Epiousios
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
"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...
[1] https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%94%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%B9%C...
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.
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.
Puts another spin on "soul food", too.
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]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna
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:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_offering
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dough_offering
See also unleavened bread during the Passover:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover#Matzah
Dr. Brant Pitre has a book called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist; presentation:
Mana is a Melanesian word for some sort of spiritual life force!
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.
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.
So what do scholars do? The best they can!
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.
Colour me "confused".
Oh well, I suppose I'll start calling everybody a "she" by default, then.
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
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!
[1] https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B5%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%8... [2] https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/l...
We have good evidence that it used to be like English b (voiced bilabial plosive):
https://www.foundalis.com/lan/betapro.htm
That's just one example. Native speakers are usually the worst at understanding and explaining their own language.
—-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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 :)
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. ;)
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.
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'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.
Can you highlight what OP got wrong?
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.
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.
Aha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
So, yes -- though named not by but for him, by Douglas Hofstadter in G, E, B.
> 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.
This might not be translatable to English in one word, but it can be to Swedish: lagom.
This word instantly reminded me of that but I don’t know if they are conceptually related or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_75?wprov=sfti1
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/-YQMdlv22BA8jnWvqnca...
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.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua?wprov=sf...
I know it’s common in some Asian languages but their character systems account for it better.
Modern texts have all these things inserted by editors, it does indeed sound much harder to have to learn without these extra aids.
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.
σ is normal sigma and ς is for the endings of words.
(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.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_redibis_nunquam_per_bella...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...
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.
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?
What am I missing here?
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.
But, "give us this day our supernatural bread"... just doesn't have the same ring to it, you know?
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.
> 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 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'
9th century and not Byzantine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_Church...
but by that point, at least according to the article, the meaning was already unclear
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.
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).
"'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.
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-p...
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Supplementary content: https://twitter.com/kristleifur/status/1429177064205258758?s...
As with many things relating to the Bible or Christianity, it can be helpful to search for what the Orthodox church says about it.
[1]: https://www.oca.org/reflections/fr.-lawrence-farley/the-lord...
It's like asking a Jew about translating the Torah - it's about historical continuity and subject matter expertise.
But it is not. A single person of Jewish faith has no conflict of interest.
A better example would be a centralized rabbinic authority, which hasn't existed since the fall of ancient Israel.
I would have just as much doubt in the analysis of an atheistic organization.
Secular =/= atheistic.
(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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
And just because someone is biased, does not make them wrong:
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.
>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.)
“Give us this day, our divine bread”
As per the linked article, that’s as reasonable of a translation as anything else.
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.
Greek spread through the conquests of Alexander the Great, and Latin never supplanted it.
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even today, following centuries of scholasticism, the Latin translations aren't always adequate enough for the task. Take "logos" and "verbum", for example.
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.
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:
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/last-lingua-fr...
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:
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/08/featuresreview...
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'.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's ironic that Occam was a theologian, and yet very few of his colleague have heard of Occam's razor.
My guess is the word was inserted deliberately to mystify. It wouldn't be the first time.
Examples?
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.
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.
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
Finally, without comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith
but this one you dont really need it everyday in the desert/dessert.
> The bread of-us the epiousion give us today
And the sense of "epi" as in "outside" like epicentre and epidermis, could this be as simple as
> Give us our daily crust of bread
I wonder?