“Our Father, who art in heaven. . . .” starts a prayer that has echoed down generations. Have you ever wondered what this oft-repeated prayer in the Christian tradition sounded like in one of the earliest English versions? Traditionally named the “Pater Noster,” I remember it as the “Sermon on the Mount Prayer.” How did it sound on the tongues of people who said it hundreds and hundreds of years ago in English? Very Germanic, with some Tolkienesque elfish-like liltings, as we’ll hear.
Here you encounter the beautiful Old English version. This prayer Jesus taught his students is found in the texts called the Gospels or “Good News,” in the books of Matthew at 6:9-13 and Luke at 11:2-4. I will read it in Old English from around the year 1000 C.E. My sources include Professor Roy Liuzza’s brilliant work on the Corpus Christi College Manuscript 140 (1994), translations of the Latin Vulgate, Sarah Ruden’s Gospels: A New Translation, many dictionaries with treasure, and my own experience with the Presence.
Through study, I became aware of the hapax legomenon or “unique use”—literally: “being said once”—here of epiousios, said “eppy-oo-see-ohs” (click here to hear the pronounciation), long translated as “daily.” This word epiousios is only found in Matthew and repeated in Luke in the same context. Translated as “daily” down through the eons in “our daily bread,” epiousios has been handed-down and handed-on doggedly as “daily” year after year after century after millennium, but again, since it’s only technically used once, in one context, in the anthology, there are no other uses to compare it to. Now many scholars don’t think it means “daily.” Imagine that.
Just this one word epiousios makes open-minded, research-loving, and contemplatively regarded translation suddenly seem quite vital to life and our well-being.
Some well-read scholars mention that epiousios may mean “tomorrow.” Which would suggest that Jesus, the man Rabbi Rami Shapiro enthusiastically calls the “God-intoxicated Jewish mystic,” would be recommending in his teaching that his students pray this way: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.” How would that make sense? For Jesus also says, “Be mindful of the lilies in the field and how they grow—they don’t work and they don’t stress. . . . Don’t worry about tomorrow then. Tomorrow will take care of its own self.” (Matthew 6:28, translated by the author).
So the long and short of it is that no one knows what epiousios means. For thousands of years, this word has been prayed as “daily” when actually there may be more to it than that.
When I say this word, “eppy-oo-see-ohs,” I think of Cheerios, the honey nut kind, which are so delicious, and I am grateful for all food in my life. I was taught that growing up. When I would grumble about my hair not looking right or boyfriend troubles or driving junker cars that had such old batteries we often spent every winter morning jumping each other off to get cranked and going, I’d be told, “Do you have food to eat? Be grateful for that instead of grumbling. People are hungry in the world. Yet you have food.” Now gratitude is a habit that has become a part of my life, admittedly sometimes more than others.
I also think about how we have enough food in the world where everyone could eat and not worry about their next meal/s, if greed and a prevailing scarcity mindset didn’t prevent it and create billionaires instead. If we didn’t have an economic system built out by greed, which the Christian New Testament calls the “root of all evil.” Why is the legal minimum wage in Georgia $5.15? See DOL. Why is the federal minimum wage $7.25?
Why also would this petition—“Give us this day our daily bread”—be what Jesus asked for? Growing up, it never made full sense to me, since I was also taught in Sunday School that “God is love,” and love is generous, while “Give us this day our daily bread” seems repetitive, desperate, and part of a scarcity-based mindset. Which the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic did not have. He had an open-hearted, sharing, and inclusive 5-loaves-of-bread-and-2-fish-can-feed-a-multitude way-of-seeing (Matthew 14). So I moved as a kid toward interpreting this line of the prayer as, “Count your blessings. Be grateful.” Because I was taken to church three times a week, and we prayed this prayer at nearly every gathering at least once, I needed it to chime with Love. Otherwise, mindless repetition would make my brain spasm if the words didn’t feed me in some way.
And when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you,” I didn’t think he meant that as fact, more like: “But really, why do you still have any who experience poverty among you? Didn’t you share everything out with those less fortunate and afflicted by the unfair systems?”
Today’s research into epiousios revealed that this Greek word is polysemantic, complexifying such questions with its multiple meanings. The ousia in it can mean both the verb “to be” or “I am” (from the verb eimí), and the noun “substance.” Epi- means, among other things, “on, at, besides,” even “intensely so.” So epiousios might mean “be present with.”
I see this lone adjective epiousios in the Sermon on the Mount Prayer as being “present-with-us.” A new translation then might include: “Give us this day our just-being bread” or “Give us this day our awareness-that-You’re-present-with-us bread” or “Give us this day our Nowness bread.”
Some see in epiousios the epi- as meaning only “over” and thus “supersubstantial,” or “transcendent.” But epi- in epiousios can mean “on” and thus “present with” and “immanent”—the sacred in the every day, the sacred in the mundane, the sacred in the silky sound of sugar poured into a mug of fresh coffee. The tang on the tongue and the silkiness of wine. The word Presence means something very similar with its prae- “before” and esse “to be.”
