I have always been fascinated by Cranmer’s poetic rendering of Matthew’s (and Luke’s) rendering of Jesus’ phrase:
Give us this day our daily bread.
Please stick with me through some heavy linguistics. It will be worth it.
In Greek, which Matthew wrote and Jesus didn’t use when teaching his Lord’s/Kingdom/Father prayer, it says:
THE – BREAD – OF – US – THE – EPIOUSION - GIVE – TO – US – TODAY
Apparently, according to Danker’s Lexicon, the word epiousion was coined by the evangelists where they were translating Jesus’ Aramaic “Abba” prayer (see also J. Jerimias: Abba). Origen said early on that the word was coined by the evangelists.
The word exists nowhere else. In the New Testament or in secular Greek literature.
“Ousia” means substance/being. “Epi” means marked or designated “right on top of.” Think “epicenter.”
In depth-etymological terms, it can’t mean “daily” or “tomorrow’s bread” as so many have suggested.
We have to go with depth etymology, because we can’t go with any parallel Greek usage outside of “our” literature.
Thus they coined a Greek word to get at what Jesus was saying in Aramaic, because what he was saying was not to be contained in a normal “off the shelf” Greek word. The problem is, our current Aramaic versions of the New Testament are, in some ways, translations from the Greek. We don’t have pre-Luke/Matthew Aramaic versions of the gospels.
When doing a depth-etymology, it’s best to stick with the un-spun core-root meanings of the parts involved in the compound word.
Thus “designated-present-substance” is the best we can mine from the root words.
It unravels if we try to project it beyond the Greek into what Jesus may have said in his language–we end up with compound speculation.
But in hand, we have EPIOUSIA.
What do you think, based on what we have said, that it means?
I’ll take a stab at it:
Jesus saw provision as dynamic, and not as static. Everything we need comes out of the Father-substance (hence the Father prayer). Have a lunch box? Feed 5,000 people.
Need to pay taxes? Take the Krugerrand out of the fish’s mouth. The Father feeds and provides for us as he does the lilies and the birds.
Don’t store up treasures in barns. Rely on daily manna. Trust God for your abundance.
Get your provision from substance, don’t try to gather it from the circumstances around you.
The epiousion is the designated/marked substance from which our bread comes.
This is the abundance we are teaching a Robinwood Church. Not some form of American consumer greed.
The world is not a zero-sum game (more for you, less for me), it is an “open system.”
Give us of the designated substance our bread today. I know it’s not as “sexy” as Cranmer, but nothing in English is 
What are your thoughts?
12 comments
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May 3, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Luke Allison
Makes sense to me. Gels with the manna in the wilderness and King Agur’s Prayer in Proverbs 30:
“Two things I ask of you;
deny them not to me before I die:
8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
9 lest I be full and deny you
and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.”
May 3, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Vondalee Smith
Beautiful! We hold and lift our hands at every Mass to say the Lord’s Prayer (the Our Father). My favorite part is “Thy Will Be Done”; not MY will, but HIS. But the daily bread part, its reliance upon God, upon our Father to provide for us, each and every day.
May 3, 2010 at 9:59 pm
David Housholder
Have, since posting, studied “Aramaic” versions of the Lord’s prayer floating around on the internet.
Most of them are recent New Age projections of “astral” belief back on Jesus. Some are quite comical.
The “Aramaic” we now have is a dialect of Syriac, which has no direct access to what Jesus said, at least nothing to pierce the “Greek” literary barrier and get back to the original words of Jesus.
It too is translated from Matthew’s Greek version, using a language similar to the one Jesus used.
May 3, 2010 at 11:31 pm
carl
“He who is content to be poor is selfish, because he has no ambition to give”– John Dawson
May 4, 2010 at 1:05 am
Brian Gigee
Cosmos-Kuchen…(add an umlaut over the ‘U’) …the sweetness of God that is everywhere…this is our daily bread…from the ham and cheese sandwich to the gifts for the Hunger Program where others are helped…those we don’t even know yet are known by our Lord… Cosmos – Kuchen… daily God “stuff” of life that is IN and OUT of this world…
Brian
May 4, 2010 at 4:05 am
Kathy McDougall
This is my first time on this site. The praise team teases you about your lack of focus and I have noticed you becoming vague when we have conversations.
After last night at the Blackberry Bush I began to have a different lens to look at you through. What I took to be differences in “translation of phrases” between us are something more. In the vernacular of computers, we have different kind of memory on our hard disc. While mine is more organic, yours have come from the hard effort of study.
After reading some of your entries I can honestly say that I cannot believe that you can distill your thoughts down so that we in the congregations can understand what you want to tell us. You talk about how much you have grown since you joined Robinwood and I agree. Through the structure of this church you have been given the freedom to finally process all of the things in your head. No wonder you seem distracted!
