I'm pretty sure we took that from the New Testament though.
I'm an atheist but I know this prayer by heart. I must have heard it hundreds of times. Its sound is deeply ingrained in me, even if its meaning is vague when it comes to that one word (and others... "εισενέγκεις"? wut)
Besides, when I was a kid I thought the prayer is talking about a guy called Amin who's cunning ("ο πονηρός Αμήν"). I just learned the words by heart, I didn't now what they meant.
He probably means that the word itself would not be used in that phrase, had it not be used in the testament first. It is used in that everyday phrase merely copying (and referring to) the New Testament, without the speakers necessarily having full awareness of its true meaning.
I am not a native English speaker. I am a Greek speaker, and there is no equivalent to the gender-neutral "they", you have to choose "he" or "she" and "he" is the most usual choice. So, here I let my native-tongued thinking interfere with the ideal English interpretation of what I had to say. And, I did not read your username :)
Conjecture: a downvote can also mean "does not add to the discussion", where 'the discussion' is the original topic.
Counterpoint: I see many threads that get off-topic from the original post, and yet downvotes for them seem…random. Some off-topic sub-threads become lengthy and lively.
I'm sorry, is this serious? I get downvoted because I ask why I was called "he" by default, as if we're all guys here, and I ask in the most polite way possible?
Oh well, I suppose I'll start calling everybody a "she" by default, then.
No, you didn't make a mistake. The Lord's Prayer is Jesus' answer to the question "how do we pray?"
From my understanding and reading, the word's exact meaning seems somewhat ambiguous, but may be estimated from the context of the surrounding verses. So, I think the intent was partially conveyed, but without other primary sources it's difficult to have an absolute degree of precision.
This is why I think the argument you made is the most-likely-to-be-correct argument (contemporary use being influenced by the NT). It's also why I'm not sure there's any debate to be had here, nor why the question to you was raised. The Wikipedia article is quite clear that no other ancient texts from that time period contain the word.
But is that a reference to the Bible? "To earn (my/your) daily bread" is a set phrase in English
and many other European languages (French pain quotidien etc) as well.
Hmm, Europe was dominated by Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. I can't imagine why a memorable turn of a phrase attributed to the most important figure in the most important text of that religion would ever become a set phrase in those languages but not in the languages of countries where Christianity was never dominant. /s
You might be surprised how many of the common aphorisms you use every day come from the Bible. Ever gone the extra mile? Moved mountains at the eleventh hour to get to the root of the matter? Ah well, no rest for the wicked, it's like the blind leading the blind.
Unfortunately, I am not versed in linguistics, but I would suppose so, because its etymology [1] based on the words where it's derived from would mean "I am on something" in a literal or more metaphorical sense (could also be used as "I'm focused on something") and it's also widely used almost everyday in the "everyday's bread" way in our most common prayer (we used to sing that every morning at school) while also never being used in any other context except for my first post's phrase.
This prayer or rather the use of epiousios in this prayer and its appearance only in this prayer and how it should be translated is exactly the topic of this discussion.
Definitely, and that's not surprising - many set phrases have their etymology in the Bible, due to its historical role not only in religion but also in how language and literacy was being taught over the last two millenia; and the phenomenon of set phrases being shared among many European languages (especially those which are not directly related, e.g. romance and germanic and slavic) is very common specifically for biblical expressions.
Yes, an enormous amount of western culture is derived from or influenced by Christianity and the Bible, due to the extremely long timeframe that it was integral to the culture (of Europe and the Middle East and Ethiopia). The other languages took the phrase from the Bible and translated it.
The article points out that this word is effectively a hapax legomenon in Ancient Greek. It only shows up in this NT context, and not elsewhere. We can speculate about what it means from the surrounding text-- it appears to modify "bread"; its morphology-- it decomposes nicely into "over" + "being, essence"; and its parallels in other sources, but we'll never be sure what it means. It might just as well be a prayer for being sustained in abundance, and this might even be expected since people in the time of Jesus thought that the end times were at hand, and with those the "world to come" where the righteous would be rewarded. But even that is speculation.
I have heard this phrase (daily bread) compared to the story of God providing manna (something flaky, often compared to flour & bread) for food in Exodus 16. In that story, the Israelites were instructed to only collect the manna for each day. If they tried to keep some for the second day, it would become rotten. This meant they were reliant on God's provision each day.
In the same way, this prayer may be about provision of bread enough for today, of sufficient/satisfactory quantity, no more than we need (per Exodus), just what we need right now. You'd obviously then want to pray this each day, and rely on God's provision daily. So daily isn't a transliteral interpretation but more a descriptive one
Bread has a special place in Christian symbolism because of the Eucharist. The bread of the Eucharist is called "the body of Christ." The ritual associates material nourishment and spiritual nourishment. Epiousios must be related to this idea...that our days are to be used to fuel our spiritual life. I don't think the word is used in the same secular sense as your case.
Philo of Alexandria was the most influential Jewish-Greek theologian in the first century AD; it was he that originally introduced the idea that Logos is the son of the One god. (That, ostensibly, is how Apollos of Alexandria was able to preach accurately about the logos without knowing about Jesus, Acts 18:24-25)
In the Platonizing esoteric context of Philo, it seems straightforward to view epi-ousia as a kind of "soul" bread. That is, we should pray for the nourishment of our soul.
Soul, in the Platonizing context of Philo, is the noetic realm of mathematics and ideas—and typically placed above the material realm. The question of materialism vs epi-materialism is still a vibrant debate; Max Tegmark, Karl Popper and Roger Penrose for instance, advocate for the meaningful existence of non-material being. For instance, that the concept of a sphere exists universally, not merely through human conception.
I'm not a linguist and I don't even know any greek (other than the alphabet I've memorized once), but if "epi" means "above" and "ousia" means "essense", then the meaning of "epiousios" trivially follows.
If you take the Bible at face value, then Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer before he gave the last supper (and long before it was ritualised later), so it doesn't quite follow.
> If you take the Bible at face value, then Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer before he gave the last supper (and long before it was ritualised later), so it doesn't quite follow.
