[HN Gopher] Epiousios
___________________________________________________________________
Epiousios
Author : benbreen
Score : 508 points
Date : 2021-09-13 02:47 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| avnigo wrote:
| I don't understand what the confusion is all about. Isn't it
| pretty clear cut from the etymology of the word what it means?
|
| 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 'semeron', which means
| 'today' -- is that where the confusion is coming from?
|
| What am I missing here?
| cratermoon wrote:
| The article mentions that. Perhaps you'd care to directly
| address the author's objections to that formulation?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yup, the "daily" part is a bit obscure and the Wiki article
| doesn't explain it very well. It turns out that it's inferred,
| by analogy with the fact that 'daily' was very commonly implied
| in similar contexts. It's a natural analogy if you think
| 'epiousios' relates to something like "necessary sustenance".
| joeberon wrote:
| Yeah, it makes sense to me to translate "sustenance bread" as
| "daily bread"
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Have you heard of the Arian heresy [1]? It was THE major
| debate in the early church and it was centered on whether
| Jesus and god were the same substance ( _Homoousia_ ) or
| somehow on a different level (as advocated by Arius). The
| Nicene Creed (325 AD) established _homoousia_ as a necessary
| principle on being Christian. This was very political -- the
| emperor Constantine got personally involved.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Except Jerome coined the latin word "supersubstantial" to
| translate this _and_ considered, but rejected, the
| alternative translation of "for the future" that could
| have completely avoided bringing substance into it at all.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Ah, true. He used _quotidianum_ in Matthew and
| _supersubstantialem_ in Luke. If you ask me, he was
| hedging his bets between church and god.
|
| But, "give us this day our supernatural bread"... just
| doesn't have the same ring to it, you know?
| CodeAndCuffs wrote:
| God provided food to the Jews as they wandered the desert,
| after leaving Egypt. Manna, which was this magical bread-like
| substance, fell from heaven. The translation of Manna is
| basically "What is it?".
|
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| Interesting; it almost sounds like it could be translated as
| "expires each day, refreshed each day" -- i.e. it's
| "ephemeral" bread. Kind of like "daily", but "daily" in the
| sense of "daily news" -- it has a one-day shelf-life.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Interestingly enough, per TFA, the Gospel of the Hebrews (via
| Jerome; in modernity we lack any complete copies of this)
| used the word "ma[h]ar" implying the "for tomorrow"
| translation.
| Y_Y wrote:
| He also gave them billions of quails (Numbers 11:31), how
| does that square with giving just enough?
| elwell wrote:
| Context needed
| Y_Y wrote:
| > 31 Now a wind went out from the Lord and drove quail in
| from the sea. It scattered them up to two cubits deep all
| around the camp, as far as a day's walk in any direction.
|
| > 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.
| elwell wrote:
| "because you have rejected the Lord who is among you, and
| cried to Him: 'Why did we ever leave Egypt?" - Numbers
| 11:20
| Y_Y wrote:
| Has anyone written an alt-history fanfic where the Jews
| choose to stay in Egypt?
| __alexs wrote:
| Didn't the quails cause a plague?
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| The quails were punishment. They complained about not
| having meat to eat even when God was sending them magical
| bread from the skies. So he sent them a plague of quails,
| so to speak.
| entropy_ wrote:
| I'm familiar with this prayer in Arabic, and two variations
| thereof (one used by Catholics and the other by Eastern
| Orthodox churches).
|
| The Catholic one would translate to 'enough for the day' (kff
| ywmn) and the Orthodox to 'essential' or 'necessary' (jwhry).
| Both seem closer to what your wrote than 'daily'
| text70 wrote:
| Could it stem from epiou & sion, roughly translated into the
| drink of zion?
| ggm wrote:
| The range of interpretation, and inferred belief in the meaning,
| as a function of religious belief and action is a classic example
| of how fraught "the word of gXd" is, subject to
| translation/transcription error.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bobthechef wrote:
| > If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the
| corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be
| highly conjectural.
|
| 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.
| Schwolop wrote:
| As an Aussie with Greek friends, I choose to treat this exactly
| as per the colloquial meaning of 'minimum', as in "minimum
| chips". :-)
| christmm wrote:
| could machine learning help?
| geraneum wrote:
| In Persian we have an old word which is even used today called
| "Roozi". It is a combination of "Rooz" + "i". The main part
| translates to "day" and this word refers to what you need to live
| for a day. It's also used in prayers which asks God to provide us
| with what we need to live for the day.
|
| This word instantly reminded me of that but I don't know if they
| are conceptually related or not.
| gremloni wrote:
| Interesting, that's in Hindi too. Probably straight from
| Persian.
| thisistheend123 wrote:
| We can find its reference in 'navroz' as well. I guess, the
| 'roz' comes from 'Rooz'.
