Can you say a prayer prayerfully with words in it you don’t understand? Yes, because for centuries Greek Christians have done precisely that. Wilfully, day in day out, they have asked God to give them epiousion bread in the Our Father. Every attempt to understand this word is more or less guess-work, so that after nineteen centuries of saying the Lord’s Prayer, we are still at square one. Square one being the statement of Origen, early in the third century, that we don’t know what epiousion really means, because it was never used by Greek writers, nor does it exist in common speech, and seems to have been made up by the evangelists.

This is a very extraordinary state of affairs. Jesus expressly repudiated meaningless and repetitive phrases, and supplied his disciples instead with this simple and straightforward prayer that everyone can understand. And then somehow or other it first appears in Greek with one quite unintelligible word. And it is an important word. For we are asked to pray for bread; but what sort of bread?— plain brown bread, spiritual bread, eucharistic bread, or food in general, eschatological food and drink, or what? The only qualifying word is this epiousion and we don’t know exactly what it means.