\ifdefiningfootnotes

\DeclareFixedFootnote{\fnEpiousios}{
EPIOUSIOS: This word appears nowhere else in Greek. Not once, before Matthew and Luke used it in Matt 6:11 and Luke 11:3,
and never again in another several centuries of living Greek (apart from writers quoting the Lord's Prayer). 
Origen (3rd century), considered perhaps the greatest Bible scholar of antiquity, when Koine Greek --- the kind of Greek
of the New Testament  --- was still a living language,
said he couldn't find it anywhere either — no author, sacred or secular. 
It looks like it was coined for this prayer.
\fnPar
Two guesses exist. It could come from epi (`upon') + ousia (`being,' `substance.') 
When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (the ``Vulgate''--- the Latin 
translation upon which the Catholic Church relied for over a millenium), he translated as ``supersubstantial'' in Matthew, 
but ``daily'' in Luke. Same word.
\fnPar
Or it comes from epi + a participle of `to come' — `the coming day's bread.' Most lexicons favor this now.
`Daily' splits the difference. It fits neither guess exactly. It just sounds safe.
I've left it untranslated. You're standing where Origen stood. No easy word fixes this.
\fnPar
The problem is that we determine the meanings of words by looking at many contexts where it is used. 
This is how lexicons and dictionaries are built. In the case of EPIOUSIOS, however we have one context (repeated twice) where it's used.
And that's not enough in this case to determine its meanings. The guesses I've listed are just that --- guesses.
\fnPar
Speaking personally, considering \Iesous' teaching in general, the idea that he's speaking here of
some sort of spiritual bread has a certain appeal.
\fnPar
One final observation. 'Chiasm' was a popular literary device of ancient world. Text would be structured like ``ABCBA'' 
in which there is a certain pattern to the middle,
then reverse the pattern to the end. We see this in the Hebrew Psalms, 
where the exact middle word or phrase is the `heart' of the Psalm.
In the case of Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer, the exact middle word/phrase is ``the EPIOUSION.'' 
Make of that what you will.
}
\fi

\begin{comment}
What is the middle word?
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς·
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.Thought processThought processCounting the whole prayer word by word (58 words total, including the Πάτερ ἡμῶν opening through πονηροῦ at the end), the middle falls right on ἐπιούσιον itself — word 30 of 58, with τὸν (word 29) immediately before it as the exact midpoint pair.

So structurally, "epiousios" — the word nobody can quite translate, the one Origen couldn't find anywhere else in Greek — sits at the dead center of the prayer. Half the words come before it, half after. Worth a footnote in its own right, given how much ink you've already spent on that word.\ifdefiningfootnotes

\DeclareFixedFootnote{\fnEpiousios}{
EPIOUSIOS: This word appears nowhere else in Greek. Not once, before Matthew and Luke used it in Matt 6:11 and Luke 11:3,
and never again in another several centuries of living Greek (apart from writers quoting the Lord's Prayer). 
Origen (3rd century), considered perhaps the greatest Bible scholar of antiquity, when Koine Greek --- the kind of Greek
of the New Testament  --- was still a living language,
said he couldn't find it anywhere either — no author, sacred or secular. 
It looks like it was coined for this prayer.
\fnPar
Two guesses exist. It could come from epi (`upon') + ousia (`being,' `substance.') 
When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (the ``Vulgate''--- the Latin 
translation upon which the Catholic Church relied for over a millenium), he translated as ``supersubstantial'' in Matthew, 
but ``daily'' in Luke. Same word.
\fnPar
Or it comes from epi + a participle of `to come' — `the coming day's bread.' Most lexicons favor this now.
`Daily' splits the difference. It fits neither guess exactly. It just sounds safe.
I've left it untranslated. You're standing where Origen stood. No easy word fixes this.
\fnPar
The problem is that we determine the meanings of words by looking at many contexts where it is used. 
This is how lexicons and dictionaries are built. In the case of EPIOUSIOS, however we have one context (repeated twice) where it's used.
And that's not enough in this case to determine its meanings. The guesses I've listed are just that --- guesses.
\fnPar
Speaking personally, considering \Iesous' teaching in general, the idea that he's speaking here of
some sort of spiritual bread has a certain appeal.
\fnPar
One final observation. 'Chiasm' was a popular literary device of ancient world. Text would be structured like ``ABCBA'' 
in which there is a certain pattern to the middle,
then reverse the pattern to the end. We see this in the Hebrew Psalms, 
where the exact middle word or phrase is the `heart' of the Psalm.
In the case of the Lord's Prayer, the exact middle word/phrase is TON EPIOUSION --- ``the EPISIOUS''.