Thank you for what you have taught us and I look forward to future teaching with great enthusiasm.
May 4, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Aramaic Scholar
I don’t agree with you when you say that we don’t have Aramaic versions of Matthew’s gospel. We have the Aramaic Peshitta, which many believe shows clear evidence of being the original from which the Greek text has come. There are dozens of examples of translation differences, where variant readings in the Greek shown that Aramaic must have come first. What if Aramaic was the original, but in the West Greek simply eclipsed it in terms of number of copies and geographic spread? In the East, Christians universally believe the Aramaic Peshitta came first.
May 4, 2010 at 3:39 pm
David Housholder
We have Aramaic versions. Wouldn’t dispute that. Never did.
Also agree that Jesus spoke and taught in Aramaic.
The problem is, the only direct record primary source we have of his teaching is in Greek.
The current Aramaic versions we have are, ironically, dependent on the Greek.
Thus, there is no way, without pure speculation, to know what Jesus said in Aramaic that underlies “epiousia.”
Help us understand also, the difference between the Aramaic that Jesus spoke and the current dialect of Syriac. Much like Greek (and English), languages change over time.
May 4, 2010 at 4:33 pm
luke allison
Have any of you ever read “Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus” by David Bivin and Roy Blizzard? It postulates that Jesus very likely taught in Hebrew, and the sectarian works from the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to back up the idea that Hebrew was at least used. There are many, many, instances where the more “cryptic” things Jesus said make much more sense in Hebrew than in other languages, (the ‘green tree’ of Luke 23:31 and Ezekiel 20:47 was a well-known Messianic claim, but scholars have long interpreted Jesus’ words in Luke 23:31 differently)
Now, I’m not a card-carrying member of the “Jewish roots” movement, since I think that a lot of the teaching becomes more about worshiping Judaism than Jesus, but I do think that it’s viable to believe that a conquered people (especially a proud, election-oriented people like the Jews) would cling to their original language in day-to-day conversation, if not in public discourse with the authorities. It’s an interesting conundrum.
“Daily Bread” in the Old Testament speaks of real feeding, yes, but it also speaks of a sort of “middle state” between poverty and riches. Contentment, resting in the shadow of the Almighty, not walking in the counsel of the wicked, being like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit, “believing God” (the Hebrew root ‘aman means a lot of things, none of which are a “mental belief) should inevitably be wrapped up with this daily bread as well.
I think the thing many Christians take for granted is the fact that Jesus is teaching us to ask for this. It doesn’t necessarily just fall on us, but rather is a surplus of sorts that God will provide, and it very well could look different to different people. I had a conversation with some parents today who lost three sons to a drunk driver, and they seem to think that God is providing more than enough for them.
Sufficiency, then, has much more to do with how you view God, how you’re oriented in relation to Him, and, whether we in America like it or not, we’re willing to part with those things that are destroying us. I’m not a “forced poverty” Christian either (I know many youngsters with dredlocks who take this position…ironically enough, they all have laptops and ipods, too) but I think that morally neutral things will wind up wrecking more lives than “bad” things. I watch hundreds of kids every Wednesday night who think of “daily bread” as their earned right, since their very existence is a gift to all around them. As Christian Smith has articulated much better than I could, the average young person holds to a sort of “moralistic therapeutic deism” much more than they hold to any sort of Biblical notion of God’s character.
Whatever the case, it’s obviously a very important part of our life, whatever language it was spoken in.
May 5, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Saint Rodney
Lord please give me what I need for today, makes perfect sense to me.
As far as the language of Christ. Is it possible that Jesus spoke what ever language that got his point across best to whomever he was teaching? God can speak any language he wants. Soo, who was he teaching? Look beyond simple words, and read with your heart instead of your head to undestand what God is teaching. Is it bad to trivialize simple teachings?
My brain is whirling, I love these blogs.
May 5, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Jay Egenes
Interesting idea about how to interpret the Greek.
We assume I think correctly that Jesus mostly spoke Aramaic, so by the time we read something in English his actual words probably have been translated and therefore interpreted twice. Despite the work of form critics, any attempt to get behind the Greek texts we have is too speculative to be of much value. So we have the Greek text.
And the Greek clearly says something about “substance” in that petition.
I had a conversation Monday with somebody who hasn’t been able to work for two years because of health reasons. Some people in this kind of situation grasp in a powerful way that God is providing for them, while some are too frustrated by their circumstances–what I usually refer to as the Incidents of their life–to see much provision if any at all. Some can’t see it, but trust anyway.
October 24, 2010 at 3:24 pm
prepagos
He who is content to be poor is selfish, because he has no ambition to give”– John Dawson