The Douay Rheims Catholic Bible version gives for Matthew 6:11: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread,” translated from Jerome’s Vulgate: “panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie.” Could the “supersubstantial” also mean “life-sustaining”—”Give us this day our life-sustaining bread.” And why might not the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic mean many wisdoms here? We could hold at one time: “Give us,” as in “Let us be aware we’re being given this, living in and from that awareness,” and “Let us be grateful for” our Cheerios and God’s Presence, so thankful for all F/foods.
Many scholars suggest epiousios modifying bread might mean “Eucharistic bread.” That could be true. But since it’s a ritual only happening in institutionalized churches, isn’t there room for more? Wasn’t Jesus inclusive always, always meaning Love is all-the-time and everywHere? And what is divine Presence if not Bread?
Also, I love the word “supersubstantial” because it can mean “superessential,” not merely as in “above or transcending all substance or being,” but as in “exceedingly, very essential,” the essence of Life. And even when our minds fall onto a binary track, as we might tend to do, if a person wants to take super- as “above,” then it is counterbalanced here with the sub- which is “below or under.” So “above” meets “below” in the here-and-now of *sta– in stantial/stance, which means “to make or be firm.” That which is, Is. The past traditional take on this word epiousios seems to be “it’s God’s transcendence,” but I see epiousios as divine immanence, the spirit indwelling all creation, making all creations, all creatures, all humans, and all beyond-humans sacred.
Since one of my best friends asked me to, I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount Prayer in Old English from around 1000 C.E. and posted it and my translation of it in modern English, on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence, more specifically here.
I expand the opening direct address to be more inclusive, since the “Our Father” leaves a good many people out. Can the divine only be masculine? Is the divine also feminine? Is it both and also neither? Is it all of these and beyond all of these?
Also, what should we call this prayer? Jesus’s Prayer? The Sermon on the Mount Prayer? The more we move away from the language of domination, slavery, power, and ruling, the more love we can open up to, accept, and share.
Fæder ure, Módor ure, Ældran ure,
þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice.
Gewurþe ðin wille on eorðan
swa swa on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf
syle us todæg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.
Our Father, our Mother, our Parents,
you who are in the Here-and-Now,
may your name be honored in all we do.
May your Presence be recognized.
May your Love be done on earth
as it is in your Home.
Give us this day our bread
of your Presence.
And forgive us our harmings of others,
as we forgive those who harmed us.
And don’t let us know danger,
but keep us from harm.
So be it.
Thank you for reading and listening, and for your kind presence in the world. Peace to all.
Notes:
“Ældran” means “older ones” or “elders,” translated here as “Parents” in honor of the Christian embodied Trinity.
The “heofon” Sarah Ruden translates as “in the skies.” That ancient cosmogony seems to risks furthering the alienation that comes from only conceiving that divinity is outside our earth, and far from us, when mystics like Hildegard see the viriditas or greenness of divinity in all of earth. And “heaven” has from its first days in English also meant “God’s home” in any place on earth, not just in a no-place “beyond the sky,” also: “celestial space,” “peace, paradise,” and “a state of everlastingness,” even “Love.”
The “ġehālgod” means in Old English “be made holy,” from hālgian, while holy, whole, health, and hale are all cognates with hālig. The “ġehālgod” means “consecrate” and has both intention and action in it. We intend to be whole and we act to love the world whole. “May your name be hallowed” seems to mean “May I become whole in Love, and may I contribute, even in small ways, to the world being whole in Love.” “May I be healthy, whole.” “May the world be healthy, whole.” Because the Presence is healthy, whole.
The “rice” (said “ree-chay”) that is cognate with reich has been tainted with the Nazi’s Third Reich. Rice and reich are related to the verb reichen “to reach” which includes diverse meanings like “extend, pass, serve, and be sufficient” or as nouns: “extension, passing, service, and sufficiency, even presence.” And when we add in power words like “kingdom” and “Lord” to such a commonly repeated prayer, we bow to the existing systems which Jesus counterculturally resisted, and offered healthy alternatives to. So rather than “your Kingdom come” for “To becume þin rice,” the sentence could mean “your Presence and Love be recognized and reach—be sufficient—even here, even now, in this moment, and everywHere.”
“Give us this day our bread / of your Presence” is written with the line break to emphasize that our physical bread and our spiritual bread are included. Being aware that all F/food is a gift, to be shared. There is also space there for including eucharistic bread, if one wishes it.
Sarah Ruden says about “temptation” or costnunge here: “Temptation: The word peirasmos refers to outward tests of all kinds, including those done on inanimate objects; but interrogation under torture could be a reference in some passages of the Gospels. Torture of noncitizens was routine in evidence gathering in the Roman legal system, and large-scale persecutions of Christians had begun before any of the Gospels’ texts were finalized. ‘Test’ or ‘ordeal’ covers this without suggesting sexual tantalization, in which the Gospels evince almost no interest.”
The “yfel” is usually interpreted in an unhelpful binary way. Most mystics teach it as “intending to harm.” The word evil itself has Faustian hints from the Proto-Indo-European *upelos for “going over and beyond acceptable limits.” This root meaning for “evil” of “exceeding due measure” or “overstepping proper limits,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, seems helpful as a reminder of what being a decent human means.