}
\fiShow moreThought processThought processTwo small fixes and one bigger substantive note.
Typo: "the EPISIOUS" is garbled — letters are scrambled. Given you just wrote "TON EPIOUSION" (correctly using the accusative form as it actually appears in the prayer, not the lemma form), the parallel English tag should be "the EPIOUSION."
Missing article: "a popular literary device of ancient world" → "of the ancient world."
The bigger thing: what you've demonstrated is that epiousios sits at the exact numerical midpoint by word count — that's real, I checked it myself. But chiasm (ABCBA) is a stronger claim: it requires that the content on each side actually mirrors around the center, not just that the center falls on a particular word arithmetically. Right now the paragraph shows the arithmetic and asserts the literary label without connecting the two. If you want to actually claim chiastic structure, you'd want to show the mirroring — e.g., do the three "Thou" petitions (name/kingdom/will) pair thematically with something in the second half, with bread as the hinge? Some commentators do read the Prayer this way (three God-directed petitions, then bread as pivot, then three human-need petitions). If that's the case you want to make, it's worth a sentence showing the mirroring rather than just the count. If you'd rather not make that argument, safer phrasing would be something like "the prayer's structure places it at the pivot" rather than invoking chiasm outright, since a reader who knows the term will expect the symmetry to be shown, not just asserted.I think I'll leave this alone for now with a TODO. At the very least this needs to be an article in the glossary and not a footnote.Just for grins, I'm not spotting any particular chiastic structure: Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, 
A ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
B ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου· 
C γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς·
D τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
C καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
B καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, 
A ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

Looking at each pair on its own merits, rather than assuming the frame holds:
C/C' is the strongest evidence you have. Both lines use the same ὡς (comparative "as") construction: "ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς" (as in heaven, so on earth) and "ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν" (as we also forgive). That's not a thematic stretch — it's the same grammatical device recurring in both lines, which is real, checkable evidence of parallel construction rather than a post-hoc reading.
B/B' has a defensible case too: "your kingdom come" and "lead us not into peirasmos" both sit in an eschatological register — πειρασμός in Jewish apocalyptic contexts often denotes the end-time trial/tribulation preceding the kingdom's full arrival, so some scholars (N.T. Wright among them) read these two lines as bracketing the same future-oriented hope. Debatable, but not invented.
A/A' is the weak link. "Hallowed be your name" and "deliver us from the evil one" share only a loose holy/evil polarity — there's no shared construction or clear conceptual pairing the way B/B' and C/C' have. If you're being honest about the structure, this is where it strains.
So: not a clean, textbook ABCBA where every ring matches with equal strength, but not nothing either — C/C' in particular looks like real design, not coincidence. If the glossary article ever gets written, I'd present it as "here's what holds up and here's what doesn't" rather than either the strong chiasm claim or dropping it entirely. Reasonable thing to shelve as a TODO either way.

Luke:
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, 
A ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου. 
B ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου. 
C γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
D τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δίδου ἡμῖν τὸ καθ’ ἡμέραν.
C καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν, καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἀφίεμεν παντὶ ὀφείλοντι ἡμῖν. 
B καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, 
A ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

Same result. 60 words total in this text, so the middle falls on the pair at positions 30 and 31: 
ἐπιούσιον (30) and δίδου (31) — "epiousion" followed immediately by "give" 
(Luke uses the present imperative δίδου, "keep giving," vs. Matthew's aorist δὸς).
So in both versions — Matthew's 58 words and Luke's 60 — the exact structural center lands on the same word: epiousios/epiousion. That's not something you'd expect from two independently-transmitted forms of the prayer with different surrounding wording (different opening, different ending on the debts/sins line, "day by day" vs. "today"). Worth noting alongside the Matthew count in whatever you eventually write up — it strengthens the case that this isn't just an artifact of one particular text's word count, but something that holds across the tradition.\end{comment}

I have not seen this pointed out in the literature.Searched the webSearched the webSearched for this specifically, and here's the distinction: what's out there is the coarser, well-known version — the prayer has seven petitions, "give us our daily bread" is the fourth, and scholars/preachers have long noted that as the structural hinge between the three "Thou" petitions (name, kingdom, will) and the three "we" petitions (forgiveness, temptation, evil). That's discussed fairly widely (Theopolis Institute, chiasmusxchange.com, various sermon literature).
What I didn't find anywhere is your specific finding: counting every individual word (not petitions) and showing epiousios/epiousion sits at the literal numeric midpoint, and that this holds independently in both Matthew's 58-word version and Luke's 60-word version. That's a finer-grained and more exacting claim than "4th of 7 petitions" — it's not just that the bread petition is structurally central, it's that the word itself is mathematically central down to the word count, in both textual traditions. I can't claim an exhaustive search rules out some obscure paper having done this, but it's not turning up in the standard chiasm-of-the-Lord's-Prayer literature I found.
So this looks like a genuinely sharper observation than what's commonly circulated — worth keeping the TODO and maybe making that distinction explicit when you write it up (i.e., "beyond the well-known petition-level centrality, the word-count itself confirms this in both Matthew and Luke").
Sources:

The Lord's Prayer Chiastic Structure - To Love and Truth https://toloveandtruth.net/2013/05/18/the-lords-prayer-chiastic-structure/
Chiasms of Prayer - Theopolis Institute  https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/chiasms-of-prayer/
Possible chiastic structure of the Lord's prayer - chiasmusxchange.com https://www.chiasmusxchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Possible-chiastic-structure-of-the-Lord%E2%80%99s-prayer.pdf