| geraneum wrote:
| Exactly, that's it. Also the first part "nav" or "no" means
| "new". So the compound noun means "new day" which marks the
| first day of spring.
| PanosJee wrote:
| New CNCF project?
| kgeist wrote:
| The Old Church Slavonic Bible (translated by 10 century Byzantine
| scholars) uses a word which now means "vital, necessary,
| important" in modern Russian, and is widely used to this day.
| pvg wrote:
| _10 century Byzantine scholars_
|
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| The language itself
|
| > 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).
| kgeist wrote:
| >Cyril (born Constantine, 826-869) and Methodius (815-885)
| were two brothers and Byzantine Christian theologians and
| missionaries.
|
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| The translations were almost certainly not personally done
| by them. That's the purpose of the Preslav School in the
| linked wikipedia thing.
|
| _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!
| panzerklein wrote:
| It's nasushchnyi, right?
| [deleted]
| sramsay wrote:
| The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (who has translated
| the New Testament) has suggested "bread adequate for the day's
| needs:"
|
| "'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 'ton arton emon ton epiousion dos emin semeron'--
| 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...
| bjarneh wrote:
| It seems Greek is Greek, even to the Greeks...
| aduitsis wrote:
| Greek here, I nearly spit my coffee with this :).
| ncmncm wrote:
| The real question, to me, is why the early church elders thought
| that their parishioners would have any idea what the word meant.
|
| My guess is the word was inserted deliberately to mystify. It
| wouldn't be the first time.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://catholicexchange.com/our-supersubstantial-bread
| ncmncm wrote:
| You have provided your own examples. "Development of
| doctrine" seems to refer to events in a time necessarily much
| later than its original composition.
| bobthechef wrote:
| I'm not sure how I provided examples of mystification.
| Rather, whatever the merits of my particular example, I
| think I rather argued _against_ the idea that "epiousios"
| was intended to obscure and to obfuscate rather than to
| clarify by arguing that this would go against the
| development of doctrine which tends toward greater clarify,
| not obscurity. I'm making two points: against mystification
| by virtue of the development of dotrine and for the idea
| that the term may have been coined to express something
| Greek had no word for. Don't confuse the two.
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you are unaware of religions coining official
| mysteries, let me recommend any introductory course in
| comparative religion. Sometimes the word even shows up in
| the name:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries
|
| 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
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Interesting, i ve been saying that prayer as a kid and i always
| thought that the word meant something like "vital, substantive",
| but that's based on my modern interpretation of the word
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Reminds me of how Western academics had an easier time
| deciphering Mayan script when they actually talked to the Mayans
| that survived colonization
| canadaduane wrote:
| I wonder if it has a corollary in the Buddhist concept of
| "impermanence." Ephemeral, momentary, "in the now". Give us this
| day our impermanent bread.
| Natsu wrote:
| If anything, it should have literally the opposite meaning.
| Part of the idea of what it represents in the Eucharist is that
| it endures when the world passes away.
| Christopgr wrote:
| In modern Greek it's not a word we use a lot, but we do have a
| phrase where it's used exclusively and that is:
|
| "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...
| WriterGuy2021 wrote:
| Bread has a special place in Christian symbolism because of the
| Eucharist. The bread of the Eucharist is called "the body of
| Christ." The ritual associates material nourishment and
| spiritual nourishment. Epiousios must be related to this
| idea...that our days are to be used to fuel our spiritual life.
| I don't think the word is used in the same secular sense as
| your case.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I agree.
|
| 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.
| gbh444g wrote:
| I'm not a linguist and I don't even know any greek (other
| than the alphabet I've memorized once), but if "epi" means
| "above" and "ousia" means "essense", then the meaning of
| "epiousios" trivially follows.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousia
| cratermoon wrote:
| The article addresses that, and suggests the problem is
| that in most contexts 'epi' loses the i in compound form,
| e.g. eponym.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| If you take the Bible at face value, then Jesus taught the
| Lord's Prayer before he gave the last supper (and long before
| it was ritualised later), so it doesn't quite follow.
| WriterGuy2021 wrote:
| Presumably, all that Jesus does is a reinforcement of the
| self-same Logos. There's a lot of repetition of the same
| principles across different contexts.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Why not? He didn't have to be understood at the time the
| prayer was taught. That is, it would become understood only
| later. The prayer acquires more depth in retrospect. The
| apostles didn't understand many things Jesus had told them
| until later.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _If you take the Bible at face value, then Jesus taught
| the Lord 's Prayer before he gave the last supper (and long
| before it was ritualised later), so it doesn't quite
| follow._
|
| Except that in the Old Testament there was manna:
|
| > _Manna (Hebrew: man man, Greek: manna; Arabic: almanuW;
| 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:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P45BHDRA7pU
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Fair enough, good point.
