Having said that, I won't jump into the fray just yet. But I will
point out that before we answer your question we need to be a
little more precise in the way we ask it. As you have noted, unlike
what Matthew and Luke do with the PEIRASMOS petition, these two
evangelists each reproduce this "bread" petition but with wording
that has significant variations, a fact which suggests that one (or
both) have redacted a traditional saying. So if we ask about the
meaning of the adjective modifying bread, as well as the meaning of
the petition itself, which adjective and which version of the
petition are we talking of?
In other words, we have here strong evidence that either Matthew or
Luke (or both evangelists!) has (have) changed the wording of the
petition in the interest of a particular theological vision, which
may or may not represent the original intention behind the original
form of the saying. So when we ask what the meaning of the petition
is, we need, I think, to ask, first, what was the original form and
wording of the traditional saying, and then, is there any
difference in intention between the Matthean and/or Lukan versions
of the saying and that of its Vorlage.
Granted, each of these questions depends for its answer on gaining
some sense of the meaning of the terminology used within each
version of the petition. But *that* comes from a contextual
analysis as well as a lexical one. And in the light of this
observation, we will probably, before we are done, have to consider
the "bread" petition from the context of interpretation provided by
the wilderness temptation story (Matt. 4:1-11/Lk. 4:1-13) or at
least the Devil's petition about Jesus procuring "bread" from
stones at Q 4:2 -- which raises the possibility of conjoining this
thread with our previous exchanges on PEIRASMOS and the PEIRASMOS
petition!
You may have opened a real can of worms here!
Jeffrey Gibson
jgibson@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu