How Do We Translate a Word That Has No Single Equivalent?

In Matthew, ἐπιούσιος modifies “bread”, while “give” and the separate “today” — δὸς … σήμερον — stand beside it. In Luke, the adjective is the same but its surroundings differ: δίδου … τὸ καθ’ ἡμέραν, “keep giving … day by day”. Luke already expresses repetition through both the verbal form and a separate phrase. The translator therefore works not with an isolated dictionary card but with two complete utterances.

The third early Christian occurrence is in Didache 8.2. There the petition has the Matthean form, “give … today”. It is important evidence for the early circulation of the prayer, but not a new everyday example in which the rare adjective accompanies another noun or is explained by a synonym. The precise literary relationship between the Didache and Matthew remains disputed. We may neither declare direct copying proven nor use the Didache as a completely independent lexical control.

Grammar does establish something firmly. ἐπιούσιος is an adjective agreeing with “bread”, not an independent adverb meaning “daily”. This removes some quick solutions, but it does not say which description is required: “daily”, “necessary” or “for the coming day”. Grammar defines the kind of question; it does not insert a ready answer.

A principle often lost in discussions of “literal translation” is already visible: the same source word need not perform exactly the same work in different sentences. Matthew gives the temporal point “today”; Luke presents the petition as repeated. A target-language decision must account not only for the adjective but also for the places where the rest of the sentence already communicates a daily sense.

Meaning is normally refined through comparison. Researchers assemble many independent occurrences and ask which words and situations accompany a lexeme. With ἐπιούσιος, this path is almost closed. The reliable early material consists of the two Gospel passages and the Didache, and all three belong to one prayer tradition. We have no undisputed independent early Greek parallel offering an ordinary non-prayer context.

Origen already regarded the word as unusual and in need of explanation in the third century. He suggested that the evangelists had coined it. This is valuable evidence for the history of interpretation: the difficulty was not invented by modern translators. Origen’s observation remains the response and hypothesis of an ancient reader, however, not proof of who first created the word or when.

Later Christian authors repeatedly quoted and interpreted the line. Their works matter greatly for the history of understanding, but they do not broaden the corpus as an independent contract, letter or everyday narrative using the same word would. Interpretation shows what a reader heard in the prayer; it does not create a new context capable of establishing the original meaning by itself.

Rarity increases the value of every witness but does not give a word mystical status. It deprives us of a broad corpus for testing. The dictionary therefore opens several reasoned possibilities here; it does not present one of them as an automatic target-language answer.

The first line concerns a daily measure: bread for the present day, enough for a day, or in natural English, “daily”. This is an ancient and widely familiar solution. Yet “daily” is better understood as a reading of the petition as a whole than as an undisputed mechanical decomposition of the Greek word. This is particularly clear in Luke, where “day by day” is already stated separately.

The second line foregrounds necessity: bread required for life, sufficient for existence. It too has an ancient history in translation and interpretation. It should not, however, turn a resemblance to Greek words for “substance” or “existence” into a demonstrated etymology. That morphological model is ancient but disputed.

The third possibility connects ἐπιούσιος with the approaching or following day: “bread for the coming day” or “for tomorrow”. This is not sensational freedom but a serious philological hypothesis. It has not been proved conclusively and does not necessarily signify the bread of the future age or another eschatological reality. An additional interpretive step lies between the next ordinary day and a theological image of the world to come.

Etymology and meaning must not be confused. Etymology asks how a word may have been formed; translation asks what it does in a particular sentence. Even a plausible history of formation does not have to become the “literal true meaning”. Conversely, a strong contextual translation may communicate the function of the petition accurately without copying a proposed set of Greek morphemes.

These three profiles are not arbitrary fantasies and need not be equally probable in every context. Grammar, sentence structure and the ancient history of interpretation constrain them. None, however, removes the others so completely that a translator can pretend the dictionary made the decision rather than an editor.

The history of the Latin text makes the problem almost visible. Surviving Old Latin manuscripts of Matthew have cotidianum, “daily”. In Matthew Jerome introduced the unusual supersubstantialem, following the line “above substance / for existence”, while in Luke he retained cotidianum. The same Greek term in two forms of one prayer thus received different Latin equivalents within the Vulgate.

In his commentary on Matthew, Jerome also reports a form that he explains as “of tomorrow” or “of the future” in another Gospel text. This confirms the antiquity of the “for tomorrow” line, but it does not recover an Aramaic original of the prayer. That text cannot be checked independently here and is known through Jerome’s report. Ancient evidence remains mediated evidence.