| BeniBoy wrote:
| For anyone wondering if Manna was related to the Mana
| found in a lot of fantasy game (most notably Magic! The
| Gathering), it is not, I just looked it up.
|
| Mana is a Melanesian word for some sort of spiritual life
| force!
| cpfohl wrote:
| Manna is literally Hebrew for "What is it?" It's
| basically the equivalent of calling it "Whatsit" bread,
| which might be a better translation anyway.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Right, it can't just be about the last supper. But we do
| know that Jesus was teaching about participation in a non-
| material world; then, perhaps, the prayer was to remind
| that bread is not just for our ousian body but for our
| epiousian soul.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The article points out that this word is effectively a hapax
| legomenon in Ancient Greek. It _only_ shows up in this NT
| context, and not elsewhere. We can speculate about what it
| means from the surrounding text-- it appears to modify
| "bread"; its morphology-- it decomposes nicely into "over" +
| "being, essence"; and its parallels in other sources, but we'll
| never be sure what it means. It might just as well be a prayer
| for being sustained in _abundance_ , and this might even be
| expected since people in the time of Jesus thought that the end
| times were at hand, and with those the "world to come" where
| the righteous would be rewarded. But even that is speculation.
| defaulty wrote:
| I have heard this phrase (daily bread) compared to the story
| of God providing manna (something flaky, often compared to
| flour & bread) for food in Exodus 16. In that story, the
| Israelites were instructed to only collect the manna for each
| day. If they tried to keep some for the second day, it would
| become rotten. This meant they were reliant on God's
| provision each day.
|
| 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
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we took that from the New Testament though.
|
| 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... "eisenegkeis"? wut)
|
| Besides, when I was a kid I thought the prayer is talking about
| a guy called Amin who's cunning ("o poneros Amen"). I just
| learned the words by heart, I didn't now what they meant.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| _I 'm pretty sure we took that from the New Testament
| though._ Other way round I would expect.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Sorry, did I make a mistake? Isn't the Lord's Prayer in the
| New Testament?
| Zancarius wrote:
| No, you didn't make a mistake. The Lord's Prayer is
| Jesus' answer to the question "how do we pray?"
|
| 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!
| orestarod wrote:
| He probably means that the word itself would not be used in
| that phrase, had it not be used in the testament first. It
| is used in that everyday phrase merely copying (and
| referring to) the New Testament, without the speakers
| necessarily having full awareness of its true meaning.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Apologies for sidetracking from the main subject of the
| thread but are you referring to me as "he"? If so, can I
| ask why?
| marton78 wrote:
| Presumably they didn't read your user name...
| orestarod wrote:
| I am not a native English speaker. I am a Greek speaker,
| and there is no equivalent to the gender-neutral "they",
| you have to choose "he" or "she" and "he" is the most
| usual choice. So, here I let my native-tongued thinking
| interfere with the ideal English interpretation of what I
| had to say. And, I did not read your username :)
| dustintrex wrote:
| But is that a reference to the Bible? "To earn (my/your) daily
| bread" is a set phrase in English and many other European
| languages (French _pain quotidien_ etc) as well.
| [deleted]
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Yes, an enormous amount of western culture is derived from or
| influenced by Christianity and the Bible, due to the
| extremely long timeframe that it was integral to the culture
| (of Europe and the Middle East and Ethiopia). The other
| languages took the phrase from the Bible and translated it.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Definitely, and that's not surprising - many set phrases have
| their etymology in the Bible, due to its historical role not
| only in religion but also in how language and literacy was
| being taught over the last two millenia; and the phenomenon
| of set phrases being shared among many European languages
| (especially those which are not directly related, e.g.
| romance and germanic and slavic) is very common specifically
| for biblical expressions.
| Christopgr wrote:
| Unfortunately, I am not versed in linguistics, but I would
| suppose so, because its etymology [1] based on the words
| where it's derived from would mean "I am on something" in a
| literal or more metaphorical sense (could also be used as
| "I'm focused on something") and it's also widely used almost
| everyday in the "everyday's bread" way in our most common
| prayer (we used to sing that every morning at school) while
| also never being used in any other context except for my
| first post's phrase.
|
| [1] https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%94%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%B
| 9%C...
| imarg wrote:
| This prayer or rather the use of epiousios in this prayer
| and its appearance only in this prayer and how it should be
| translated is exactly the topic of this discussion.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Hmm, Europe was dominated by Christianity and the Roman
| Catholic Church for centuries. I can't imagine why a
| memorable turn of a phrase attributed to the most important
| figure in the most important text of that religion would ever
| become a set phrase in those languages but not in the
| languages of countries where Christianity was never dominant.
| /s
|
| 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.
| imarg wrote:
| As a Greek myself I never really thought much about this word.
