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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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: מָן mān, Greek: μάννα; Arabic: اَلْمَنُّ; 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]
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
This makes a lot of sense. The wiki article begs the question, why not the same etymological analysis for the prefix 'epi' for the Epiphany/Επιφανεια? Επι+φανεια = epi + appear. Of course, adding prefixes to established word changes each words meaning, but if epi were to mean super/supra, it would mean that for each word -and, it clearly does not of Epiphany.
