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| Life magazine photograph of conscientious objectors during starvation experiment. July 30, 1945. Volume 19, Number 5, p. 43. Credit: Wallace Kirkland/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. |
It is painfully clear that hunger is on the rise.
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about this hunger and what it says about who we are as a country at this point in time. I’ve also been thinking about how the Gospels are, in many ways, stories for and about hungry people. They are replete with the dreams of a persistently hungry people, full of images of banquets, the miraculous feeding of 5,000 from just a few loaves and fishes, and Jesus’ prayer for ‘our daily bread.’ Except that ‘daily’ isn’t exactly what Jesus originally said.
There is a linguistic mystery embedded in the Gospels’ version of the Lord’s Prayer. The difficulty occurs in the seemingly untranslatable Greek word ‘epiousios’, a word that doesn’t appear to occur anywhere else in Greek literature outside the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is likely a Greek neologism for a word that was first uttered by Jesus in Aramaic. Like a copy of a copy, the English ‘daily’ is a faulty translation of a Greek word that was trying to approximate a word or phrase that may itself have been new or unusual in Aramaic.
So what would a correct rendering of ‘epiousios’ line be? While this is still being debated among linguists and biblical scholars, two plausible renderings of this phrase are “Give us this day enough bread for both today and tomorrow” and something along the lines of “Give us tomorrow’s bread, today.”[3]
Since I am neither a linguist nor a biblical scholar, I will avoid going down the well-worn path of parsing out whether these two translations are exactly right. I am, however, interested in grasping the deeper meaning of these two interpretations, and I believe this requires thinking about hunger.
This blog post is a meditation, if you will, wherein I seek to integrate these more accurate, though initially somewhat awkward and unfamiliar, phrasings. Stated differently, I want to move a rendering such as “Give us this day enough bread for today and tomorrow” from the realm of an interesting factoid to being something that I know and feel deeply. To arrive at this synthesis, I am going to juxtapose socioeconomic information from biblical scholars and early church historians and a study on semi-starvation. Actual scholars may wince at the liberties I take here...which is why I’d never call this scholarship. Instead this is a form of spiritual wrestling, an attempt to understand the deeper significance of this still unfamiliar phrase, and to integrate it into my own outlook.
----
The meaning and impact of words has a great deal to do with the context they are said in. I’ve heard the Lord’s prayer said at dinner tables where, like me, it seemed that no one ever had to worry about where their next meal is coming from in their lives. I’ve also had the opportunity to say those same words in spaces such as temporary homeless shelters and at a house for undocumented refugees where people had most certainly experienced intermittent periods of real hunger. The very same words -- and particularly this petition for bread -- landed differently depending on the stomachs of the people in the room. How could they not?
Therefore, when trying to grasp what these newer translations actually mean, I believe it’s important to begin with the stomachs of its first speakers and hearers. Were their stomachs full or were they empty? Were most getting enough to eat or were most constantly worried about their next meal? Reflecting on these questions has added a new dimension to this petition for bread, and even to the Lord’s Prayer itself.
There is significant evidence that Jesus, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many in the first Christian assemblies would have been constantly teetering at the edge of subsistence, persistent hunger, and even semi-starvation. It is likely that many who would have first heard the Lord’s Prayer would have personally experienced a prolonged period of hunger in their lives, may have lived through a period of food shortages, and that they may have held memories of others in their communities either succumbing to starvation or nearly doing so. Taking into account the horrifying fact of empty stomachs, how would they have heard Jesus’ prayer for ‘enough bread for both today and tomorrow’ or for ‘tomorrow’s bread, today’?
One of the most striking aspects of the Gospels is the way in which the poor are front and center in the stories. They are rare examples in Greek literature in which it is “the poor, the ill-educated, and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”[4] It is worthwhile, then, to try to wrap our minds around what it was like to be poor in first century Roman Palestine. In what follows, I will rely heavily on the work of scholars Helen Rhee and Mary Beard.
In her book Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, Helen Rhee describes the Roman Empire as primarily an agrarian subsistence economy, wherein the majority of production was for self-sufficiency and therefore remained outside the money economy. The Roman socioeconomic hierarchy was one of stark inequality with an imperial & aristocratic elite (1-3%), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7-15%), and “the poor” who were either stable near subsistence (22-27%), at subsistence (30-40%), or below subsistence and therefore lacking necessary food, shelter, and clothing (25-28%).[5] In this agrarian subsistence economy, 75-90% of the Roman world lived close to subsistence level -- near, at, or below -- and were struggling for survival and sustenance on a daily basis.[6] As such, they were particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, including droughts resulting in periodic food shortages and diseases.
Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome helps to fill in the picture of what these percentages mean. The fact that ancient Rome was an agrarian subsistence economy, for instance, means that 50 million people across the Roman Empire were peasant farmers -- both smallholders and tenants alike -- “struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves in some years, with a small surplus to sell in others.”[7] There were periods of extreme hardship such as the late 60s BCE when evidence from Roman coins suggest that peasant farmers experienced “if not starvation then persistent hunger.”[8]
As early Christianity’s spread was largely an urban phenomenon, it is especially important to take in her descriptions of the extreme urban poverty that plagued Roman cities. She notes the existence of Roman laws prohibiting people camping in the tombs of the aristocracy, the descriptions of the poor creating lean-tos against walls and how those were cleared periodically. In describing why so few indications remain that tell us anything about the lives of the poor, Beard writes about how literally fragile their existence was. “The outskirts of many Roman towns may have not been far different from those of modern ‘Third World’ cities, covered in squatter settlements or shanty towns populated by the nearly starving and those who begged as much as worked for their living.”[9] Shanty towns do not leave behind permanent structures to study millennia later, and extreme hunger, she notes, typically resolved itself by the starving dying without leaving a trace behind.
The Gospels were stories about the poor, shared in poor communities, whose recurring negative view of the rich speaks to a vastly unequal society. Helen Rhee describes Jesus and his disciples (Matt 8:20), the Jerusalem Church (Romans 15:26; Gal 2:10), Pauline communities (1 Cor: 26-27; 2 Cor 8:1) as belonging to the “lower socioeconomic stratum and ‘the poor’ in varying degrees; and they regularly described experiencing oppression and maltreatment by the rich and powerful in one way or another (cf. Luke 12:11–12; Acts 4:1–3; 8:1–3; 12:1–4; 2 Cor. 11:23–27; Heb. 10:32–34).”[10]
More to the point, it is likely that Jesus himself, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many in the first Christian assemblies would have been constantly struggling with having enough to eat. Many in the first Christian communities would have had a direct experience of a period of prolonged hunger in their lives, and I believe it’s fair to say that nearly all would have carried anxiety and fear of hunger as a result of sudden food shortages caused by natural disasters.
Of course, it is one thing to say that many in the first Christian assemblies would have had a direct experience of prolonged hunger in their lives, and it is another to comprehend what that actually means. What does a period of prolonged hunger do to a person physiologically? How does it reshape a person’s psyche and worldview? What do people need in order to recover from semi-starvation and what are their memories of this experience? It is worth spending time exploring these questions to understand how Jesus’ petition for bread might have been heard among the first followers of Jesus.
In the 1940s, a groundbreaking -- and profoundly moving -- study now called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment examined the physiological and psychological effects of semi-starvation. Led by Ancel Keys, it aimed to provide insights on how to feed and rehabilitate the emaciated civilians of previously German-occupied Europe.[11]
During World War II, 36 male conscientious objectors, primarily from Peace Churches, volunteered to participate in this semi-starvation study. Over the course of the study, participants lost approximately 2.5 lbs per week until most had lost fully 25% of their original body weight. In that we’re exploring Jesus’ petition for bread, it is moving to read that reductions and additions in calories were made using slices of bread. Very quickly, participants developed “sunken faces and bellies, protruding ribs, and edema-swollen legs, ankles, and faces” and other problems such as anemia, neurological deficits, and skin changes became apparent.[12]
Food became an obsession and the center of their lives. Interviewed in their eighties for the journal article They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, study participant Richard Willoughby recalled how ‘eating became highly ritualized’ and Harold Blickenstaff described how “food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life.”
One finding from the 3-month rehabilitation period proved especially important in the development of the postwar relief plan, and also has special resonance in light of the usage of ‘epiousios’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Keys and his colleagues discovered that the semi-starved participants continued to physically deteriorate even when returned to their previously normal levels of caloric intake. In order for the tissues that were destroyed in starvation to be rebuilt, they found “no appreciable rehabilitation can take place on a diet of 2000 calories a day. The proper level is more like 4000 daily for some months.” Quite literally, in order to begin to recover, the semi-starved participants needed bread enough for today and tomorrow.