That word-count coincidence landing on epiousios in both versions independently is a nice one — especially given how much scholarly hand-wringing that word has already generated. Good find. Worth keeping the TODO alive rather than letting it get buried in the glossary backlog.Ha, it's a microscopic but real contribution to Biblical Studies!Genuinely might be — a footnote-sized one, but a real one: not "here's another take on what epiousios means" (a crowded field), but "here's a structural fact about where it sits, verified by count, that nobody seems to have written down." That's a different, rarer kind of contribution. Worth a line in the article version citing that it holds across both textual traditions independently.I'll also want to check the textual history -- how varied is the Text here? As I recollect there aren't a lot of variants here. (As I would expect, everyone being rather conservative and careful about the most important prayer in Christendom.)Searched the webSearched the webYour intuition holds for Matthew but not for Luke — the variation is lopsided.
Matthew is comparatively stable. The one significant variant is the doxology ("For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.") — present in the Byzantine majority text (hence KJV) but absent from the earliest and best witnesses: Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Codex Bezae, the Old Latin tradition, and Jerome's Vulgate. Critical editions (NA28) don't print it in the main text; it's generally judged a later liturgical addition that crept into the manuscript tradition from congregational use. Aside from that, Matthew's wording is fairly settled.
Luke is the surprise — it's actually the more volatile of the two, and in the opposite direction than you might expect: not competing wordings, but competing lengths. The earliest manuscripts (P75, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus) preserve a noticeably shorter Lukan prayer — no "our, who art in heaven," no "thy will be done, as in heaven so on earth," and ending right after "lead us not into temptation" with no "but deliver us from evil" at all. Later manuscripts progressively absorbed Matthew's fuller, more familiar wording into Luke through scribal harmonization, which is exactly how you get the longer form in the Textus Receptus/KJV — the version you gave me. There's also a genuine oddity worth knowing about: Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) attests a variant reading "may your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us" in place of "your kingdom come" — preserved in at least one later manuscript, though clearly an outlier, not a serious contender for the original text.
This bears directly on your word-count finding: the Luke text you gave me is already the longer, Byzantine-harmonized form. If your project's underlying text is Byzantine/TR-based, your 60-word count and the epiousion/didou midpoint stand as-is. But if you ever check this against the shorter critical (NA28) Luke, the total word count drops substantially and the midpoint would very likely land somewhere else entirely — so worth being explicit, when you write this up, about exactly which textual basis the count depends on. Same logic applies to Matthew if you ever compare against a doxology-inclusive text: adding those ~13 words at the end pushes the center away from epiousios too.
Sources:

Manuscripts of the Lord's Prayer - Bible Odyssey
Is the Doxology of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:13 a late addition?
stylos: Thoughts on the text of the Lukan Lord's Prayer
Right. I'm not counting the doxology. Fairly clear to me that it was a later addition. (Works better for liturgy that way.)Ha you're right, I was using the TR. Mostly because for FNT review I was getting tired of verses missing in the NA28.Here's the NA28:Πάτερ,
    ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
    ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·
Luke 11:3     τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δίδου ἡμῖν τὸ καθ’ ἡμέραν·
Luke 11:4     καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν,
    καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ἀφίομεν παντὶ ὀφείλοντι ἡμῖν·
    καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν.
    
    Recounting on this shorter NA28 text: 38 words total. Middle pair falls at positions 19–20: ἡμέραν (19) and καὶ (20) — "day" and "and." Ἐπιούσιον itself is word 14 of 38, sitting well before center, not at it.
So the coincidence doesn't survive the switch to the critical text. It held for Matthew (58 words, no doxology) and for the TR/Byzantine-expanded Luke (60 words) — but the NA28 Luke, which is shorter precisely because it lacks the phrases that got harmonized in from Matthew, breaks the pattern. Epiousios/epiousion is close to the center in the short form (14th of 38, roughly a third of the way through) but not sitting on it the way it does in the two longer texts.
That's a meaningful qualifier for whatever you eventually write: the finding is real for Matthew and for the Byzantine/TR Luke, but it's a property of those two textual traditions specifically — not something that holds independent of which underlying Greek text you use for Luke. Worth stating plainly rather than letting the coincidence sound more universal than it is.Right. Simply doesn't work in Luke. (Harmonization is obvious and understandable.)Thought processThought processRight — it's a Matthew-specific structural feature, not something inherent to Luke's own composition. The TR-Luke only "worked" because harmonization borrowed Matthew's surrounding material wholesale, and that material happened to expand roughly symmetrically around the same shared core clause (τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δίδου/δὸς ἡμῖν) — so the centering effect got inherited along with the borrowed text, not independently generated by Luke's own wording. Once you strip back to what Luke actually wrote, the symmetry disappears with it. Cleaner and more honest to frame it as a Matthean observation that TR-Luke happens to reproduce as a byproduct, rather than a cross-Gospel pattern.

\end{comment}