Except that in the Old Testament there was manna:
> Manna (Hebrew: מָן mān, Greek: μάννα; Arabic: اَلْمَنُّ; sometimes or archaically spelled mana) is, according to the Bible, an edible substance which God provided for the Israelites during their travels in the desert during the 40-year period following the Exodus and prior to the conquest of Canaan. It is also mentioned in the Quran three times.[1]
God (YHWH) feeding his people was a concept that the Jewish people of Jesus' time would be very familiar with. Bread was quite sacred even in the Old Testament, as the Ark of the Covenant contained, in addition to the Ten Commandment tablets (as we learned from Indiana Jones), there was manna as well:
> And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations.” As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron placed it before the testimony to be kept.
* Exodus 16:33–34
There was also to be cereal offerings/sacrifices made in the Temple:
For anyone wondering if Manna was related to the Mana found in a lot of fantasy game (most notably Magic! The Gathering), it is not, I just looked it up.
Mana is a Melanesian word for some sort of spiritual life force!
Why not? He didn’t have to be understood at the time the prayer was taught. That is, it would become understood only later. The prayer acquires more depth in retrospect. The apostles didn’t understand many things Jesus had told them until later.
Right, it can't just be about the last supper. But we do know that Jesus was teaching about participation in a non-material world; then, perhaps, the prayer was to remind that bread is not just for our ousian body but for our epiousian soul.
Presumably, all that Jesus does is a reinforcement of the self-same Logos. There's a lot of repetition of the same principles across different contexts.
This makes a lot of sense. The wiki article begs the question, why not the same etymological analysis for the prefix 'epi' for the Epiphany/Επιφανεια? Επι+φανεια = epi + appear. Of course, adding prefixes to established word changes each words meaning, but if epi were to mean super/supra, it would mean that for each word -and, it clearly does not of Epiphany.
As a Greek myself I never really thought much about this word. Yes, it is not common but I thought I understood this. After reading the linked article I am not so sure anymore and I am not really sure how I would translate it.
I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
I found two greek sources that seem to agree with me [1], [2]. Especially in the first it gives also as synonym the word "daily". However it also mentions that in the biblical context although it is widespread understood as "necessary" the correct interpretation (of the whole phrase) is rather "give us today the bread of tomorrow".
So, as a conclusion, I guess even as a Greek I am as much confused as all these scholars that try to translate it!
> I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
> I found two greek sources that seem to agree with me [1], [2].
Except did that meaning crystalize before or after the word was used in the New Testament?
What the original authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke meant, and what people started using the word for later in history, could be two very different things.
> I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
This might not be translatable to English in one word, but it can be to Swedish: lagom.
There is a thesis called "Indeterminacy of Translation" by the late philosopher W.V.O Quine. You don't need to worry about "fully translating" any word from one natural language to another language.
I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek. For example, beta has changed pronunciation, becoming something like English v instead of English b like it was originally, but most modern Greeks will vehemently deny that the pronunciation has changed.
We have good evidence that it used to be like English b (voiced bilabial plosive):
Yes I know about the Erasmus pronunciation and that it does not conform to how we talk nowadays. And I know most Greeks haven't ever heard about his theory. And I say theory because not everyone agrees with his proposed pronunciation.
But this here is another matter. Biblical texts are not in ancient Greek.
Edit:
I actually said that the biblical texts are not in ancient Greek (in that the language had evolved from the time of Plato and other such texts) but to be honest I wasn't really sure about my statement. I tried to do a quick research and I might have been mistaken.
However about this particular prayer, although it is of course not in modern Greek, I do not think there are particular hard passages that are not understood without knowing any ancient Greek.
To build a bit further on this. The new testament is written in Koine Greek (Common Greek) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek . A lot of the phonological changes from attic to modern have already happened by the time these text were written.
For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.
Additionally I would like to point out that pronunciation has little to do with comprehension of written texts.
> For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.
Is this true? As someone who studied classical Greek, I can mostly understand NT Koine OK, but most of modern Greek goes right over my head. Conversely (anecdote alert) I watched a YouTube video where a Greek guy took ancient texts out onto the streets of Athens and asked people to make sense of them; most people giggled self-consciously and admitted that while they had studied them in school they were able to make very little headway in actual translations.
Edit: so my point is that, to my naïve eye, Koine seems much closer to Attic than to Modern, and hence I'd expect modern Greeks to struggle with it - but would be very interested in being proved wrong :)
In my own limited experience in school, I found texts from the first century AD much easier to comprehend than say the odyssey, or even classical texts.
But still it was an academic exercise, it required attention and some time, it was far easier than classical texts yet not something you can do in the street on the fly.
I may have to pull back from mostly legible to mostly decode-able. ;)
I only really know some classical texts and, for Koine, just the NT, but the structure of the NT is so much more straightforward to understand - it's basically this happened, then that happened, etc etc and there is none of the "decoding" that you often have to do with the classical stuff. But I am fascinated by how much of this is intrinsic to the language and how much is down to artifice on the part of the classical writers. In other words, the audience for the NT is ordinary folks whose first language in many (most?) cases is not even Greek, so the message has to be written as plainly as possible (and actually the prose is kind of pedestrian as a result IMO). But what's the situation with classical authors? Are they really reflecting the speech of the time or are they using a more complex and artificial form of language divorced from daily speech? I don't know - I think there must be an element of it, but otoh someone like Aristophanes is trying to make audiences laugh so the language has to be relatable and idiomatic you would think.
This, exactly. The Greek alphabet is much older than Koine Greek, of almost 500 years. While spoken language tends to change fast, written language tends to stick and doesn't easily change, for obvious reasons (just look at English or Tibetan). People won't change how they write some word just because they pronounce it differently from the past, because that would make the text much harder to read.
Also, /b/, /β/ and /v/ have the tendency to get swap with each other in lots of languages, and most people fail to distinguish them apart unless their language imposes a clear distinction among them. See for instance how Italian or English distinguish /b/ from /v/, while /b/, /β/ and /v/ are all basically the same thing for a Spanish speaker.
Indeed Koine Greek is not ancient Greek, and while also being different from modern Greek, it's also different. The main difference being that Koine stems from the attic dialect and modern Greek from the dimotic dialect. To make matters even more complicated, the transition to make dimotic official happened in 1979 and thus there is still a living generation accustomed to read and write Koinè/kathareuousa Greek.
This familiarity didn't end overnight and as these things often do they live on in a long tail, see for example Russian influence in many ex-soviet republics which is only waning with the youngest generations, or for example German influence that lasted in northern Croatia way longer than the austro-hungarian domination.