In late March, as the infection and mortality rates of COVID-19 steadily increased and the situation in my home city of New York became especially dire, I found myself fervently hoping that this virus would somehow ‘pass over’ my friends and loved ones. It occurred to me then that, as a result of COVID-19, I “knew” what Passover meant at a much deeper level than I had just a few weeks prior. Similarly, I’m wondering if part of the difficulty of interpreting ‘epiousios’ is that its significance is wrapped up in the experience and fear of periods of persistent hunger, one of the many instances in which full stomachs do not allow us to grasp the meaning of the Gospel text.
To bring all this home, I want to imagine someone who might have been among the first hearers of the Lord’s Prayer. Taking both the socioeconomic data and study on semi-starvation into account, I can begin to imagine the life story of a woman in her twenties, a wife and mother, who experienced three months of semi-starvation around the age of 9-10. As the daughter of tenant farmers, she and her family were particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, and so when a period of drought came they endured a seemingly interminable period of scrounging and begging for food. It was never enough and she still vividly recalls how the search and longing for food became the center of their lives. Even after the rains began to fall again and her family was able to eat regularly, her body never fully recovered. For a long while afterward, she’d experienced an insatiable hunger. Now, as a mother, she lives with the fear her children would experience the same one day.
By holding this woman’s story firmly in mind, I feel released from some of the technical interpretations of ‘epiousios’ and can instead begin to discern the underlying spirit of the phrase. Give us today bread for two whole days. Give us today double the portion that we normally get. Give us today so much that we have leftovers for tomorrow.
Importantly, by playing with these interpretations, this line begins to be connected to other moments and themes of the Gospels, including the feeding of the five thousand and how Jesus frequently describes the Kingdom of God as a banquet (Matthew 8:11-12; Matthew 22:2-14; Matthew 25:1-10;Luke 13:28-29; Luke 14:16-24). Consider how our imagined first listener would have heard such images, or anyone who struggled day in and day out on a small plot of land to eek out enough food for themselves and their family, and who was persistently anxious about doing so. A particularly telling version of this story takes place in Luke 14:16-24 in which a societal reversal takes place. Drawing on the imagery of apocalyptic reversals that developed in the post-exilic Second Temple period, this story is about a man preparing a banquet, inviting the typical guests only to have that invitation rejected, who then orders his servant to go out into the “streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” In light of such eschatological imagery, other interpretations come to mind. Give us today the promised bread of tomorrow. Give us today the long-awaited feast.
As mentioned at the outset, there are many translations of the word ‘epiousios’ with multiple schools of thought and theology backing different iterations. As I am not a linguist or biblical scholar, I don’t wish to weigh in on that debate. What is clear, however, is that this difficult-to-translate word occurs in a petition for bread, and so it’s worthwhile for me, as someone who hasn’t had to skip a meal in his life, to step outside my own experience and seriously consider the state of the first hearers’ hungry stomachs.
Biblical scholars, early church historians, and historians of Rome offer insights into the day-to-day poverty and persistent hunger that Jesus and his early followers would have directly experienced or teetered just on the edge of. The Minnesota Starvation experiment suggests that a period of semistarvation is a profoundly transformative experience, one that reshapes both the body and mind and from which a person doesn’t easily recover.
Bearing these things in mind allows us to approach something like the spirit of the phrase, and I (at least) feel as if I am now able to think of less technically accurate but more faithful ways of conveying this line’s deeper significance as hunger -- including children’s hunger -- increases across the country.
Give us today so much food that we have leftovers. Give us today a hot meal and a full fridge. Give us your promised feast, but give it to us now.
----
[1] Bauer, Lauren. “The COVID-19 crisis has already left too many children hungry in America.” May 2020 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the-covid-19-crisis-has-already-left-too-many-children-hungry-in-america/
[2] deParle, Jason. “Hunger Program’s Slow Start Leaves Millions of Children Waiting” New York Times, May 2020.
[3] MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 89.
[4] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 77.