| Yes, it is not common but I thought I understood this. After
| reading the linked article I am not so sure anymore and I am not
| really sure how I would translate it.
|
| 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...
| jordigh wrote:
| I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient
| Greek. For example, beta has changed pronunciation, becoming
| something like English v instead of English b like it was
| originally, but most modern Greeks will vehemently deny that
| the pronunciation has changed.
|
| 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.
| cgio wrote:
| I will disagree. I cannot see how a native speaker can be
| _the worst_ at understanding their own language. Your own
| language is the one you understand best, and even though that
| is not directly the opposite statement, for your statement to
| be correct it would mean that statistically native speakers
| are of inferior understanding compared to others. When you
| take that to apply for all languages you would end up with a
| paradox. You give an example based on pronunciation, which
| does change for all languages, so I would not take knowledge
| of history of pronunciation to have anything to do with the
| instinctive understanding of concepts in your mother tongue.
| Now on the second part, I.e. the ability to explain, I would
| think it's related to understanding, but it is more nuanced
| as it also has to do with knowledge of the language in which
| the explanation is articulated.
|
| ---edit to add comment on pronunciation of b
|
| 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 mp 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 empneo.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> 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 mp 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 empneo.
|
| It's possible that "mp" was not pronounced "b" as today, in
| ancient times, but as "mp". For example, I think Cypriot
| Greeks tend to pronounce another consontant dipthong, "nt"
| as "nt" rather than "d".
| kubami wrote:
| I think what the OP means is that on average native
| speakers understand the language intuitively, while most of
| the non-natives were taught the rules and structure of the
| language directly. Being a non-native english speaker I
| experienced this often. I have never gotten a useful answer
| for a question about english from English people. It
| usually was "oh, I just feel which word is right"...
| cgio wrote:
| That's why I separated the treatment of understanding and
| explaining. I would still argue that a native English
| speaker has better skills to explain an English word in
| English - on average.
| harperlee wrote:
| I find the same. My wife is from another country and we
| find she has more command of my mother language's rules
| and whys and viceversa.
|
| 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.
| imarg wrote:
| But this isn't ancient Greek.
|
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| To build a bit further on this. The new testament is
| written in Koine Greek (Common Greek)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek . A lot of the
| phonological changes from attic to modern have already
| happened by the time these text were written.
|
| 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.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| > For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly
| legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.
|
| 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 naive 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 :)
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| In my own limited experience in school, I found texts
| from the first century AD much easier to comprehend than
| say the odyssey, or even classical texts.
|
| 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. ;)
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I only really know some classical texts and, for Koine,
| just the NT, but the structure of the NT is so much more
| straightforward to understand - it's basically this
| happened, then that happened, etc etc and there is none
| of the "decoding" that you often have to do with the
| classical stuff. But I am fascinated by how much of this
| is intrinsic to the language and how much is down to
| artifice on the part of the classical writers. In other
| words, the audience for the NT is ordinary folks whose
| first language in many (most?) cases is not even Greek,
| so the message _has_ to be written as plainly as possible
| (and actually the prose is kind of pedestrian as a result
| IMO). But what 's the situation with classical authors?
| Are they really reflecting the speech of the time or are
| they using a more complex and artificial form of language
| divorced from daily speech? I don't know - I think there
| must be an element of it, but otoh someone like
| Aristophanes is trying to make audiences laugh so the
| language has to be relatable and idiomatic you would
| think.
| qalmakka wrote:
| This, exactly. The Greek alphabet is much older than
| Koine Greek, of almost 500 years. While spoken language
| tends to change fast, written language tends to stick and
| doesn't easily change, for obvious reasons (just look at
| English or Tibetan). People won't change how they write
| some word just because they pronounce it differently from
| the past, because that would make the text much harder to
| read.
|
| Also, /b/, /b/ 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/,
| /b/ and /v/ are all basically the same thing for a
| Spanish speaker.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Indeed Koine Greek is not ancient Greek, and while also
| being different from modern Greek, it's also different. The
| main difference being that Koine stems from the attic
| dialect and modern Greek from the dimotic dialect. To make
| matters even more complicated, the transition to make
| dimotic official happened in 1979 and thus there is still a
| living generation accustomed to read and write
| Koine/kathareuousa Greek.
|
| 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.
| afroisalreadyin wrote:
| Isn't this a tad exaggerated, jumping from the change in the
| pronunciation of one letter, to native speakers being the
| _worst_? I think you need considerably more proof than that.
| tbrake wrote:
| > I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient
| Greek
|
| 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?
| nspattak wrote:
| As a Greek myself I can confirm that most of us know almost
| nothing about ancient Greek and a lot of us think that they
| do because they have the mistaken impression that the two
| languages slightly differ.
