Bread (as raised) or a loaf
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Artos is the ordinary Greek word for bread or a loaf of bread, but it appears in the New Testament in contexts that lift it far beyond the ordinary. Jesus is tempted to turn stones into artos and responds by quoting Deuteronomy: man does not live by bread alone.
Reader summary
Full entry for ἄρτος (G740) · Open the biblical lexicon
Artos is the ordinary Greek word for bread or a loaf of bread, but it appears in the New Testament in contexts that lift it far beyond the ordinary. Jesus is tempted to turn stones into artos and responds by quoting Deuteronomy: man does not live by bread alone.
The BSB source-word alignment has 97 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include bread (55), loaves (19), . . . (6), consecrated bread (3), loaf (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 4:3. Its strongest book concentrations include John (24), Mark (21), Matthew (21), Luke (15).
This entry includes 1 verse guide that explain exact original-language forms in context.
Artos is the ordinary Greek word for bread or a loaf of bread, but it appears in the New Testament in contexts that lift it far beyond the ordinary. Jesus is tempted to turn stones into artos and responds by quoting Deuteronomy: man does not live by bread alone. He feeds five thousand with five loaves of artos. He calls himself the bread (artos) of life in John 6, and the discourse that follows is among the most theologically dense in the Gospels.
At the Last Supper he takes artos, gives thanks, breaks it, and says this is my body. The word reappears in Acts and Paul as the bread broken at the Lord's Table. Artos thus carries the weight of God's provision in creation (daily bread, the Father's gift), of Jesus' identity (I am the bread of life), and of the church's fellowship (the breaking of bread as common meal and Communion).
The word moves easily between the literal (people are physically hungry and need food) and the figurative (what sustains life is more than material provision), but the New Testament consistently refuses to abandon the physical for a purely spiritual reading. The bread Jesus multiplies is real bread that physically hungry people eat. The bread broken at the Lord's Table is real bread eaten in a real meal.
The theology of artos is embodied, communal, and gift-shaped at every point.
The local Greek index currently counts about 97 occurrences of artos as exact Strong's ID G740; its NT witnesses are concentrated in the Gospels and carry significant theological weight in 1 Corinthians and Acts. The word anchors the feeding miracles, the bread-of-life discourse, the Lord's Prayer, the Last Supper accounts, and the post-resurrection meals.
But Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, which itself recalls the manna provision. The temptation to use divine power for physical artos is met with a word about the word. Jesus does not deny that bread matters — he denies that it is ultimate. The saying frames the entire Gospel's understanding of provision: what God supplies goes beyond the physical without abandoning it.
Give us this day our daily bread.
The Lord's Prayer places artos in the center of petition to the Father. Physical provision is not too small a matter for prayer. The word 'daily' (epiousios, a rare Greek word) anchors the petition in dependence, not accumulation. The prayer asks for enough, not surplus, and assumes that the Father gives.
Jesus answered, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me will never hunger, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst.
The bread-of-life discourse uses artos to develop the claim that Jesus himself is what manna pointed toward. The crowd wants more miraculous bread (v.34); Jesus identifies himself as what sustains ultimate life. The discourse moves from physical hunger to spiritual, from the sign (feeding miracle) to the reality (Jesus himself). This is the theological peak of artos in the NT.
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is My body.”
The Last Supper account places artos at the center of the covenant meal. Jesus' identification of the bread with his body invests every subsequent breaking of bread in the church's life with sacramental and memorial weight. The church that eats artos together is performing an act that proclaims the Lord's death until he comes (1 Cor.11.26).
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
The early church's pattern includes the breaking of artos as one of four marks of its common life. Whether this refers to the Lord's Supper, ordinary shared meals, or both is debated, but the physical gathering around bread is explicitly included in what the Spirit-formed community does. Artos here is communal and forming.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Greek word. Staple food source representing sustenance, or metaphorically Christ as life-giving spiritual nourishment in John 6.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 99 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
bread, a loaf, food
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Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
This word appears as a noun across 8 case and number patterns. The form changes show how the word functions in a sentence; they do not change the basic lexical meaning by themselves.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 2 selected witnesses from 97 lexical occurrence verses.
ἄρτος is built from this root:
Represents divine provision and anticipates Christ as the Bread of Life. John 6:22–40
Represents Christ as life-sustaining provision. Luke 9:10–17
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Artos is a word that refuses to let biblical theology become disembodied. Every significant use of it in the New Testament is set in a physical context: real bread, real hunger, real mouths, real tables. When Jesus refuses to turn stones into artos, he is not dismissing hunger as unspiritual. When he feeds five thousand, he does not hand them a parable about spiritual nourishment and send them away still hungry.
When he says he is the bread of life, John is at pains to anchor the claim in a community that had just eaten real fish and real bread. The incarnate Christ feeds bodies as well as souls, and the church that follows him is called to the same integrity. The Lord's Prayer's petition for daily bread is not an embarrassment to be spiritualized away; it is the Father's invitation to bring the ordinary needs of daily life into the conversation with the one who provides.
At the same time, every artos text reaches past the physical without abandoning it. Man does not live by bread alone. The manna was real food, but it pointed to the real Word. The Supper's bread is real bread, but it declares a death and points to a return. Teachers who hold both dimensions together serve their congregations well: the gospel addresses people who are actually hungry in every sense, and it sends communities into the world with bread for both kinds of need.
John.6.35
Artos derives from a root related to the verb arō (to raise, to fit together), reflecting the risen, leavened character of Greek bread. The word covers both a loaf of bread and bread as a generic food substance. In the Septuagint it regularly translates Hebrew leḥem. The phrase artos tēs prothoseōs (the bread of the Presence or showbread, Mark 2:26) carries significant liturgical background — twelve loaves set before God in the sanctuary, renewed weekly.
Jesus' citation of David eating this bread in Mark 2 uses artos to make a claim about his authority over the law's sabbath regulations.
The artos of the New Testament is continuous with the leḥem of the Old. The bread of the Presence in the tabernacle anticipates the bread that represents Christ's presence in the Supper. The manna in the wilderness anticipates the bread from heaven Jesus claims to be. Deuteronomy 8:3's insight that man lives by God's word, not bread alone, is a framework for reading the Gospel provision scenes.
The feeding miracles recall the Exodus generation's daily dependence on heaven's provision. The Lord's Supper inaugurates the covenant meal that the Passover meal had long anticipated. In the New Jerusalem, John's Revelation speaks of the tree of life and its fruit — not artos, but the same logic of divine provision for creaturely need that artos carries throughout the entry.
The word that begins with physical sustenance ends in eschatological fullness.
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