Abstract / DOI
What bread? What bread! What sort of «bread» we are really dealing with, when we turn to the fourth petition in the Lord’s Prayer, depends on the adjective that qualify it both in Luke and Matthew. It reads «epiousion» and is used nowhere else in the Greek (hapax legomenon). The linguistic pragmatics of this lexical items are considered here for the first time. Jerome intuitively translated into «supersubstantialis» in his Vulgata version. The familiar phrase «our daily bread» refers back to the «cotidianum» used in the Vetus Latina translation. It was a word that still made sense in the context of Jewish-Christian communities, but eludes its eschatological meaning in the later context of evolving communities. The inner framework of the Lord’s Prayer is distorted by the commonly used, misleading translation. What is put forth here, is not the bread that satiates, but the unleavened bread that is developed in the Exodus tradition, which Jesus gives a new meaning at the Last Supper. This interpretation takes a central position in my media history of monotheism.