Our Daily Bread Is Translated from a Word No One Knows

If you read the Lord's Prayer, you'll recognize the line "give us this day our daily bread," which can also be traced back to Latin, where the sentence is "panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Based on what they've established here, the conventional translation is epiousion implies daily. The issue is that epiousion does not appear elsewhere. Not only in the Bible, but everywhere. It only appeared once in other writing, on a 5th century accounting papyrus that has since been lost.

The term epiousion has no etymology. It is not definitively linked to any other words, therefore the translation to "daily" is a bit of a mystery. In reference to the present day, "epi" is translated as a prefix meaning "for," whereas "ousion" was taken to signify "for the being." The problem in translating the term as "daily" is that the word "daily" appears numerous times throughout the sentence. It was translated as hemeran, which was a pretty common term at the time. So picking a totally new, never-before-seen word doesn't make much sense. And, of course, there appears to be no hope of ever getting to the bottom of it.