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The Concealed Word in The Lord’s Prayer


The word is visible in the Hanna Papyrus 1 (p75) - "Mater Verbi" (Mother of the Word), the oldest surviving witness for certain New Testament passages.


Epiousion 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, ἄρτον, arton. In an interlinear gloss:

Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον

The bread of-us        epiousion give us     today

"Give us today our epiousion bread"


There are several reasons that epiousios presents an exceptional translation challenge. The word appears nowhere else in other Ancient Greek texts, and so may have been coined by the authors of the Gospel. Jesus probably did not originally compose the prayer in Greek, but in his native language (either Aramaic language or Hebrew), but the consensus view is that New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek. This implies the probability of language interpretation (i.e., spoken Aramaic to written Greek) at the outset of recording the Gospel. Thus, the meaning of any such word is often difficult to determine, because cross-references and comparisons with other usages are not possible, except by morphological analysis.


Multiple Biblical scholars through the centuries have given their particular interpretation and arguments as to the (one correct) meaning of the Greek word. Having reviewed most of the arguments, and studied this further, it is
my hypothesis herein, it may be a mystery because it could have an ambiguous or duality in meaning and interpretation.  Is there duality in meaning and interpretation in the Bible?  Scripture is replete with metaphor

and use of parallel meaning and dual interpretation.  Proverbs 25:2 tells us “It is the glory of God to conceal
the word, and the glory of kings to search out the speech.”  One interpretation of this passage states “God
conceals deep truths, making them mysteries, and that is good and glorious. The good and glorious role of
the most noble of men, on the other hand, is to search out those mysteries.”