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EpiousiosEpiousios is a Greek word used in the fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer, as it is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke. In English epiousios is usually translated as "daily", as in, "Give us this day our daily bread". But epiousios has no direct or simple English translation and there have been several interpretations of its meaning throughout the history of Christianity. For Christians, this is not just a quibble over an isolated phrase. Christians believe that the Lord's Prayer was instituted by Jesus for the use of his disciples, so they want to be as faithful as they can be to the original words of Jesus. Beyond that, subtle differences among various translations of this prayer become larger differences when the various translations are used to generate theology. The words Jesus used to teach his followers to pray reveal something of how he viewed himself, God, and the earthly life of his followers. Epiousios is an example of how the translation of one word can make a big difference for theology: if the phrase "ho artos hemon ho epiousios" is translated into English as "our daily bread", this imparts to the reader that Jesus wanted his followers to ask God for the means to survive physically, one day at a time. If, on the other hand, it is translated as "our bread for tomorrow", Jesus is saying that we should pray for our future needs rather than our present needs. A third possibility is "our necessary" or "our essential bread". All of these imply ordinary bread that we eat every day to sustain our bodies, but a fourth possibility, "our bread for the age to come", implies a spiritual bread or nourishment which will be consumed not in this world but in the next. Still other translations would focus attention away from ordinary bread and onto the Eucharist: epiousios has also been translated as "supersubstantial" or as something having to do with the very essence of things rather than their tangible nature, or as "supernatural". It has been proposed that "ho artos hemon ho epiousios", whatever it may mean, was used as a name for the Eucharist by the earliest Christians, even before the Gospel accounts of Jesus's life were written. This would indicate that the Gospel authors used epiousios with a specific meaning in mind: "our eucharistic bread". A common way to tease out the unknown meaning of an ancient word is to look at all of the various contexts in which that word is used in ancient writings. For epiousios, however, this method can not be applied, because the word is not found anywhere else in Greek or Hellenistic literature. Its use was long thought to be restricted to the two versions of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew and Luke. This would have made it a neologism, a word used only in Christian circles and lacking meaning outside of a eucharistic context. It was only in the twentieth century that a single additional use of the word was discovered. The document in which it was found is an ancient shopping list. The word epiousios is written next to the names of several grocery items. This seems to indicate that it was used in the sense of either "enough for today", "enough for tomorrow", or "necessary".
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