[5] Rhee, Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Loc 80
[6] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, pages 5 and 11
[7] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 442-448
[8] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 46
[9] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 443
[10] Rhee, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation. 35
[11] Leah M. Kalm, Richard D. Semba, They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 135, Issue 6, June 2005, Pages 1347–1352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347
[12] Leah M. Kalm, Richard D. Semba, They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 135, Issue 6, June 2005, Pages 1347–1352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about this hunger and what it says about who we are as a country at this point in time. I’ve also been thinking about how the Gospels are, in many ways, stories for and about hungry people. They are replete with the dreams of a persistently hungry people, full of images of banquets, the miraculous feeding of 5,000 from just a few loaves and fishes, and Jesus’ prayer for ‘our daily bread.’ Except that ‘daily’ isn’t exactly what Jesus originally said.
There is a linguistic mystery embedded in the Gospels’ version of the Lord’s Prayer. The difficulty occurs in the seemingly untranslatable Greek word ‘epiousios’, a word that doesn’t appear to occur anywhere else in Greek literature outside the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is likely a Greek neologism for a word that was first uttered by Jesus in Aramaic. Like a copy of a copy, the English ‘daily’ is a faulty translation of a Greek word that was trying to approximate a word or phrase that may itself have been new or unusual in Aramaic.
So what would a correct rendering of ‘epiousios’ line be? While this is still being debated among linguists and biblical scholars, two plausible renderings of this phrase are “Give us this day enough bread for both today and tomorrow” and something along the lines of “Give us tomorrow’s bread, today.”[3]
Since I am neither a linguist nor a biblical scholar, I will avoid going down the well-worn path of parsing out whether these two translations are exactly right. I am, however, interested in grasping the deeper meaning of these two interpretations, and I believe this requires thinking about hunger.
This blog post is a meditation, if you will, wherein I seek to integrate these more accurate, though initially somewhat awkward and unfamiliar, phrasings. Stated differently, I want to move a rendering such as “Give us this day enough bread for today and tomorrow” from the realm of an interesting factoid to being something that I know and feel deeply. To arrive at this synthesis, I am going to juxtapose socioeconomic information from biblical scholars and early church historians and a study on semi-starvation. Actual scholars may wince at the liberties I take here...which is why I’d never call this scholarship. Instead this is a form of spiritual wrestling, an attempt to understand the deeper significance of this still unfamiliar phrase, and to integrate it into my own outlook.
----
The meaning and impact of words has a great deal to do with the context they are said in. I’ve heard the Lord’s prayer said at dinner tables where, like me, it seemed that no one ever had to worry about where their next meal is coming from in their lives. I’ve also had the opportunity to say those same words in spaces such as temporary homeless shelters and at a house for undocumented refugees where people had most certainly experienced intermittent periods of real hunger. The very same words -- and particularly this petition for bread -- landed differently depending on the stomachs of the people in the room. How could they not?
Therefore, when trying to grasp what these newer translations actually mean, I believe it’s important to begin with the stomachs of its first speakers and hearers. Were their stomachs full or were they empty? Were most getting enough to eat or were most constantly worried about their next meal? Reflecting on these questions has added a new dimension to this petition for bread, and even to the Lord’s Prayer itself.
There is significant evidence that Jesus, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many in the first Christian assemblies would have been constantly teetering at the edge of subsistence, persistent hunger, and even semi-starvation. It is likely that many who would have first heard the Lord’s Prayer would have personally experienced a prolonged period of hunger in their lives, may have lived through a period of food shortages, and that they may have held memories of others in their communities either succumbing to starvation or nearly doing so. Taking into account the horrifying fact of empty stomachs, how would they have heard Jesus’ prayer for ‘enough bread for both today and tomorrow’ or for ‘tomorrow’s bread, today’?
Hungry Stomachs
One of the most striking aspects of the Gospels is the way in which the poor are front and center in the stories. They are rare examples in Greek literature in which it is “the poor, the ill-educated, and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”[4] It is worthwhile, then, to try to wrap our minds around what it was like to be poor in first century Roman Palestine. In what follows, I will rely heavily on the work of scholars Helen Rhee and Mary Beard.
In her book Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, Helen Rhee describes the Roman Empire as primarily an agrarian subsistence economy, wherein the majority of production was for self-sufficiency and therefore remained outside the money economy. The Roman socioeconomic hierarchy was one of stark inequality with an imperial & aristocratic elite (1-3%), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7-15%), and “the poor” who were either stable near subsistence (22-27%), at subsistence (30-40%), or below subsistence and therefore lacking necessary food, shelter, and clothing (25-28%).[5] In this agrarian subsistence economy, 75-90% of the Roman world lived close to subsistence level -- near, at, or below -- and were struggling for survival and sustenance on a daily basis.[6] As such, they were particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, including droughts resulting in periodic food shortages and diseases.
Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome helps to fill in the picture of what these percentages mean. The fact that ancient Rome was an agrarian subsistence economy, for instance, means that 50 million people across the Roman Empire were peasant farmers -- both smallholders and tenants alike -- “struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves in some years, with a small surplus to sell in others.”[7] There were periods of extreme hardship such as the late 60s BCE when evidence from Roman coins suggest that peasant farmers experienced “if not starvation then persistent hunger.”[8]
As early Christianity’s spread was largely an urban phenomenon, it is especially important to take in her descriptions of the extreme urban poverty that plagued Roman cities. She notes the existence of Roman laws prohibiting people camping in the tombs of the aristocracy, the descriptions of the poor creating lean-tos against walls and how those were cleared periodically. In describing why so few indications remain that tell us anything about the lives of the poor, Beard writes about how literally fragile their existence was. “The outskirts of many Roman towns may have not been far different from those of modern ‘Third World’ cities, covered in squatter settlements or shanty towns populated by the nearly starving and those who begged as much as worked for their living.”[9] Shanty towns do not leave behind permanent structures to study millennia later, and extreme hunger, she notes, typically resolved itself by the starving dying without leaving a trace behind.
The Gospels were stories about the poor, shared in poor communities, whose recurring negative view of the rich speaks to a vastly unequal society. Helen Rhee describes Jesus and his disciples (Matt 8:20), the Jerusalem Church (Romans 15:26; Gal 2:10), Pauline communities (1 Cor: 26-27; 2 Cor 8:1) as belonging to the “lower socioeconomic stratum and ‘the poor’ in varying degrees; and they regularly described experiencing oppression and maltreatment by the rich and powerful in one way or another (cf. Luke 12:11–12; Acts 4:1–3; 8:1–3; 12:1–4; 2 Cor. 11:23–27; Heb. 10:32–34).”[10]
More to the point, it is likely that Jesus himself, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many in the first Christian assemblies would have been constantly struggling with having enough to eat. Many in the first Christian communities would have had a direct experience of a period of prolonged hunger in their lives, and I believe it’s fair to say that nearly all would have carried anxiety and fear of hunger as a result of sudden food shortages caused by natural disasters.
Insights from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment
Of course, it is one thing to say that many in the first Christian assemblies would have had a direct experience of prolonged hunger in their lives, and it is another to comprehend what that actually means. What does a period of prolonged hunger do to a person physiologically? How does it reshape a person’s psyche and worldview? What do people need in order to recover from semi-starvation and what are their memories of this experience? It is worth spending time exploring these questions to understand how Jesus’ petition for bread might have been heard among the first followers of Jesus.
In the 1940s, a groundbreaking -- and profoundly moving -- study now called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment examined the physiological and psychological effects of semi-starvation. Led by Ancel Keys, it aimed to provide insights on how to feed and rehabilitate the emaciated civilians of previously German-occupied Europe.[11]
During World War II, 36 male conscientious objectors, primarily from Peace Churches, volunteered to participate in this semi-starvation study. Over the course of the study, participants lost approximately 2.5 lbs per week until most had lost fully 25% of their original body weight. In that we’re exploring Jesus’ petition for bread, it is moving to read that reductions and additions in calories were made using slices of bread. Very quickly, participants developed “sunken faces and bellies, protruding ribs, and edema-swollen legs, ankles, and faces” and other problems such as anemia, neurological deficits, and skin changes became apparent.[12]
Food became an obsession and the center of their lives. Interviewed in their eighties for the journal article They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, study participant Richard Willoughby recalled how ‘eating became highly ritualized’ and Harold Blickenstaff described how “food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life.”
One finding from the 3-month rehabilitation period proved especially important in the development of the postwar relief plan, and also has special resonance in light of the usage of ‘epiousios’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Keys and his colleagues discovered that the semi-starved participants continued to physically deteriorate even when returned to their previously normal levels of caloric intake. In order for the tissues that were destroyed in starvation to be rebuilt, they found “no appreciable rehabilitation can take place on a diet of 2000 calories a day. The proper level is more like 4000 daily for some months.” Quite literally, in order to begin to recover, the semi-starved participants needed bread enough for today and tomorrow.
