Good news was a word for a battlefield

The most important noun in the New Testament did not start as a religious word.

Euangelion — good news. In classical and Roman usage it meant the report a runner brought back from a battle, or the announcement of an emperor’s accession or birthday. Inscriptions from the period use it of imperial proclamations.

It was public, political, and about something that had already happened. Nobody used it for advice, philosophy, or a way of life.

And the Hebrew behind it has the same shape.

A man running over hills with news, and the news is four words: Your God reigns.

Notice what a herald does and does not do. He does not create the victory, negotiate it, or persuade anyone to accept it. He reports it, and the reporting is the whole job.

Which is why the New Testament writers took the word.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mark opens his book with the word and then immediately quotes Isaiah, which is where the word came from.

That is why Paul can summarize it in three clauses in 1 Corinthians 15 — Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, He was buried, He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures — and call that the thing he received and passed on.

Two of those three clauses have according to the Scriptures attached, which is the whole burden of this volume in one creed.

And the political edge of the word was not lost on anyone in the first century. To announce a euangelion about a crucified Jew being Lord, in an empire that used the same word for Caesar’s accession, was a deliberate collision.

Which explains the charge at Thessalonica in Week Eight’s aquifer: these men are defying Caesar’s decrees, saying there is another king, Jesus. The accusers understood the vocabulary.

And the related verb is what the man in the chariot heard on the desert road, and what Philip did with a passage from this same prophet. Luke says he euangelized Jesus to him, starting from that Scripture.

One consequence of the vocabulary is worth stating plainly. If the gospel is a report, then it can be told wrongly, and Paul says so in Galatians in the harshest language he ever uses. A herald who alters the message has not offered a variation; he has failed at the only task he had.

A runner. A battle already decided. And four words shouted from a hilltop to a city that had not yet heard.

Euangelion occurs about seventy-six times in the New Testament, more than half in Paul, and the related verb euangelizo about fifty-four times, heavily in Luke and Acts. The noun is rare in the Greek Old Testament; the verb is common, and Isaiah 40:9, 52:7 and 61:1 are its key homes.

The Priene calendar inscription from about 9 BC, honoring Augustus, uses the plural of the word for the good news of the emperor’s birthday. Scholars differ on how much weight to put on the parallel, but the word was in public political circulation when the Gospel writers picked it up.

English gospel comes from Old English godspel, good tidings — a translation rather than a transliteration, and one of the few places where the English word carries the sense as well as the Greek.

Isaiah 52:7 is quoted by Paul in Romans 10:15, in the chain studied last week. The verse about the herald’s feet is the proof text for the necessity of sending, and it comes from the paragraph immediately before Isaiah 53.

Isaiah 61:1 — the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor — uses the verb, and it is the line Jesus read at Nazareth in Week Twelve and stopped mid-verse. The word for gospel is in the passage He applied to Himself in His first recorded sermon.

Look it upG2098 εὐαγγέλιον euangelion, good news, gospel · G2097 εὐαγγελίζω euangelizo, to announce good news · H1319 בָּשַׂר basar, to bear news, announce · G2784 κηρύσσω kerusso, to herald, proclaim

Where this touchesIsaiah 40:9; 52:7; 61:1 (Week Twelve, Day One) · Mark 1:1–3 · Romans 10:15 (Week Eighteen, Day Six) · 1 Corinthians 15:1–5 · Acts 8:35 (Week Four, Day One) · Acts 17:7. The earlier word studies were dabar, theopneustos, logos, torah, graphe, emeth, amen, the messenger formula, sepher, edut, imrah, logia, massa, chazon, piqqudim, sod, mitzvah and choq.