That said, linguistics is full of traps. The common person on the street makes all sorts of assumption based on modern facets, often inverting the relationship between Prestige/low-education/provinciality with historical language change, i.e. often assuming that the poor illiterate provincial people are those who talk badly and distort the language, while in reality they often preserve archaic forms in some cases (while innovating in others).
An example from contemporary coastal Tuscany in Italy: in the local dialect the word for rabbit is "cunigliolo" while the offician Italian is "coniglio". If you ask a random person from the street they would tell you that "cunigliolo" is not only an uneducated form but actually a silly deformation of the right word and that it's obviously so, because the suffix "-olo" sounds funny (probably because of the influence of the names of the seven dwarves in Italian, brontolo, cucciolo, mammolo, pisolo, ... all designed to sound cute to the ear of a modern italiano speaker).
Turns out that the latin word for rabbit is "cuniculus".
Now, did I say that linguistics is tricky? Turns out that the "-olo" suffix has been added to other words as well, like "ragnolo" which has no etymological explaination. They could be an innovation to regularize the perceived "funny local way of saying rabbit", perhaps modeled on the 7 dwarves, or not. Perhaps cunigliolo etymology is also wrong and I'm grasping at straws, but I think my main point still holds: don't trust the gut reaction of native speakers for anything other than their living language.
I will disagree. I cannot see how a native speaker can be the worst at understanding their own language. Your own language is the one you understand best, and even though that is not directly the opposite statement, for your statement to be correct it would mean that statistically native speakers are of inferior understanding compared to others. When you take that to apply for all languages you would end up with a paradox. You give an example based on pronunciation, which does change for all languages, so I would not take knowledge of history of pronunciation to have anything to do with the instinctive understanding of concepts in your mother tongue. Now on the second part, I.e. the ability to explain, I would think it’s related to understanding, but it is more nuanced as it also has to do with knowledge of the language in which the explanation is articulated.
—-edit to add comment on pronunciation of β
On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.
I think what the OP means is that on average native speakers understand the language intuitively, while most of the non-natives were taught the rules and structure of the language directly.
Being a non-native english speaker I experienced this often. I have never gotten a useful answer for a question about english from English people. It usually was "oh, I just feel which word is right"...
I find the same. My wife is from another country and we find she has more command of my mother language’s rules and whys and viceversa.
For example she had a hard time expressing when does she say “oui” and when does she say “si”; being such a basic word (probably learnt at age 2), she never had to sit and try to infer the rule explicitly. Whereas every french-as-second-language speaker, this is a basic (explicit) rule that has been discussed in class and memorized before being internalized.
And having the rules more explicitly in the head enables hard reasoning over them, which goes beyond intuitiveness in some contexts.
That’s why I separated the treatment of understanding and explaining. I would still argue that a native English speaker has better skills to explain an English word in English - on average.
>> On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.
It's possible that "μπ" was not pronounced "b" as today, in ancient times, but as "mp". For example, I think Cypriot Greeks tend to pronounce another consontant dipthong, "ντ" as "nt" rather than "d".
> I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek
I'd find it fascinating that you would have encountered these discrepancies often enough to form such an opinion, assuming you're not involved in studies of or adjacent to ancient greek.
Isn't this a tad exaggerated, jumping from the change in the pronunciation of one letter, to native speakers being the worst? I think you need considerably more proof than that.
I'm sure you didn't intend this as an insult but in the context of the comment you were responding to, it could have been expressed more kindly.
Unfortunately, an inflammatory grandiose generalization like "native speakers are the worst at understanding their own language" is likely to derail a thread altogether and turn itself into the (much less interesting) topic, so please let's all try to edit those out of our posts to HN.
As a Greek myself I can confirm that most of us know almost nothing about ancient Greek and a lot of us think that they do because they have the mistaken impression that the two languages slightly differ.
To be fair though, i guess this happens in any language/ethnicity so it is better to leave science to the experts/scientists and take their opinion. And ancient Greek scientists are not necessarily Greeks as much as any random Greek speaker is not a linguist.
Know-it-all armchair Internet experts are always the worst at understanding and explaining anything, especially when they attempt so with scarce evidence.
In Persian we have an old word which is even used today called “Roozi”. It is a combination of “Rooz” + “i”. The main part translates to “day” and this word refers to what you need to live for a day. It’s also used in prayers which asks God to provide us with what we need to live for the day.
This word instantly reminded me of that but I don’t know if they are conceptually related or not.
I’m curious how much more difficult it would be to learn to read in a largely illiterate world without many documents around. While having the additional burden of identifying words within one long string of characters.
Google tells me it’s called Scriptio Continua and the first documents to use spaces and punctuation were later Bibles.
One thing that makes Greek somewhat easier to read without spaces than English would be is the inflection system. Almost every word follows a set system of rules for how the end (and sometimes the beginning) of a word changes. After a while it becomes less difficult to read because you start seeing those patterns as word boundaries. Spaces and lowercase are easier of course.
Ithinkyouwouldgetusedtoitprettyquickly. Plus, the suffixes on most words of the major languages of the time would have helped delineate words. But I do agree that it could have acted as a small impediment in learning to read.
Oh that's a really neat theory! So many regularly declined nouns and related word classes end in the sigma. It certainly makes sense considering the frequency of -s ending words. The rough breathing mark seems like it could have played a similar role.
(At least, you have the singular nominatives of the 1st declension masculines, all the 2nd declension noms and a fraction of the 3rd declension noms. And then the singular genitives and the plural accusatives and datives. And so on. Using a 2nd person singular verb, you could probably make a complete and rather complicated sentence in which every word ended in sigma.)
I think the word-final sigma has been found in manuscripts dating to the 1st century BCE, but I think its use was only in cursive and not universal. So, I think you're basically right; certainly majuscule scripta continua documents like the Codex Sinaiticus or Vaticanus wouldn't have used it.
Both ancient Greece generally and Judaism and early Christianity specifically had strong practices of oral tradition. People memorized long works word for word and often primarily passed them on in this way. Hilariously (to the modern mind), Socrates criticized the practice of writing in general, as he felt discussing, memorizing, and repeating things conferred better mastery of the material (which is hard to disagree with, but...) : https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
This is one of my favorite examples of people being worried about the secondary effects of adopting technology. We've apparently been worried about that since the invention of writing.
