300px|right|thumb| (ΕΠΙΟΥ[[sigma#Lunate sigma|ϹΙΟΝ) in the Gospel of Luke, as written in Papyrus 75 ()]]
() is a Koine Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "" ('Give us today our bread'). Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation. The word is also referred to by , its presumed lemma form.
Since it is a Koine Greek tris legomenon (a word that occurs only thrice within a given corpus) found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 and in the early Christian treatise Didache, but always in the same context of relaying the Lord's Prayer, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word (, 'day'). Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of , meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs (), meaning "to be", or (), meaning both "to come" and "to go".
A majority of scholars today believe that epiousion probably meant "for tomorrow" or "for the future".
is the only adjective in the Lord's Prayer. It is masculine, accusative, singular, agreeing in gender, number, and case with the noun it qualifies, , ("bread"). In an interlinear gloss:
In the 20th century, another supposed instance appeared to come to light. In an Egyptian papyrus dated to the 5th century CE which contains a shopping list, a word transcribed as was reported as being next to the names of several grocery items. This seemed to indicate that it was used in the sense of "enough for today", "enough for tomorrow", or "necessary". However, after the papyrus containing the shopping list, missing for many years, was rediscovered at the Yale Beinecke Library in 1998, a re-examination found the word (oil), not (the original transcriber, A. H. Sayce, was apparently known to be a poor transcriber). In addition, the document was reassessed to date from the first or second century CE, not the 5th century.
, used in Acts 7:26 and elsewhere to refer to the day, may be a cognate word. This is not an absolute rule, however: Jean Carmignac has collected 26 compound words that violate it. Alternatively, the word may be analyzed as a feminine participle from two different verbs.
"Daily"
Daily has long been the most common English translation of . It is the term used in the Tyndale Bible, the King James Version, and in the most popular modern English versions. This rests on the analysis of as for and as being; the word would mean "for the [day] being" with day being implicit. and is the translation found in the Tridentine Mass.
Some translators have proposed slight variations on daily as the most accurate. Richard Francis Weymouth, an English schoolmaster, translated it as "bread for today" in the Weymouth New Testament. Edgar J. Goodspeed in An American Translation used "bread for the day." Another option is to view as an allusion to Exodus 16:4 where God promises to provide a day's portion of manna every day. This verse could be an attempt to translate the Hebrew of "bread sufficient to the day" into Greek.
Today, most scholars reject the translation of as meaning daily. The word daily only has a weak connection to any proposed etymologies for . Moreover, all other instances of "daily" in the English New Testament translate (, "day"), which does not appear in this usage. Because there are several other Greek words based on that mean daily, no reason is apparent to use such an obscure word as .
"Supersubstantial"
In the Vulgate Jerome translated in Matthew 6:11 as supersubstantial (), coining a new word not before seen in Latin.
This translation is used by some modern Bibles. In the Douay-Rheims Bible English translation of the Vulgate (Matthew 6:11) reads "give us this day our supersubstantial bread". The translation of supersubstantial bread has also been associated with the Eucharist, as early as in the time of the Church Fathers and later also by the Council of Trent (1551).
In 1979, the , also called the Neo-Vulgate, became the official Latin edition of the Bible published by the Holy See for use in the contemporary Roman rite. It is not an edition of the historical Vulgate, but a revision of the text intended to accord with modern critical Hebrew and Greek texts and produce a style closer to classical Latin. The retains the same correspondence-of-meaning for in the Lord's Prayer contained in the Gospel according to Matthew and Luke as in the Vulgate, i.e., and .
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are several meanings to , and that is most literally translated as super-essential:</blockquote>
Eucharist metaphor
This translation has often been connected to the eucharist. The bread necessary for existence is the communion bread of the Last Supper. That the gospel writers needed to create a new word indicates to Eugene LaVerdiere, an American Catholic priest and biblical scholar of the post-Vatican II era, that they are describing something new. Eating the communion bread at the Last Supper created the need for a new word for this new concept.
Supersubstantial was the dominant Latin translation of from Matthew for many centuries after Jerome, and influenced church ritual. It was the basis for the argument advanced by theologians such as Cyprian that communion must be eaten daily. Jean Carmignac, and Nicholas Ayo. Craig Blomberg, also a Protestant New Testament scholar, agrees that these "concepts had yet to be introduced when Jesus gave his original prayer and therefore could not have been part of his original meaning."
