Our 'Daily' Bread.

...our daily bread...

The Lord’s prayer contains the line: “Give us this day our daily bread”. This line is in both Matthew’s gospel (chapter 6, verse 11) and in Luke’s gospel (chapter 11, verse 3). Here is the interesting part... In Matthew’s gospel, the greek word that we translate as ‘daily’ is epiousios. This is a challenging word for translators. This is the only time that this word is recorded inall of ancient greek literature, no other books of the bible, nor any other pagan writings. If we break this word down into its roots here is what we get:

• epi - upon, over, or above.
• ousios - being, nature, or substance.

So, literally, it translates to “over nature”, or “above nature”, or to use another word in place of above, “super substantial” (which is how it is translated in the Latin Vulgate, a late 4th century Latin translation of the bible; largely done by St. Jerome). A more modern translation might be “super natural”. With this, the words of Jesus become:

Give us this day our super-substantial bread.

Or,

Give us this day our super-natural bread.

The bread that is above nature... This bread, is the Eucharist. We use the word “transubstantion” to describe how the bread changes into the body and blood of Chirst, and it sounds like this word is a super-fancy-Latiny word that professors use so that they can give exams. But, as the root “trans” also means above (think of transcends) we can see that trans-substance is actually the word that Jesus used when he taught us how to pray:

trans-substancial  =  super-substancial  =  super-natural

Give us this day our epiousios bread; our trans-substantiated bread; our super-natural bread; the Eucharist... I also don’t think it is a coincidence that this occurs in Matthew, but not Luke. Matthew’s primary audience was Jewish-Christians, and they would have known full-well about super-substancial bread.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church talks about all of this, and more, in paragraph 2837.

(Most of this was courtesy of Drs. Scott Hahn and Brant Pitre.)