Anyway. A lot of ancient systems of writing seem very ambiguous by modern standards. It is my suspicion that such systems are easier to use in a cultural context in which a lot of people already know by heart what the text is supposed to say. It is less of a complete source in itself and more of a reminder. Socrates, at least, seems to think this is what it is for.
Spaces? The scripts used for the oldest versions of biblical writings didn't have vowels either. It's no wonder there have been bloody generation wars fought over the meaning of brief passages of vague religious tracts. It seems all we need to do is airdrop some vowels and punctuation over some regions and we'll finally have world peace.
Harder certainly, but fluency in the language obviously helps, and inflectional endings and - to a lesser extent - common prefixes will certainly help to delineate word boundaries. And the sort of reading that we are used to today - taking in a page of text via a quick scan - was afaik unknown then, where the mode was to read aloud, at a correspondingly slower pace (although I find this unconvincing for very literate individuals)
I don't understand what the confusion is all about. Isn't it pretty clear cut from the etymology of the word what it means?
I interpret epiousios to mean, 'that which is of substance', or just 'substantial', from the epi- prefix and the root word 'ousia'.
In Modern Greek, the word 'epiousio' (missing the final -s, in the nominative neuter singular) just means 'the crux of the matter', or more simply just 'that which is relevant'.
I get that the connotation of epiousios may be closer to sustenance in that passage, but I don't see where 'daily' comes from. The last word of that phrase is 'σήμερον', which means 'today' -- is that where the confusion is coming from?
God provided food to the Jews as they wandered the desert, after leaving Egypt. Manna, which was this magical bread-like substance, fell from heaven. The translation of Manna is basically "What is it?".
A huge amount fell. God told them to eat their fill, but don't save it. The hungry wanderers ate to their contentment, and some of them stored the left over manna in jars. That leftover manna was rotten and spoiled the next day, but God sent them more.
God could've dropped magical non-expiring bread. Instead he dropped preservative-free no-shelf-life bread, and told them to trust that he would provide for them.
I've always interpreted the "daily bread" as being a reference to the manna. It seemed like it was acknowledging that they need to trust God day-to-day. It's not a one time "Here is the solution to all future concerns", its a daily trust.
So I think the debate is, if one wants to have it, is the prayer saying "give us our bare minimum to survive" or "give us our plenty that comes with an implicit trust that the plenty will continue"
But its a weird concern to have IMO. Especially since Jesus likely never spoke the word epiousios at all, he probably said something in Aramaic or Hebrew or something. I'm also in the "This wasn't a literal 'say these words' guide, it was an example." Both instructions seem in line with the rest of what Jesus was teaching; be thankful and trust God.
Interesting; it almost sounds like it could be translated as “expires each day, refreshed each day” — i.e. it’s “ephemeral” bread. Kind of like “daily”, but “daily” in the sense of “daily news” — it has a one-day shelf-life.
Interestingly enough, per TFA, the Gospel of the Hebrews (via Jerome; in modernity we lack any complete copies of this) used the word "ma[h]ar" implying the "for tomorrow" translation.
> 31 Now a wind went out from the Lord and drove quail in from the sea. It scattered them up to two cubits deep all around the camp, as far as a day’s walk in any direction.
> 32 All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than ten homers. Then they spread them out all around the camp.
> 33 But while the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed, the anger of the Lord burned against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague.
The quails were punishment. They complained about not having meat to eat even when God was sending them magical bread from the skies. So he sent them a plague of quails, so to speak.
Yup, the "daily" part is a bit obscure and the Wiki article doesn't explain it very well. It turns out that it's inferred, by analogy with the fact that 'daily' was very commonly implied in similar contexts. It's a natural analogy if you think 'epiousios' relates to something like "necessary sustenance".
Have you heard of the Arian heresy [1]? It was THE major debate in the early church and it was centered on whether Jesus and god were the same substance (Homoousia) or somehow on a different level (as advocated by Arius). The Nicene Creed (325 AD) established homoousia as a necessary principle on being Christian. This was very political — the emperor Constantine got personally involved.
So, in the context of this recent event, imagine Jerome translating the lord's prayer and dealing with a word that appears to imply multiple levels of substance. Rather than encouraging more heresies, he used a colloquial translation.
Except Jerome coined the latin word "supersubstantial" to translate this and considered, but rejected, the alternative translation of "for the future" that could have completely avoided bringing substance into it at all.
I'm familiar with this prayer in Arabic, and two variations thereof (one used by Catholics and the other by Eastern Orthodox churches).
The Catholic one would translate to 'enough for the day' (كفاف يومنا) and the Orthodox to 'essential' or 'necessary' (جوهري). Both seem closer to what your wrote than 'daily'
The Old Church Slavonic Bible (translated by 10 century Byzantine scholars) uses a word which now means "vital, necessary, important" in modern Russian, and is widely used to this day.
>Cyril (born Constantine, 826–869) and Methodius (815–885) were two brothers and Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries.
OK, 9th century, not 10th.
>but by that point, at least according to the article, the meaning was already unclear
Well, the article mostly mentions Catholic Church and the problems translating the Vulgate. The same Vulgate which gave us "horned Moses" and other mistranslations. I thought maybe the Orthodox church has no trouble with the word.
The translations were almost certainly not personally done by them. That's the purpose of the Preslav School in the linked wikipedia thing.
Well, the article mostly mentions Catholic Church and the problems translating the Vulgate.
I guess I see a papally-commissioned translator's difficulty with this 500 years before OCS translation as evidence it was already confusing then. "horned Moses" is a sort of layering of confusions over time. Maybe I'm putting too much stock in the pope!
> is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece).
The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (who has translated the New Testament) has suggested "bread adequate for the day's needs:"
"'Daily bread,' admittedly, is almost accurate enough, though the phrase would better be rendered 'bread adequate for the day's needs'; but I doubt most of us quite hear the note of desperation in that phrase 'τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον'—the very real uncertainty, suffered every day, concerning whether today one will have enough food to survive."
But this in the context of a larger argument, in which the Lord's Prayer is presented quite specifically as a prayer intended to be uttered by the destitute.
From it article it seems to be a new coinage in latin at the time of the translation. It makes sense only in the logic of theology so don't think too rationally about it. some clues from the article:
> Taken literally (epi-ousios: "super-essential"), it refers directly to the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, the "medicine of immortality," without which we have no life within us.