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| I'm sure you didn't intend this as an insult but in the
| context of the comment you were responding to, it could have
| been expressed more kindly.
|
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| antegamisou wrote:
| Know-it-all armchair Internet experts are always the worst at
| understanding and explaining anything, especially when they
| attempt so with scarce evidence.
| marton78 wrote:
| > 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).
|
| This might not be translatable to English in one word, but it
| can be to Swedish: lagom.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I always took it to mean "essential" (as in "ousiastikos"). But
| then I read that wikipedia article and now I'm as confused as
| you :)
| raincom wrote:
| There is a thesis called "Indeterminacy of Translation" by the
| late philosopher W.V.O Quine. You don't need to worry about
| "fully translating" any word from one natural language to
| another language.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Quine, as in...?
|
| Aha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
|
| So, yes -- though named not by but for him, by Douglas
| Hofstadter in _G, E, B._
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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]._
|
| 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.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Absolutely fascinating. But after reading the entire article, I
| still don't have a clear understanding of what "supersubstantial"
| means.
| akomtu wrote:
| It must be "soul food". There's material world "below" and
| there's world of ideas "above". Matter has essence, so it's
| substantial; and ideas must be "supersubstancial". That "lord's
| prayer" tells something along this line: "oh, the god who lives
| above, your name is sacred, your material world reflects your
| ideas above, give us soul food, save us from duality, ..." (my
| own interpretation, sounds a bit egyptian).
| fourtrees wrote:
| That's kind of the point. No one does or has for at least 1700
| years. "Daily" or "Enough for tomorrow/the time after" seems to
| lead the pack due to its' appearance in an Egyptian shopping
| list and similar Biblical words.
| contravariant wrote:
| It's also somewhat weird to have both the prefixes super- and
| sub- in the same word.
| lgeorget wrote:
| In the Catholic rite, the bread _becomes_ the body of the
| Christ during Eucharist, a process known as
| _transubstantiation_ (meanwhile in protestant liturgy, it
| _contains_ the body of the Christ, a process known as
| _consubstantiation_). In any case, the bread is more than just
| bread, it's the symbol of the sacrifice made by the Christ to
| save Humanity and renew the alliance made with God. I think
| (I'm not a doctor of canon law by the way) that's what it
| means: the bread beyond its substance.
| [deleted]
| thyrsus wrote:
| The Catholic theological tradition holds that the "form"
| remains bread, but the "substance" becomes God. It is
| explicitly not a symbol, it _is_ God. Many of the laity don
| 't understand this or, even if they do, do not think it a
| necessary article of faith.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| This reminds me of a phrase I've heard many times, but I
| don't know the origin. "Protestants believe Eucharist is
| symbolic. Catholics believe the Eucharist is real. Orthodox
| Christians believe the Eucharist is real because it's
| symbolic."
|
| 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.
| iammisc wrote:
| Catholics do not believe you can physically measure the
| change to the eucharist. The aristotelian understanding
| and explanation of transubstantiation is not a
| requirement of the catholic religion as emphasized by the
| unity of the eastern catholic churches who do hold on to
| the dogma that the bread and wine are indeed the body and
| blood of Christ but teach nothing as to how that takes
| place.
| christophilus wrote:
| > The Catholics have developed the idea that
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| They understand it is one of those things that matters only
| to theologians, and even then only in conflicts with other
| theologians.
| anm89 wrote:
| I take it to be a very literal take on the term "substance".
| something like "superior to things of substance" ie spiritual
| or holy.
| foo_foo_can_do wrote:
| From it article it seems to be a new coinage in latin at the
| time of the translation. It makes sense only in the logic of
| theology so don't think too rationally about it. some clues
| from the article:
|
| > 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
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Thank you, this makes sense!
| dmix wrote:
| Off topic but I just noticed there are no spaces between words in
| the old Greek papyrus:
|
| 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.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Harder certainly, but fluency in the language obviously helps,
| and inflectional endings and - to a lesser extent - common
| prefixes will certainly help to delineate word boundaries. And
| the sort of reading that we are used to today - taking in a
| page of text via a quick scan - was afaik unknown then, where
| the mode was to read aloud, at a correspondingly slower pace
| (although I find this unconvincing for very literate
| individuals)
| bregma wrote:
| Spaces? The scripts used for the oldest versions of biblical
| writings didn't have vowels either. It's no wonder there have
| been bloody generation wars fought over the meaning of brief
| passages of vague religious tracts. It seems all we need to do
| is airdrop some vowels and punctuation over some regions and
| we'll finally have world peace.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I take it that's a reference to the classic Onion report:
| https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/clinton-
| deploys-v...
| stevula wrote:
| That's easy compared to boustrophedon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| ITCANBESLOWBUTYOUCANSTILLREADIT.
|
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| So there aren't too many "expertsexchange" type issues in
| Greek?