"Necessary for existence"
Another interpretation is to link to the Greek word meaning both the verb to be and the noun substance. Origen was the first writer to comment on the unusual word. A native Greek speaker writing a century and half after the Gospels were composed, he did not recognize the word and thought it was an original neologism. Origen thought "bread necessary for existence" was the most likely meaning, connecting it to the to be translation of . Philosopher Raïssa Maritain, wife of philosopher Jacques Maritain, writes that during her era of the 1940s this translation was found to be the most acceptable by modern scholars. Her own conclusion was stated as being in agreement with Theodore of Mopsuestia, that being the "bread we need." This was seen as vague enough to cover what was viewed as the three possible etymological meanings: (1) literal – the "bread of tomorrow or the bread of the present day," (2) analogical – the "bread we need in order to subsist," and (3) spiritual/mystical – the bread "which is above our substance" (i.e., supersubstantial).
Joseph Fitzmyer translates the verse as "give us this day our bread for subsistence." He connects this to the Aramaic targum translations of Proverbs 30:8.
Like daily, this translation also has the problem that there are well known Greek words that could have been used instead.
"For the future"
A majority of scholars today believe that epiousion meant "for tomorrow" or "for the future". Early supporters of this translation include Cyril of Alexandria and Peter of Laodicea by way of linking with the word (ἐπιοῦσα), meaning "next" or "following" (as in "the next day (or night)", and with the related verb , "coming in the future." According to Jewish theologian Herbert Basser, this translation was also considered (but eventually rejected) as a possibility by Jerome, who noted it as an aside in his commentary to Matthew that the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews used ("for tomorrow") in this verse.
Raymond E. Brown claims it is also indicated by early Bohairic and Sahidic sources. Others see tomorrow being referenced to the end times and the bread that of the messianic feast. Raymond Brown argues that all the other phrases of the Lord's Prayer are eschatological, so it would be incongruous for this phrase to be speaking prosaically about bread for eating.
The Catholic theologian Brant Pitre acknowledges the "for the future'" interpretation is held by a majority of scholars, but criticizes it for lacking support among ancient Christian interpreters.
"Estate"
Lutheran scholar Douglas E. Oakman suggests "give us today bread in abundance" as another translation. He notes that in the contemporary literature can mean substance, but it also has a concrete meaning of a large, substantial, estate. Thus as a cognate of the word , could refer to plentiful or abundant bread.
Oakman also notes contemporary sources that translate as the royal or imperial estate and proposes that the verse could originally have meant "give us the royal bread ration for today."
|-
| dat wij nodig hebben
| that we need
|
|-
| German
| tägliches
| daily
|
|-
|Gothic
|𐍃𐌹𐌽𐍄𐌴𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌽 (sinteinan)
|daily
|Wulfila Bible
|-
| rowspan="2" | Norwegian
| daglige (Bokmål)
| rowspan="2" | daily
|
|-
| daglege (Nynorsk)
|
|-
| rowspan="3" | Swedish
| dagliga
| daily
|
|-
| för dagen som kommer
| for the day to-come
|
|-
| vi behöver
| (that) we need
|
|-
| Malayo-Polynesian
| Indonesian
| secukupnya
|enough
|
|-
| rowspan="15" | Romance
| rowspan="9" | French
| de ce jour
| this day's
|
|-
| essentiel
| essential
|
|-
| nécessaire
| needed
|
|-
| dont nous avons besoin
| that we need
|
|-
| qu'il nous faut
| that we lack
|
|-
| de la journée
| of the day
|
|-
| pour jour
| for the day
|
|-
| de demain
| tomorrow's
|
|-
| spirituel
| spiritual
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | Latin
| cottidianum/cotidianum
| everyday
| Vetus Latina, Matthew 6:11, Luke 11:3, Vulgate, Luke 11:3 (Stuttgart Vulgate)
|-
| supersubstantialem
| supersubstantial
| Vulgate, Matthew 6:11 (Stuttgart Vulgate)
|-
| rowspan="2" |Spanish
| de cada día
| each day's
|
|-
| sustancial de cada día
|each day's substantial
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |Romanian
| de toate zilele
| each day's
|
|-
| spre ființă
|supersubstantial
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | Semitic
| rowspan="2" | Syriac
| ܝܘܡܢܐ (yawmānā)
| today's
|Peshitta
|-
| ܐܡܝܢܐ (ameno, )
|everlasting
|Curetonian Gospels, liturgical
|-
| eguneco / eguneko
| the day's
| Joanes Leizarraga / Elizen Arteko Biblia
|}
Slavonic translations
The Old Church Slavonic canon translates epiousion variously as well. For example, Codex Marianus translates it as (, which appears to be a calque of using the etymology with debatable semantics) in Luke 11:3 but (, 'for the coming day') in Matthew 6:11. Sava's book agrees in the latter case, but has (, 'daily') in the former, while Codex Zographensis has () and () respectively.
The New Church Slavonic version has the calque () in both cases now, following 16th-century Ostrog Bible, and the dictionaries translate the New Church Slavonic word as 'necessary for existence' (note that the sense of the word likely changed in course of the time),