> In all languages that traditionally Eastern Christians use—Greek, Slavonic, and all the Arabic languages... the best translation would be: "Give us today the bread of tomorrow". Give us today the bread of the coming age, the bread that when you eat it, you can never die. What is the food of the coming age? It's God himself, God's word, God's Son, God's lamb, God's bread, which we already have here on earth, on earth, before the second coming. So what we're really saying is, "Feed us today with the bread of the coming age", because we are taught by Jesus not to seek the bread that perishes, but the bread that, you eat it, you can never die
In the Catholic rite, the bread _becomes_ the body of the Christ during Eucharist, a process known as _transubstantiation_ (meanwhile in protestant liturgy, it _contains_ the body of the Christ, a process known as _consubstantiation_). In any case, the bread is more than just bread, it's the symbol of the sacrifice made by the Christ to save Humanity and renew the alliance made with God. I think (I'm not a doctor of canon law by the way) that's what it means: the bread beyond its substance.
The Catholic theological tradition holds that the "form" remains bread, but the "substance" becomes God. It is explicitly not a symbol, it is God. Many of the laity don't understand this or, even if they do, do not think it a necessary article of faith.
This reminds me of a phrase I've heard many times, but I don't know the origin. "Protestants believe Eucharist is symbolic. Catholics believe the Eucharist is real. Orthodox Christians believe the Eucharist is real because it's symbolic."
The word "symbol" originally meant "where two things come together" as in, two rivers joining into one river. Many Protestants believe that the Eucharist is only a token or reminder of Christ. The Catholics have developed the idea that it materially changes. The Orthodox believe it changes into the Body of Christ, but not in a way you could physically measure.
I'm not a theologian and this is my poor layman's understanding.
It may have developed, but it appears to have developed quite early, if you read the writings of the 1st and 2nd century. It was reading Ignatius of Antioch (or maybe Polycarp) that made me realize how early the Catholic / Orthodox understanding was.
Catholics do not believe you can physically measure the change to the eucharist. The aristotelian understanding and explanation of transubstantiation is not a requirement of the catholic religion as emphasized by the unity of the eastern catholic churches who do hold on to the dogma that the bread and wine are indeed the body and blood of Christ but teach nothing as to how that takes place.
That's kind of the point. No one does or has for at least 1700 years. "Daily" or "Enough for tomorrow/the time after" seems to lead the pack due to its' appearance in an Egyptian shopping list and similar Biblical words.
It must be "soul food". There's material world "below" and there's world of ideas "above". Matter has essence, so it's substantial; and ideas must be "supersubstancial". That "lord's prayer" tells something along this line: "oh, the god who lives above, your name is sacred, your material world reflects your ideas above, give us soul food, save us from duality, ..." (my own interpretation, sounds a bit egyptian).
The function of this adjective seems to be the augmentation of "bread" so that it is interpreted as food to feed the spiritual mission of Christians. The day is to be food for their stated higher spiritual purpose. Clearly, this word means something like "higher-purpose" or something like that.
I think most Christians interpret "Give us the day our daily bread." correctly because the whole prayer is about living a pious life. Even if "daily" doesn't exactly mean what the original text meant, I think the context flavors it well enough.
Well put. I see it too. Indeed it is epiousios to see the spiritual essence “over nature” (supra-natural / super-natural). The inner, spiritual world that we can witness in our witnessing of nature. Martin-Löf comes to mind: https://github.com/michaelt/martin-lof/blob/master/pdfs/A-pa... (It’s funny and beautiful that we’re now building all the most interesting programming languages on top of Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory. – At least in my opinion.)
It is epiousios to use the word “daily” as a translation of “epiousios”.
Isn’t it also a common pattern in religious texts the metaphor that the soul is a light? – and the first light man knew certainly was the light of day. As well as metaphors like a life being like a year with its seasons and its finality? And a life like a day?
And indeed metaphor is itself epiousios. Bread is metaphor. Metaphor can certainly be spiritual sustenance. And indeed the prayer itself is exactly that. Or rather, it isn’t, but
it can be seen that way. Or rather, it can’t actually be seen that way, but we can certainly find beauty in interpreting it that way.
From a beautiful, beautiful paper on the substrate of human cooperation – neural mechanisms, namely in the prefrontal cortex: Zoh, Y., Chang, S.W.C. & Crockett, M.J.: The prefrontal cortex and (uniquely) human cooperation: a comparative perspective. ACNP journal Neuropsychopharmacology* (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01092-5 / https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01092-5
‘Relative to other species, humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate—we are willing to incur personal costs to benefit others, including strangers, and people who we will never meet again. These abilities are thought to arise from complex systems of shared moral intuitions about what is “right” or “good” that are culturally transmitted across space and time.’
Along with such things as comfort, solace, hope, and understanding. In the form of metaphor. Shared metaphor. Our shared, daily, divine, epiousios bread. If we choose to receive it that way.
Maybe it's not so difficult to translate. Fr Lawrence Farley [1] notes that 1) the word was used in other historical writings than the Bible and 2) that the closely related word `epiouse' is used in Acts 16:11 which reads "We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the next day, to Neapolis."
As with many things relating to the Bible or Christianity, it can be helpful to search for what the Orthodox church says about it.
The wikipedia article mentions your 1st point (that it was used elsewhere) but then continues to say that when the original text was reexamined it was found that it was a different word.
>However, after the papyrus containing the shopping list, missing for many years, was rediscovered at the Yale Beinecke Library in 1998,[21] a re-examination found "elaiou" (oil), not "epiousios." (The original transcriber, A. H. Sayce, was apparently known to be a poor transcriber.)
Generally, wouldn't a religious organization be a biased source? They use religious texts to derive power, establish a narrative, and influence people's actions.
I reject this blanket characterization of religious organizations, but anyway the Eastern / Greek Orthodox Church is interesting here because it descends directly from the original Greek speaking Christians in the Eastern Roman empire when the Bible was written.
It's like asking a Jew about translating the Torah - it's about historical continuity and subject matter expertise.
The Gospels were written in the first century AD, when the (Catholic) Church was not in any way a powerful organization. Christianity didn't because the official religion until many centuries later:
You have an interesting point. However, if a biased, power-hungry organization says that the temperature outside at a certain time & location is 27° C and that really is the temperature there, the bias and ambition are less relevant.
Are you aware that the Orthodox church doesn't have a single leader? It is several organizations which co-exist as one united body.
