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The Liturgical TextsThe liturgical section of the NY begins, fittingly enough, with what Catholics considered the single most important sentence of the Mass, Jesus' words of institution, which effected the transubstantiation of the eucharistic bread into the body of Christ.7
No doubt Christian polemicists referred to this sentence frequently, which is why it is mentioned first in the liturgical portion of the NY. A testimony to the familiarity of this sentence in the Middle Ages, even among Jews, may be the fact that this is almost the only quotation of a Latin liturgical text in NY that has not been significantly corrupted. Nevertheless it has been translated incorrectly; a better translation would say "for this is my body." The inaccuracy seems to have arisen by reading The NY moves immediately to a central line of the baptismal ritual, one that, again, is likely to have come up frequently in Christian anti-Jewish sermons.
Here there is unquestionably a corruption of some sort. It is incredible that any medieval baptismal ritual would have included such a line as "Let this be an offering to Satan," particularly as the word offerentia was relatively rare in liturgical Latin.10 Undoubtedly Offerentia Satane, translated in NY as |
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, the Hebrew transliteration of the Latin word enim (meaning "indeed, for"), as a transliteration of the Latin word unum (meaning "one"), and thus translating it into Hebrew as 
("only" or "alone").8 The error suggests that the Hebrew transliteration may have been in circulation for a while before the translation was added. If so, then the third logical stage of compilation, the transliteration of Latin into Hebrew, would have been distinct from the fourth stage, when the Hebrew transliteration was misread to produce a faulty Hebrew translation.
, is a misreading of the Hebrew transliteration of the Latin question that was asked of each candidate before baptism: Abrenuntias Satane? or "Do you renounce Satan?"11 What probably happened was this: the Latin question was first transliterated into Hebrew as 
(Aprenuntsiyah Sataney), with the b rendered as an unvoiced p (reflecting German pronunciation of Latin) and the final s of Abrenuntias assimilated into the initial one of Satane. Subsequently the first word 
underwent a series of corruptions, which led to its being re-read as Offerentia: Since the first letter, Hebrew aleph, represents an undifferentiated vowel, it could easily be read as a or o. The second Hebrew letter, intended to represent the labial plosive p, was read as a fricative f, a common shift in Hebrew. The transliteration was then corrupted further by haplography, dropping one of the two ns (i. e., the Hebrew letter nun), and shortening the waw between them to a yod, resulting in the actual manuscript reading 
(Afrenitsiyah). This was close enough to Offerentia to justify translation into Hebrew as 
, a sacrifice or offering. The phrase "offering to Satan" obviously lends itself to anti-Christian interpretation much better than the original question, "Do you renounce Satan?"