The contrast does not prove that Jerome solved the word, and it does not require a separate theological programme behind every choice. It shows something simpler and important: an ancient translator or editor could already decide that one target word need not function identically in both contexts. The phrase was translated, not a lemma in a vacuum.

Other ancient witnesses extend the map. The Peshitta renders the sense “the bread of our need” in both Gospels, while separately preserving “today” in Matthew and “each day” in Luke. This is an ancient Syriac translation decision, not a recovered recording of Jesus’s Aramaic words. John Chrysostom interpreted the petition through bread for one day and the context of refusing anxiety about tomorrow. His reading witnesses to the antiquity of the daily-sufficiency line while remaining patristic interpretation rather than independent lexical usage.

Disagreement among ancient translators does not mean arbitrariness. They repeatedly remain within the same limited field: time, sufficient measure, necessity and the coming day. Their versions show that the difficulty is real and old. No version becomes an automatic key to the Greek merely because it is ancient.

The Russian example makes the long afterlife of a translation especially clear. Vasmer’s etymological dictionary connects Russian nasushchnyi with Church Slavonic насѫштьнъ, created as a calque of Greek ἐπιούσιος. The translators did not find a ready transparent equivalent; they constructed one using the resources of Slavonic. The translated word then took root, became recognisable and moved beyond a single line of prayer.

In contemporary standard Russian, nasushchnyi primarily means vitally important or absolutely necessary, while “daily bread” in this form signifies food or sustenance. A modern Russian reader therefore hears necessity more strongly than calendar regularity or the coming day. This observation describes the word’s present semantic profile but does not prove that its entire history arose exclusively from the prayer.

Calling the traditional Russian equivalent wrong would be as imprecise as declaring it the final solution. It preserves cultural memory, recognisability in prayer and one serious line of interpretation. At the same time, familiarity can conceal the fact that it is already an interpretation — a successful historical choice with gains and losses.

This is not an exposure of tradition. The calque demonstrates the intellectual courage of earlier translators: faced with a rare word, they created a target equivalent capable of living for centuries. Success does not remove its editorial character. A translator who preserves it today preserves tradition and the line of necessity; a temporal alternative may be made visible elsewhere in the sentence or in a note.

Modern translations distribute the meaning differently. Two reviewed Russian versions retain nasushchnyi, while two English versions use the familiar daily bread. The German Lutherbibel has tägliches Brot, “daily bread”, whereas the Einheitsübersetzung says das Brot, das wir brauchen, “the bread we need”. A reviewed Ukrainian pair contains both the traditional насущний and the transparent temporal щоденний.

In Luke, English daily bread stands beside each day, and a German temporal formula may combine “daily bread” with “day by day”. Such repetition does not automatically make a translation wrong. It may preserve a shared recognisable formula across Matthew and Luke. Yet it reveals the cost of the decision. German “the bread we need” distributes the material differently: necessity is expressed in the description, regularity in a separate “daily”.

This small sample cannot establish a ranking, still less a confessional tendency from one word. It demonstrates that a translation may foreground time, necessity or traditional recognition, while other elements — “today”, “each day”, the form of the verb — carry part of the meaning. What differs is not only the adjective but the distribution of information across the sentence.

The NET Bible and NRSVue retain familiar daily bread in the main English line but note the alternative “bread for tomorrow”; NET also records the line “bread we need”. The main text remains readable and traditional, while a serious alternative does not disappear. The reader sees both the editorial choice and the limit of its confidence.

Such a note is not an admission of defeat. One short line can rarely preserve the entire form of the source, the history of interpretation and competing hypotheses. A responsible editorial system distributes the work: the main text makes a reasoned choice, context helps the reader hear it, and the note restores consequential uncertainty that cannot honestly be declared closed.

A translator does not begin by choosing an attractive target word. The work starts by checking grammatical form, collecting real occurrences and testing whether they are independent, comparing Matthew, Luke and the Didache, separating a possible origin of the word from its function in the sentence, studying ancient versions as a history of understanding, and asking what a contemporary reader will hear. Only then can the editor decide what is probable enough for the main line.

Another decision remains: what has been lost and must be explained nearby? A traditional term may preserve more than a transparent replacement. An ordinary contemporary word may communicate the function of the phrase more accurately. A familiar line with a strong note may be the best solution. Neither age, novelty nor outward “literalness” guarantees accuracy.

The history of ἐπιούσιος does not end with “we simply do not know”. We know the form of the word, its rare contexts, the principal philological possibilities, ancient translations and the changes of sense in target languages. That is enough to limit the field of decisions, describe residual uncertainty precisely and make an editorial choice transparent.

Translation here is neither mechanical substitution nor free opinion. It is a reasoned decision under the control of evidence.