(More or less. There are some recent schisms which are probably temporary. There aren't currently any partitions, ie Constantinople and Moscow are still united through Antioch, etc.)
Technically Christ leads the church, but even among God there are 3 of them who co-exist.
In this case no. Even if we accept your argument - which really can only be partly true - I don't understand how the interpretation of epiousios could change.
How would they derive power, establish a narrative and influence people's actions?
On big issues that may be something to keep in mind, in an issue such as this, which a word could be taken to mean either "daily bread", "supersubstantial bread" or anything in between, I don't really see why they'd try to spin it any way other the one they honestly understood it as.
I began my comment with the word "generally" for a reason. The person I replied to gave broad advice to consult the Eastern Orthodox church for religious interpretation. I was responding to that broad recommendation, not this specific case.
No. This text belongs to a religious tradition. Texts are not free-floating bits of meaning somehow unrelated to the traditions in which they were written. So reading text in light of tradition is arguably the best way to interpret text.
Indeed. Its a clear case of trusting the cat to keep the cream. But most poeple dont seem to notice, which is indicative for how strong the illusions the churches have created are.
I'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from.
why would a text even exist at all on the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek. Wouldn't all of the relevant texts have been in Latin at that point?
honestly asking. I'm not supposing I have a good grasp on the history here.
>I'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from. why would a text even exist at all on the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek.
The New Testament was written in Greek ("The New Testament is a collection of Christian texts originally written in the Koine Greek language, at different times by various authors"). Heck, Paul's epistles were written to mostly Greek-side churches, addressed in Greek.
Furtherore, while Greece had declined as an "superpower" (basically Romans took over), Greek culture, communities, and the use of Greek language had not, and were prevalent in the Eastern part of the Empire, which later became the Eastern Roman Empire (known as Byzantium).
The Eastern empire used Latin at first as official language, but the common language of the majority of the population was Greek (which was also what was taught, and the language were literature and such was written).
This includes the old core ancient Greece (modern-day Greece, Asia Minor, southern Italy, Cyprus), and all the way around eastern mediteranean and the middle east - e.g. places like Alexandria, Antioch, etc. where Greek were spoken, and had big -and ruiling- Greek-speaking populations from the hellenistic times). Byzantium itself turned to use Greek as official language after 2-3 centuries (and kept it for another millenium).
Indeed, there is no evidence there was ever any New Testament text in Aramaic. Nothing in the Greek text hints at any sort of translation difficulty going from a Semitic to an Indo-European language.
Questions of whether Jesus, Matthew, Luke, et al ever even existed as live people arise. Again, there is no evidence of any kind to settle the matter. Serious historians, in its absence, lean toward "no". Many conclude that Christianity started out as a cult wholly based in Rome, that later identified a need for "people stories" set in someplace exotic to appeal to the laity.
> Again, there is no evidence of any kind to settle the matter. ...Many conclude that Christianity started out as a cult wholly based in Rome, that later identified a need for "people stories" set in someplace exotic to appeal to the laity.
There are sorts of clues. For instance, say that you and I both wrote a story set in your hometown. Assuming that your hometown isn't the same as mine, your story would have a much richer "backdrop", in terms of, say, the variety of place names.
Some evidence along these lines are presented in this video:
That its authors were familiar with geographical Palestine is evident, but that does not bear on events or existence of named individuals. And, of course, any of them could have existed without the events reported occcurring, just as we acknowledge GW without conceding his cherry tree. It all comes down to faith, the which historians are obliged to work without.
> ...but that does not bear on events or existence of named individuals.
Right, the logic of my post wasn't clear. I wasn't addressing whether there was evidence for the existence of Luke, but addressing the theory that "people stories" were made up in some exotic locale.
> That its authors were familiar with geographical Palestine is evident,
So what you're saying is that members of this cult from Rome:
1. Determined that their nice theory needed "people stories" (why?)
2. Determined that they needed to be placed in an exotic locale
3. Actually travelled and to Palestine and bummed around there long enough to be familiar with the geography -- and not just Jerusalem and some of the surrounding villages, but Galilee way up in the north, the Samaritan region in between, and so on.
It had been awhile since I watched that video; after posting it I watched it again, and it turns out these authors also bummed around long enough that the made-up names in these made-up stories just accidentally match up well statistically with the names that were common in Palestine at the alleged time of the events.
> It all comes down to faith, the which historians are obliged to work without.
This is just propaganda. I've listened to a number of audio books of history in the last few years, including a biography of Catherine Howard (5th wife of Henry VIII), the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and a history of Pompeii. All of them seem perfectly comfortable discussing a number of possible reconstructions given the facts at hand and giving a judgement of the plausibility of any of them.
"We don't have any evidence that a person named Luke existed" doesn't sound like the kind of thing those authors would say. It's not that huge of a deal theologically whether Luke existed or not; but my understanding is that there's no particular reason to doubt that he did.
So consider two hypotheses:
A. "There were guys named Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John who collected and wrote down reports collected from people who actually met some a Palestinian preacher named Joshua"
B. "People from some theology-heavy cult based in Rome lived in Palestine for a decade drinking in the culture so that their made-up stores would be more realistic."
Any neutral judge -- i.e., one who isn't starting out with the assumption that the events in the gospels are complete fabrications -- would say A is a lot more likely scenario than B. And if B really is the best alternate explanation people have been able to come up with, that lends an awful lot of credence to A, in my mind.
It is a fact that anybody could live somewhere, for example Palestine, for a year or a decade, and then at any later time encounter a reason to make up stories about events set there. That is the origin story of probably tens of thousands of novels, good and bad. I could recommend a few.
Thus, it strikes me as very weird to object to such a historical possibility (except on theological grounds, which are out of scope here).
You could reasonably object that the evidence would better place the origin of the cult in some other Roman city, such as Antioch or Alexandria, and I know of no evidentiary reason to prefer one over another. Romans did get around.
> It is a fact that anybody could live somewhere, for example Palestine, for a year or a decade, and then at any later time encounter a reason to make up stories about events set there.
Right, but we don't have just a single book by a single person. We have five books by four people, as well as loads of letters. Are you saying a single person from this cult made up this story, and then wrote it four different times? Are you saying four different people from this cult had all lived in Palestine, and decided to tell the same story four different ways? Are you saying one person made up the story and wrote it down, and three other guys came along and did their own version of it, but somehow managed to be accurate about names and places in spite of not having lived there?