| piaste wrote:
| The potential for confusion arising from a lack of punctuation
| does appear in the tradition of classical languages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_redibis_nunquam_per_bella...
| simonh wrote:
| And in modern English, the use or absence of the Oxford Comma
| can critically affect meaning.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-
| maine.htm...
| thatBilly wrote:
| One of the latest History of English Podcast episodes explains
| the origins of punctuation and spacing between words.
| https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2021/07/29/episode-150-a...
| nemoniac wrote:
| It appears to have been Irish monks in the 7th and 8th century
| who introduced spaces between words in religious texts
|
| https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=683
| fourtrees wrote:
| Ithinkyouwouldgetusedtoitprettyquickly. Plus, the suffixes on
| most words of the major languages of the time would have helped
| delineate words. But I do agree that it could have acted as a
| small impediment in learning to read.
| srcreigh wrote:
| I wonder if this is part of why there is a special sigma for
| use at the end of words.
|
| s is normal sigma and s is for the endings of words.
| fourtrees wrote:
| Oh that's a really neat theory! So many regularly declined
| nouns and related word classes end in the sigma. It
| certainly makes sense considering the frequency of -s
| ending words. The rough breathing mark seems like it could
| have played a similar role.
|
| (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.)
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I wouldn't think so, I am under the impression lowercase
| case and thus the two different characters for sigma came
| after spacing out words.
| fourtrees wrote:
| I _think_ the word-final sigma has been found in
| manuscripts dating to the 1st century BCE, but I think
| its use was only in cursive and not universal. So, I
| think you 're basically right; certainly majuscule
| scripta continua documents like the Codex Sinaiticus or
| Vaticanus wouldn't have used it.
| gmoot wrote:
| Yeah, no punctuation at all and not even lower case letters!
|
| Modern texts have all these things inserted by editors, it does
| indeed sound much harder to have to learn without these extra
| aids.
| 5040 wrote:
| Modern Japanese is interesting here. It also doesn't make use
| of spaces, capitalization, or much of punctuation for that
| matter.
| [deleted]
| raptorraver wrote:
| At least st. Cyprian (died 258) [1] understands epiousious
| meaning the holy communion. (Source: my friend who has studied
| theology focusing to early church fathers)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian
| m000 wrote:
| Why try to find a super-deep meaning in something that is
| straightforward and makes perfect sense in its literal
| interpretation? Even if it is an hapax legomenon.
|
| It's ironic that Occam was a theologian, and yet very few of his
| colleague have heard of Occam's razor.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| That's one of the things I like about HN :-) The variety and
| range of different subjects being posted. I'm casually reading
| why we can't go faster than light, contemplating about Roko's
| Basilisk or how to use a Raspberry for a strange project, and
| here comes along the definition of a Greek word (with a
| surprising number of comments and points).
| anm89 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely amateur
| history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely
| declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated
| from.
|
| 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.
| antillean wrote:
| If you happen to live in London or ever go there, you can see
| one of the oldest surviving New Testament Greek manuscripts.
| It's called Codex Sinaiticus
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus), dates from
| the 4th century AD, and is always on free public display at the
| British Library in London.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I 'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely
| amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had
| completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this
| papyrus originated from. why would a text even exist at all on
| the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek._
|
| 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).
| ncmncm wrote:
| Indeed, there is no evidence there was ever any New Testament
| text in Aramaic. Nothing in the Greek text hints at any sort
| of translation difficulty going from a Semitic to an Indo-
| European language.
|
| 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.
| bhaak wrote:
| [citation needed] who those serious historians are supposed
| to be.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Please allow me to direct you to an active, ongoing
| history of refereed journals, academic chairs, and
| professional study which you may even see discussed at
| great length on Youtube, such as is cited in a sibling
| reply.
| gwd wrote:
| > Again, there is no evidence of any kind to settle the
| matter. ...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:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8
| ncmncm wrote:
| That its authors were familiar with geographical
| Palestine is evident, but that does not bear on events or
| existence of named individuals. And, of course, any of
| them could have existed without the events reported
| occcurring, just as we acknowledge GW without conceding
| his cherry tree. It all comes down to faith, the which
| historians are obliged to work without.
| gwd wrote:
| > ...but that does not bear on events or existence of
| named individuals.
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It is a fact that _anybody_ could live somewhere, _for
| example Palestine_ , for a year or a decade, and then _at
| any later time_ encounter a reason to make up stories
| about events set there. That is the origin story of
| probably tens of thousands of novels, good and bad. I
| could recommend a few.
|
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my
| impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce
| when they are claiming this papyrus originated from._
|
| 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...
