It is possible that Jesus himself gave more than
one version of this prayer but there is good reason to believe that the two
versions in Matthew and Luke were derived from a single Greek translation of an
Aramaic original. This is the very high degree of verbal identity in those
parts of the prayer which are found in both Matthew and Luke. One word is of
crucial importance, the Greek word epiousion, which qualifies ‘bread’.
This word is conventionally translated ‘daily’, so that we ask for ‘our daily
bread’. However, it does not occur elsewhere, and this has made the whole
petition difficult to understand. Moreover, the search for an Aramaic word
underlying the Greek epiousion did not go well. Ironically, however,
modern scholarship has found the right answer by going back to the Church
Father Jerome. When Jerome wrote his commentary on Matthew, he got stuck too,
but in those days he had a resource which has not survived into modern times, a
Gospel which he called ‘According to the Hebrews’. He comments:
In a Gospel which is called ‘According to the
Hebrews’ . . . I found ‘mahar’, which means ‘tomorrow’s, so that the meaning is
‘Give us to-day our bread “for tomorrow”’, that is, ‘for the future’.
The Aramaic word maḥar means ‘tomorrow’,
and these Jewish Christians are more likely to have preserved the Lord’s Prayer
in Aramaic than to have translated it from Greek, because they will have said it
in Aramaic themselves. We should therefore accept the originality of this word,
and the interpretation passed on by Jerome. Moreover, while it is
understandable that one translator, faced with the task of rendering the
Aramaic maḥar into Greek, should form the new adjective epiousios
from the common Greek expression tē epiousē, ‘on the next (day)’, the
changes of two translators doing so independently are negligible. It
follows that both Matthew and Luke are dependent on a single Greek translation.
It is therefore much more probable that they are both dependent on a written
Greek source than that they have taken the prayer from the worship of their own
churches. (Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s
Account of His Life and Teaching [London: T&T Clark International,
2010], 227)