None of these things are impossible; but in the absence of some actual evidence for this, they certainly seem less probable.
> Thus, it strikes me as very weird to object to such a historical possibility (except on theological grounds, which are out of scope here).
OK, so according to Wikipedia, the earliest copy of Luke that we have is titled, "The Gospel according to Luke"; dozens of references from early Christians refer to Luke as its author; and no source ever refers to the author as anyone else. But to you this is "no evidence that Luke existed".
But so far the only arguments you've made for your cult-retrofitted-exotic-backstory theory are "it could have happened".
I'm not the one judging theories differently based on my theological preferences.
One individual with direct experience of life in Palestine -- say, Paul -- suffices to write down a story with geographical details. As many people as you like may then crib from such a story. But we do know of more than one person who had lived in Palestine, in the period.
I do not judge theories. Historians judge, and report their results. As I understand the scenario, the theology came first, then the parables, then a person to quote parables from, and finally biographical accounts of that person's life, all unfolding over decades according to the needs of an expanding church.
I do not find anything implausible in their results, or in their reasoning. You are welcome to your own conclusions. If you have a problem with historians' results, you may take it up with them.
Please allow me to direct you to an active, ongoing history of refereed journals, academic chairs, and professional study which you may even see discussed at great length on Youtube, such as is cited in a sibling reply.
I'm not sure how "New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts" would support your claim "whether Jesus, Matthew, Luke, et al ever even existed" and that Christianity started out as Roman cult.
Greek was the literate language of the Eastern Mediterranean during Roman times. Roman domination couldn't undo the existing network effects that preexisted there, all the more so that you couldn't be considered to have an education in Rome if you didn't speak Greek. Latin was used but it was essentially restricted to legal and administrative tasks.
I would also add that Greek was more philosophically sophisticated. The Greeks had a rich philosophical tradition and the resulting terminology was beyond what was available in other languages.
Even today, following centuries of scholasticism, the Latin translations aren't always adequate enough for the task. Take "logos" and "verbum", for example.
You can just use Greek words in Latin ! They certainly did often enough that it doesn't carry any prejudice. The declension system is very similar and Latin is by itself highly flexible, I wouldn't go as far as calling Greek particularly more sophisticated (and I'm usually very wary of assigning inherent qualities to languages). But it does carry along a cultural environment that's more focused on philosophy. You could say the same of Latin and law.
Haha, yes and no. This isn't really a question of the inherent grammatical qualities of languages in this case (though I don't see why certain languages can't perhaps be more suitable for certain kinds of discourse over others, but I digress). There's a received bit of wisdom in poetry that literature, strictly speaking, cannot be translated. This expression gets to the bottom of something very important which is that language is inseparable from culture and tradition (which you gesture toward in your reply).
So a word like "logos" simply has no equivalent in Latin and simply using the word "logos" or claiming that "verbum" is now the same as "logos" would require that either the receiver already know the Greek, or that Latin had become sophisticated enough to absorb the Greek meaning and all that it presupposes.
Every translation of John 1:1 seems equally as anemic as "verbum" or deficient in some way: word, Wort, słowo, Слово, parole, Verbo, 道. You need a sophisticated philosophical culture to support a word like "logos". Otherwise, there's nothing in your language to translate into.
The entire New Testament was originally written in Greek during the late 00’s/early 100’s. The papyrus mentioned in the article is a copy of Luke’s gospel dated to about 200 AD, but the original manuscript was written closer to 100 AD [0]. We have fragments of and references to the book of Luke from earlier than 200, but the copy from 200 is the first fragment containing the Lord’s Prayer and that unknown adjective.
The Septuagint (the Old Testament) was also in Greek, and translated around 200 BC, and was the official scriptures read in synagogues at the time. If they read scriptures in another local language in the synagogue, they were also required to read it from the Septuagint in Greek afterwards because that was the official language for scriptures in the synagogues. Only after Romans started persecuting the Christians did Jews start separating themselves and trying to put together a separate canon and translating it back into Hebrew, which wasn't accomplished until the 1400s.
Like Latin, Greek was a language whose use extended far past the decline of its birthplace. We do not have extensive contemporary sources for the Gospels. All we have are copies produced much later. This word is found in authoritative sources for the text of the new testament, which is written in Koine Greek.
> I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from.
Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. In the Middle East during that time Aramaic (the language that Jesus spoke) was the lingua franca, as was Persian further east. See The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler for a history:
A language can survive the waning of the culture that it was associated with. For another example, see Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, also by Ostler:
I wanted to add that Koine Greek was also the official language used in synagogues at the time, and that the Septuagint was the official version of the scriptures used in synagogues at the time of Christ. The scriptures could be read in Aramaic, but if they were read in Aramaic, it was also required that they be read in Greek afterwards.
If you happen to live in London or ever go there, you can see one of the oldest surviving New Testament Greek manuscripts. It's called Codex Sinaiticus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus), dates from the 4th century AD, and is always on free public display at the British Library in London.
This is my favorite example of this sort of thing (Source: Appendix II - λυκάβαντος: when the wolf comes?' in Elisabeth Irwin's 'Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation)
At Odyssey 14.158–64 and 19.303–7, the disguised Odysseus swears oaths, amounting to prophecy, to Eumaeus and to Penelope, respectively, that Odysseus’ return is imminent.
[...]
These passages are famous for the controversy surrounding the meaning of the critical phrase τοῦδ' αὐτοῦ λυκάβαντος: λυκάβας is a term otherwise unattested in Homer and one that does not resurface until some few centuries later, glossed by the less enigmatic term, 'year'.
[...]
None of the arguments proposed for the ‘true’ etymology are fully convincing: the origins of λυκάβας are alternatively proposed as pre-Greek—quite possibly related to the prehellenic name of the Attic mountain λυκαβηττός—or even Semitic. The first half of the word has been alternatively derived from 'light' or 'wolf', and the second from βαίνω ('to walk') so rendering the phrase 'when the wolf walks' or 'when the light goes'.
[...]
Here one might return to the phrase itself, and not its disputed etymology, but its possible folk etymologies. For the scholiasts the association of the word with year came from a connection with the wolf, λύκος, which they justified by the supposed amazing cooperative power of wolves who, each grasping in their jaws the tail of the wolf in front, were said to form a chain to cross rivers, a sequence that is said to evoke the motion of time as sequential units (ὥσπερ καἰ ἐπὶ τοῦ χρόνου, 'as also in the case of time'). The explanation is fanciful, but at least points to a tradition of associating the word more distinctly with 'wolf' rather than 'light'.
