Why Do We Call It Our "Daily" Bread?
In the Gospels, Jesus teaches us the Our Father prayer, where we ask God to “give us this day our daily bread” (Mt 6:11; Lk 11:3). That phrase “daily bread” — especially the word daily — has been famously tricky.
In the Gospels, the Greek has Jesus saying: “gives us this day our epiousion bread.” Epiousion is a strange word. In fact, it had never existed in the Greek language until this moment. The Gospel writers invented it in their attempt to capture whatever Jesus actually said in Aramaic or Hebrew.
Ancient Christians had a way of thinking through this. They figured epiousion was a combination of two things: epi (which can mean something like “beyond”) and ousion (which would mean “substantial”). Calling it “epiousion bread” might suggest that something about it goes beyond its material substance. Many Church Fathers thought we should simply say “give us this day our spiritual bread.”
In the fourth-century, Saint Jerome translated the entirety of the Scriptures into Latin. Since the Our Father appears in both Matthew’s Gospel as well as Luke’s, Jerome had two chances to translate epiousion into Latin. For Matthew’s Gospel, he translated it “supersubstantialem” — “give us this day our super-substantial bread.”1 But when he got to Luke’s Gospel, he translated the same word as “cotidianum” — “give us this day our daily bread.”
What gives? How does a word as simple and common as “daily” adequately represent a prayer so extraordinary in the original that the Gospel writers needed to invent a word to capture it?2
While puzzling over epiousion, Saint Jerome found another manuscript (not one of the four Gospels) which has Jesus calling it, in Hebrew, “mahar bread” — “tomorrow’s bread.”3 “The meaning,” Jerome said, “would be: ‘give us today our bread for tomorrow, i.e., our future bread.’”4 For Luke’s Gospel, then, he simplified the translation to “our daily bread” — our portion of bread for today, for tomorrow, and for every day.
Modern scholars have found other reasons for translating epiousion as “daily.” There are reasons to believe epiousion may be related to the Greek word epiousē, which means “the coming day” — i.e. tomorrow.5 This is perhaps why, in other ancient languages, you’ll find translations of the Our Father that have “our coming bread.”6
These days, of course, the scholarly consensus is that epiousion is, in fact, best translated as “our daily bread” — hence the prayer we are taught as children and use at Mass. Certainly, though, both of Saint Jerome’s translations are useful. There’s a reason the Gospel writers needed a new word. The idea Jesus was getting at is more complicated than a simplistic understanding of “daily bread.” There is something about this bread which is both cotidianum and supersubstantialem, daily and super-substantial.
When ancient Christians thought about a “super-substantial bread,” they thought about the Eucharist. But the Eucharist is our “daily bread,” our “coming bread,” our daily allotment. It is the bread for each of our tomorrows as well as the bread of that Great Tomorrow. This daily bread is spiritual, supernatural, and super-substantial.
This is no easy concept to communicate. Perhaps that’s why the Gospel writers needed an entirely new word.
More than 1,000 years after Jerome’s translation, this is how the 1582 Douay-Rheims translation of the New Testament rendered Matthew’s account of the Our Father into English.
See Anthony Harvey, “Daily Bread” The Journal of Theological Studies 69, no. 1 (April 2018): 25.
This was the “Gospel of the Nazarenes,” a non-canonical Jewish-Christian gospel often quoted by the Church Fathers but now lost to us. See John Hennig, “Our Daily Bread,” Theological Studies 4, no. 3 (1943): 446.
Cited in Hennig, “Our Daily Bread,” 446.
See Harvey, “Daily Bread,” 31.
See A.H. Macneile, The Gospel According to St Matthew (London: MacMillan, 1915), 80.