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I wanted to add that Koine Greek was also the official
| language used in synagogues at the time, and that the
| Septuagint was the official version of the scriptures used in
| synagogues at the time of Christ. The scriptures could be
| read in Aramaic, but if they were read in Aramaic, it was
| also required that they be read in Greek afterwards.
| gmoot wrote:
| The common language was Greek, even though the Romans were in
| charge.
|
| Greek spread through the conquests of Alexander the Great, and
| Latin never supplanted it.
| fourtrees wrote:
| Yup, the entire eastern half of the Roman Empire used Greek
| as a lingua franca.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| rather, as an actual and official first Lingua
| Bayart wrote:
| Greek was the literate language of the Eastern Mediterranean
| during Roman times. Roman domination couldn't undo the existing
| network effects that preexisted there, all the more so that you
| couldn't be considered to have an education in Rome if you
| didn't speak Greek. Latin was used but it was essentially
| restricted to legal and administrative tasks.
| bobthechef wrote:
| I would also add that Greek was more philosophically
| sophisticated. The Greeks had a rich philosophical tradition
| and the resulting terminology was beyond what was available
| in other languages.
|
| Even today, following centuries of scholasticism, the Latin
| translations aren't always adequate enough for the task. Take
| "logos" and "verbum", for example.
| Bayart wrote:
| You can just use Greek words in Latin ! They certainly did
| often enough that it doesn't carry any prejudice. The
| declension system is very similar and Latin is by itself
| highly flexible, I wouldn't go as far as calling Greek
| particularly more sophisticated (and I'm usually very wary
| of assigning inherent qualities to languages). But it does
| carry along a cultural environment that's more focused on
| philosophy. You could say the same of Latin and law.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > You can just use Greek words in Latin !
|
| 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, slowo,
| Slovo, parole, Verbo, Dao . You need a sophisticated
| philosophical culture to support a word like "logos".
| Otherwise, there's nothing in your language to translate
| into.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Like Latin, Greek was a language whose use extended far past
| the decline of its birthplace. We do not have extensive
| contemporary sources for the Gospels. All we have are copies
| produced much later. This word is found in authoritative
| sources for the text of the new testament, which is written in
| Koine Greek.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| The entire New Testament was originally written in Greek during
| the late 00's/early 100's. The papyrus mentioned in the article
| is a copy of Luke's gospel dated to about 200 AD, but the
| original manuscript was written closer to 100 AD [0]. We have
| fragments of and references to the book of Luke from earlier
| than 200, but the copy from 200 is the first fragment
| containing the Lord's Prayer and that unknown adjective.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Luke
| prometheus76 wrote:
| The Septuagint (the Old Testament) was also in Greek, and
| translated around 200 BC, and was the official scriptures
| read in synagogues at the time. If they read scriptures in
| another local language in the synagogue, they were also
| required to read it from the Septuagint in Greek afterwards
| because that was the official language for scriptures in the
| synagogues. Only after Romans started persecuting the
| Christians did Jews start separating themselves and trying to
| put together a separate canon and translating it back into
| Hebrew, which wasn't accomplished until the 1400s.
| _0ffh wrote:
| FWIW I side with the "perpetual" (or one of various approximate
| synonyms) faction that cites the Syriac translation from Aramic.
| I think that, firstly, it makes sense to see "always-being" as a
| kind of superlative of mere "being". And secondly, it seems
| plausible that one might arrive from "always-being" via "being-
| at-all-days" or "being-everyday" to the common "daily"
| translation.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Why is this of interest to so many people on Hacker News? I'm
| fascinated by that.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Lots of history/etymology nerds?
| throwaway20371 wrote:
| I'm a simple man. I see article says "We don't know what this
| ancient word means", I upvote.
| 5040 wrote:
| This is my favorite example of this sort of thing (Source:
| Appendix II - lukabantos: when the wolf comes?' in Elisabeth
| Irwin's 'Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of
| Exhortation)
|
| _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 toud ' autou lukabantos: lukabas
| 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 lukabas are alternatively
| proposed as pre-Greek--quite possibly related to the prehellenic
| name of the Attic mountain lukabettos--or even Semitic. The first
| half of the word has been alternatively derived from 'light' or
| 'wolf', and the second from baino ('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, lukos, 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 (osper kai epi tou khronou,
| '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'._
| CDokolas wrote:
| This is an interesting source of info:
| https://lsj.gr/wiki/%E1%BC%90%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%83%...
| saketmehta wrote:
| Hear me out... could this be a typo?
| Thorrez wrote:
| Then the question would be, a typo for what? Given that
| scholars have been studying this word for 1600 and coming up
| with various theories, if a typo was a plausible theory, they
| would have already thought of that.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would think so (that is to say a misspelling, not a typo as
| it wasn't typed), but on the other hand misspelling generally
| look like another word that fits in the context, but nobody
| seems to be suggesting a better word that looks like epiousios
| to put in its place.