At least st. Cyprian (died 258) [1] understands epiousious meaning the holy communion. (Source: my friend who has studied theology focusing to early church fathers)
Interesting, i ve been saying that prayer as a kid and i always thought that the word meant something like "vital, substantive", but that's based on my modern interpretation of the word
As a Greek who's lived abroad and has taken a jab at a bunch of different languages, I always talked to my friends about how easy it is to understand most Greek words even if I've never heard of them before. Yes, there are a lot of etymological roots that change + exceptions but it is a lot simpler to make out (or make up) words than it is with other languages. Especially, ones that have a complex genealogical history like English. For example, chicken, turkey, poultry, bird are all different in English but in Greek you can find the word for bird in all of them (κοτόπουλο, γαλοπούλα, πουλερικά, πουλί). Btw this is also why I think that Greek is a relatively easy language to learn (but there isn't much material to get people started unfortunately :( )
TIL that a word I've been hearing and saying since I was 5 does not mean what I thought it meant and it's still baffling me haha made my day really
The range of interpretation, and inferred belief in the meaning, as a function of religious belief and action is a classic example of how fraught "the word of gXd" is, subject to translation/transcription error.
If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
[*] contemporary being also subject to some discussion given the highly approximate nature of document ageing. If the other uses are as little as 50 years after, how strongly would you agree with the meaning, as opposed to documents 50 years prior?
Imagine you're in the future, and discover terms of art in contemporary computing like "bus" and then your point of reference is henceforth set by ICT, and not by mechanised transport, or even electrical engineer because you don't find the dual-meaning of bus-bars, and bus (vehicle) which informed this choice.
> If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
Maybe, but you've got a body of tradition to lean on. You cannot interpret text, perhaps especially Christian texts, without drawing on tradition. This is a major flaw in sola scriptura and hence the reason why over forty thousand Protestant sects exist in the US alone. Without that continuous tradition, you have to reach for some other hermeneutic, some other interpretive lens, likely you're own undisciplined and unacknowledged implicit one of the day.
Right. But, this is the world we live in: people who insist on literal meaning of text, often inferred from an english gloss of a greek gloss, back to documents where (as in this case) the word is not able to be defined, because it's the only instance of the word in the corpus at this time.
If you put the faith "to the test" of reasoned meaning, you're a long way off a sola scriptura reservation.
FWIW I side with the "perpetual" (or one of various approximate synonyms) faction that cites the Syriac translation from Aramic. I think that, firstly, it makes sense to see "always-being" as a kind of superlative of mere "being". And secondly, it seems plausible that one might arrive from "always-being" via "being-at-all-days" or "being-everyday" to the common "daily" translation.
Then the question would be, a typo for what? Given that scholars have been studying this word for 1600 and coming up with various theories, if a typo was a plausible theory, they would have already thought of that.
Scholars do some pretty intense analysis of this stuff. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_75 about how differences between different scrolls are tracked.
I would think so (that is to say a misspelling, not a typo as it wasn't typed), but on the other hand misspelling generally look like another word that fits in the context, but nobody seems to be suggesting a better word that looks like epiousios to put in its place.
That's one of the things I like about HN :-) The variety and range of different subjects being posted. I'm casually reading why we can't go faster than light, contemplating about Roko’s Basilisk or how to use a Raspberry for a strange project, and here comes along the definition of a Greek word (with a surprising number of comments and points).
Why try to find a super-deep meaning in something that is straightforward and makes perfect sense in its literal interpretation? Even if it is an hapax legomenon.
It's ironic that Occam was a theologian, and yet very few of his colleague have heard of Occam's razor.
I contest this notion because the development of doctrine is toward greater clarity. It may be the case that there is a more complex meaning to be considered that resists easy understanding. A movement toward clarity may lead to more and not less to consider. Consider John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." What is "Word"? You really only begin to appreciate the meaning in the original Greek, "Logos". And that by itself can be contemplated inexhaustibly.
So this suspicion that it was an exercise in obscurantism is unsubstantiated.[0]
If this is a neologism, then it suggests that no existing Greek word was able to fully articulate the intended meaning. It may have tried to capture a meaning available in Aramaic [1]
[0] Not a fan of Karl Rahner, but I think his characterization of "mystery" as "inexhaustible intelligibility" is much more accurate that the modern implication that mystery is impenetrable obscurity. On the contrary, it is penetrable, but inexhaustible. And that would agree, I think, with the notion of the Beautific Vision.
You have provided your own examples. "Development of doctrine" seems to refer to events in a time necessarily much later than its original composition.
I'm not sure how I provided examples of mystification. Rather, whatever the merits of my particular example, I think I rather argued against the idea that "epiousios" was intended to obscure and to obfuscate rather than to clarify by arguing that this would go against the development of doctrine which tends toward greater clarify, not obscurity. I'm making two points: against mystification by virtue of the development of dotrine and for the idea that the term may have been coined to express something Greek had no word for. Don't confuse the two.
In any case, the lack of examples and explanation to support the claim that mystification is a practice in this context is conspicuous. It smells of prejudice, frankly.
If you are unaware of religions coining official mysteries, let me recommend any introductory course in comparative religion. Sometimes the word even shows up in the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries
And, if you do not understand how "development of doctrine which tends toward greater clari[t]y" implies a progression of events in time that can, perforce, have no effect on events that preceded them, let me suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
If anything, it should have literally the opposite meaning. Part of the idea of what it represents in the Eucharist is that it endures when the world passes away.
If “epi” is above and “ousia” is essence, then this leads me to think: what is above essence? A Thomistic reading would suggest that the only remaining principle above essence is existence. So something like bread of existence/bring? This does sound like “bread of life”. Some may argue that the Greeks had no “concept” of existence qua existence, but they also didn’t have this word either, hence the neologism. And it would not be a strong objection: the Thomistic understanding of transsubstantiation also came later, but is the accepted view of the Catholic Church.
"He fights to earn the epiousios"
In that context epiousios means the bread of each day and by extension the absolutely necessary (commodities) for human living.
https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/l...
https://ikypros.com/53875/%CE%B7-%CE%B6%CF%89%CE%B7-%CE%BC%C...