A puzzle in the Bible

A line in the most important prayer in Christianity – one which was personally prescribed by Jesus Christ – contains a word whose meaning is unknown.

The prayer in question is the one generally known to Protestants as the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ and to Catholics as the ‘Our Father’.

The word is ἐπιούσιον, epiousion. The nominative form – the one that you would find in the dictionary – is ἐπιούσιος, epiousios. It describes the bread which we are asking God to give us.

The problem is that looking in the dictionary does not help us translate the word because the word doesn’t appear anywhere else in the vast corpus of ancient Greek literature. It is found only in the Our Father, in Matthew 6.11 and Luke 11.3.

So – what are we to make of it?

The word is traditionally translated into English – and seemingly other European languages too – as ‘daily’. This is quite an attractive proposal. It is simple and easy to understand. The concept of daily bread makes perfect sense on a literal level, and it also works on a theological level: in particular, the request for daily bread has been linked with the miraculous food known as manna which the Old Testament tells us was gathered each day by the Israelites in the desert.

Linguistically, however, ‘daily’ doesn’t work very well. When the New Testament writers wanted to convey the meaning of ‘daily’, they tended to use phrases based on the Greek word for ‘day’: ἡμέρα, hémera. That word does not appear in the Our Father.

Ok, well, maybe ἐπιούσιον, epiousion is some sort of shortened form of a phrase which did include that word. Perhaps what was meant was something like ἐπὶ τὴν οὖσαν ἡμέραν, epi tén ousan hémeran, ‘on the current day’.

This is speculative, however. The manuscripts don’t contain any such phrase. And, whatever it means, the word is not feminine gender, so it doesn’t look like it originally went with the feminine noun ἡμέρα.

According to one ancient theory, what the prayer is asking for is the ‘bread for tomorrow’. This interpretation is mentioned by Origen, an important early theologian, and it appeared in a text known as the Gospel of the Hebrews. In Biblical Greek, the phrase ἡ ἐπιούση [ἡμέρα], hé epiousa [hémera] could indeed mean ‘the following day’; and the adjective epiousios could have been coined from it.

This initially seems like a promising theory; but it is not especially plausible. There were other, less obscure, ways of saying ‘for tomorrow’ in Greek, and it seems odd that whoever wrote the Gospels would have devised an unusual adjective just for this occasion.

Incidentally, if the mystery word does mean something like ‘for tomorrow’ or ‘for the following day’, this does not entirely solve the problem. Is it referring to the next day, as in the day which will begin after the present day has ended? This seems to go against what Jesus says just a few lines later in Matthew’s Gospel (6.34): “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own”. If the mystery word has something to do with days, it is surely more likely that it means ‘daily’ and that the point is that we should only pray for today’s bread. This could be reconciled with epiousion meaning ‘the following day’ if the Our Father was meant to be said on getting up at the start of the day, so that ‘the following day’ would be the day ahead. But this is quite a big ‘if’.

We may briefly mention a couple of other ‘day’-type interpretations. The word could mean something like ‘each following day continually’ (an interpretation of this kind – ‘continual bread’ – is attested in ancient Syriac). Alternatively, given that Jesus seems to have taught that the end times were at hand, it could have meant the bread that will be eaten ‘tomorrow’ in the coming eschatological Kingdom of God (the church father St Athanasius can be cited in support of this idea).

We can deal with some other suggested translations briefly:

• Some ancient writers thought that the mystery word meant ‘necessary’, from ἐπί + οὐσία, epi + ousia. But this is linguistically problematic, because with that etymology the word should have been ἐπούσιον, epousion not ἐπιούσιον, epiousion.
• Early Latin translators of the Bible went with quotidianum, ‘daily’. But when St Jerome was producing the Vulgate, which became the standard Catholic Bible, he altered this word to superstantialem, ‘superstantial’ – a translation choice with mystical overtones which indicates that the bread is more than just earthly. (Oddly, Jerome only made the change in Matthew, not in Luke.)
• It is possible that the mystery word comes from ἐπιέναι, epienai, ‘come to/belong’.
• It is possible that the meaning behind the mystery word is ‘mere’ bread, as opposed to luxury foods piled up for indulgence.
• Finally, all of these proposals assume that the mystery word is an adjective describing the bread. But there are no other adjectives in the Our Father. Maybe it doesn’t refer to the bread at all.

In addition, there is a further consideration to be borne in mind. Maybe the original word was something quite different from epiousion, and this nonsensical word came to be incorporated into the text because an early copyist badly misread what he saw in front of him.

Now might be a good time to mention that Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic (or possibly Hebrew), so solving the mystery of the Greek would not take us back to his original words. In fact, there are several scholarly proposals for what Jesus originally said in Aramaic (or Hebrew). I just don’t have the heart to go into them here.

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The mystery word doesn’t just pose a linguistic problem. It poses a theological one too, for those who approach it from a Christian perspective. Why would Jesus place an obscure word at the heart of the very prayer that he gave to his disciples as the model of how to pray?

At first sight, this question seems to have an easy answer. What Jesus said was perfectly clear, but one of his followers mangled it when they put it into Greek. Or maybe a later hand mangled it when copying the text. But this doesn’t really solve the problem. Why would God allow the mangled version of the word to find its way into the accepted texts of the Bible and to persist for so long?

Another possibility is that the mystery word wasn’t part of the original prayer. It may have been inserted by a later hand, perhaps as a result of the prayer becoming part of the early Christian liturgy. Again, this explanation means that it was early Christians who were unclear and not Jesus – but it fails to explain why God allowed this situation to develop.

From a Christian perspective, God must have foreseen that the word would not be clear. One way of interpreting this is that the obscurity is deliberate: God wanted there to be a puzzle embedded in the prayer, perhaps in order to provoke people to think about what it might mean.