| WriterGuy2021 wrote:
| The function of this adjective seems to be the augmentation of
| "bread" so that it is interpreted as food to feed the spiritual
| mission of Christians. The day is to be food for their stated
| higher spiritual purpose. Clearly, this word means something like
| "higher-purpose" or something like that.
|
| 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.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Well put. I see it too. Indeed it is _epiousios_ to see the
| spiritual essence "over nature" (supra-natural / super-
| natural). The inner, spiritual world that we can witness in our
| witnessing of nature. Martin-Lof comes to mind:
| https://github.com/michaelt/martin-lof/blob/master/pdfs/A-pa...
| (It's funny and beautiful that we're now building all the most
| interesting programming languages on top of Martin-Lof's
| intuitionistic type theory. - At least in my opinion.)
|
| 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...
| bobthechef wrote:
| If "epi" is above and "ousia" is essence, then this leads me to
| think: what is above essence? A Thomistic reading would suggest
| that the only remaining principle above essence is existence. So
| something like bread of existence/bring? This does sound like
| "bread of life". Some may argue that the Greeks had no "concept"
| of existence qua existence, but they also didn't have this word
| either, hence the neologism. And it would not be a strong
| objection: the Thomistic understanding of transsubstantiation
| also came later, but is the accepted view of the Catholic Church.
| chippy wrote:
| something that's more than just being essential for the body?
| strenholme wrote:
| I translate this as "divine" when I recite the Lord's prayer:
|
| "Give us this day, our _divine_ bread"
|
| As per the linked article, that's as reasonable of a translation
| as anything else.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Very much so:
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...
| srcreigh wrote:
| Maybe it's not so difficult to translate. Fr Lawrence Farley [1]
| notes that 1) the word was used in other historical writings than
| the Bible and 2) that the closely related word `epiouse' is used
| in Acts 16:11 which reads "We set sail from Troas and took a
| straight course to Samothrace, the next day, to Neapolis."
|
| 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...
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Generally, wouldn't a religious organization be a biased
| source? They use religious texts to derive power, establish a
| narrative, and influence people's actions.
| bobthechef wrote:
| No. This text belongs to a religious tradition. Texts are not
| free-floating bits of meaning somehow unrelated to the
| traditions in which they were written. So reading text in
| light of tradition is arguably _the best_ way to interpret
| text.
| gmoot wrote:
| I reject this blanket characterization of religious
| organizations, but anyway the Eastern / Greek Orthodox Church
| is interesting here because it descends directly from the
| original Greek speaking Christians in the Eastern Roman
| empire when the Bible was written.
|
| It's like asking a Jew about translating the Torah - it's
| about historical continuity and subject matter expertise.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| _like asking a Jew about translating the Torah_
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanhedrin
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Good thing atheists don't have any biases.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| You are putting words in my mouth. I specifically called
| out religious organizations, not religious individuals.
|
| I would have just as much doubt in the analysis of an
| atheistic organization.
|
| Secular =/= atheistic.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Are you aware that the Orthodox church doesn't have a
| single leader? It is several organizations which co-exist
| as one united body.
|
| (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.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| You have an interesting point. However, if a biased, power-
| hungry organization says that the temperature outside at a
| certain time & location is 27deg C and that really is the
| temperature there, the bias and ambition are less relevant.
| throw0101a wrote:
| The Gospels were written in the first century AD, when the
| (Catholic) Church was not in any way a powerful organization.
| Christianity didn't because the official religion until many
| centuries later:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
|
| And just because someone is biased, does not make them wrong:
|
| * https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
|
| * https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
| CameronNemo wrote:
| This has nothing to do with anything I said.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Indeed. Its a clear case of trusting the cat to keep the
| cream. But most poeple dont seem to notice, which is
| indicative for how strong the illusions the churches have
| created are.
| aiilns wrote:
| In this case no. Even if we accept your argument - which
| really can only be partly true - I don't understand how the
| interpretation of epiousios could change.
|
| 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.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I began my comment with the word "generally" for a reason.
| The person I replied to gave broad advice to consult the
| Eastern Orthodox church for religious interpretation. I was
| responding to that broad recommendation, not this specific
| case.
| [deleted]
| imarg wrote:
| The wikipedia article mentions your 1st point (that it was used
| elsewhere) but then continues to say that when the original
| text was reexamined it was found that it was a different word.
|
| >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.)
| fourtrees wrote:
| Now that's interesting. I hadn't heard that the shopping list
| reference had been called into question. That deepens the
| mystery quite a bit.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Given the literal translation:
|
| > 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?
| riofoxx wrote:
| T.o a.s.s.i.s.t y.o.u i.n t.r.a.d.e.s f.o.r b.e.t.t.e.r
| i.m.p.r.o.v.e.m.e.n.t on c.r.y.p.t.o.c.u.r.r.e.n.c.y
| W.h.a.t.s.A.p.p (+13052395906)
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