‘Enough for Leftovers’
In late March, as the infection and mortality rates of COVID-19 steadily increased and the situation in my home city of New York became especially dire, I found myself fervently hoping that this virus would somehow ‘pass over’ my friends and loved ones. It occurred to me then that, as a result of COVID-19, I “knew” what Passover meant at a much deeper level than I had just a few weeks prior. Similarly, I’m wondering if part of the difficulty of interpreting ‘epiousios’ is that its significance is wrapped up in the experience and fear of periods of persistent hunger, one of the many instances in which full stomachs do not allow us to grasp the meaning of the Gospel text.
To bring all this home, I want to imagine someone who might have been among the first hearers of the Lord’s Prayer. Taking both the socioeconomic data and study on semi-starvation into account, I can begin to imagine the life story of a woman in her twenties, a wife and mother, who experienced three months of semi-starvation around the age of 9-10. As the daughter of tenant farmers, she and her family were particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, and so when a period of drought came they endured a seemingly interminable period of scrounging and begging for food. It was never enough and she still vividly recalls how the search and longing for food became the center of their lives. Even after the rains began to fall again and her family was able to eat regularly, her body never fully recovered. For a long while afterward, she’d experienced an insatiable hunger. Now, as a mother, she lives with the fear her children would experience the same one day.
By holding this woman’s story firmly in mind, I feel released from some of the technical interpretations of ‘epiousios’ and can instead begin to discern the underlying spirit of the phrase. Give us today bread for two whole days. Give us today double the portion that we normally get. Give us today so much that we have leftovers for tomorrow.
Importantly, by playing with these interpretations, this line begins to be connected to other moments and themes of the Gospels, including the feeding of the five thousand and how Jesus frequently describes the Kingdom of God as a banquet (Matthew 8:11-12; Matthew 22:2-14; Matthew 25:1-10;Luke 13:28-29; Luke 14:16-24). Consider how our imagined first listener would have heard such images, or anyone who struggled day in and day out on a small plot of land to eek out enough food for themselves and their family, and who was persistently anxious about doing so. A particularly telling version of this story takes place in Luke 14:16-24 in which a societal reversal takes place. Drawing on the imagery of apocalyptic reversals that developed in the post-exilic Second Temple period, this story is about a man preparing a banquet, inviting the typical guests only to have that invitation rejected, who then orders his servant to go out into the “streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” In light of such eschatological imagery, other interpretations come to mind. Give us today the promised bread of tomorrow. Give us today the long-awaited feast.
Conclusion
As mentioned at the outset, there are many translations of the word ‘epiousios’ with multiple schools of thought and theology backing different iterations. As I am not a linguist or biblical scholar, I don’t wish to weigh in on that debate. What is clear, however, is that this difficult-to-translate word occurs in a petition for bread, and so it’s worthwhile for me, as someone who hasn’t had to skip a meal in his life, to step outside my own experience and seriously consider the state of the first hearers’ hungry stomachs.
Biblical scholars, early church historians, and historians of Rome offer insights into the day-to-day poverty and persistent hunger that Jesus and his early followers would have directly experienced or teetered just on the edge of. The Minnesota Starvation experiment suggests that a period of semistarvation is a profoundly transformative experience, one that reshapes both the body and mind and from which a person doesn’t easily recover.
Bearing these things in mind allows us to approach something like the spirit of the phrase, and I (at least) feel as if I am now able to think of less technically accurate but more faithful ways of conveying this line’s deeper significance as hunger -- including children’s hunger -- increases across the country.
Give us today so much food that we have leftovers. Give us today a hot meal and a full fridge. Give us your promised feast, but give it to us now.
----
[1] Bauer, Lauren. “The COVID-19 crisis has already left too many children hungry in America.” May 2020 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the-covid-19-crisis-has-already-left-too-many-children-hungry-in-america/
[2] deParle, Jason. “Hunger Program’s Slow Start Leaves Millions of Children Waiting” New York Times, May 2020.
[3] MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 89.
[4] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 77.
[5] Rhee, Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Loc 80
[6] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, pages 5 and 11
[7] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 442-448
[8] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 46
[9] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 443
[10] Rhee, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation. 35
[11] Leah M. Kalm, Richard D. Semba, They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 135, Issue 6, June 2005, Pages 1347–1352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347
[12] Leah M. Kalm, Richard D. Semba, They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 135, Issue 6, June 2005, Pages 1347–1352, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/135.6.1347
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