The Greek word translated “gospel/glad tidings/good news” in the New Testament is euangelion. “Eu” in that word means “good.” That meaning continues in English words like euthanasia (good death) and eulogy (good word spoken at funerals and memorial services for someone who has died). “Angelion” means “message.” (The Greek word translated “angel” in many translations simply means messenger. That messenger can be human or heavenly. The focus on angels in the Bible is on their message, not their person or identity.)
Euangelion has two crucial backgrounds we must appreciate to understand the impact of the word “gospel.” ‘Gospel” in the gentile/pagan world referred to the announcement of or about the emperor (Caesar). Such an announcement was proclaimed any time a new emperor came to the imperial throne, when the emperor had achieved a great military victory, when the emperor claimed responsibility for any achievement which he believed benefited his empire, or simply when he needed to polish his image through imperial propaganda. “Gospel” in the ancient Roman Empire was a political, economic, social, military, and religious tool used by Caesar to maintain and increase his status, power, and reputation. The early church coopted the term “gospel” and applied it to Jesus. In other words, “gospel” was a subversive term claiming that the real good news for all the earth came from Jesus and not Caesar.
The Jewish background of the word “gospel” can be seen in passages from Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55).
Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings (euangelion), lift up your voice with strength. O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings (euangelion), lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God.” (Isaiah 40:9)
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger (derivative of euangelion) who announces (derivative of euangelion) peace, who brings good news (euangelion), who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7)
These passages (see also Isaiah 60:6 and 61:1) announce the return of God to Jerusalem as King after the Exile as well as the return of the Jews to their homeland tenderly led by Yahweh. God is returning to be enthroned as King of Her people and of all creation (including the gentiles). This “good news” is not a general announcement applicable at any time in history. It is specific to the return from Exile and the return of God as King. The hope of such a victorious return was alive and cherished in first century Judaism. Many Jews during the time of Jesus and Paul believed that the return from Exile predicted by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had not yet fully taken place. The Essenes referred specifically to these verses in Isaiah and the role of the “herald” as they looked forward to the defeat of the Romans, the victory of their God over all gentiles, and the return of Jews to the straight and narrow Judaism the Essenes embraced. “Gospel” among the Jews also had political, economic, social, military, and religious meanings.
N. T. Wright suggests that “gospel” for Paul and the rest of the writers of the New Testament encompassed both the gentile and the Jewish meanings of the world. It included the words of comfort and promise from Isaiah as well as the imperial meaning intended by Rome. Gospel was the announcement that God had become King through the Christ Event.
Related to these insights regarding “gospel” is the word “Lord.” It, too, has both a gentile/pagan meaning and a Jewish meaning. In the Roman world, “Lord” had the general meaning of “Sir.” “Lord” (dominus) is what slaves called their masters. There were many “lords” in the Roman Empire. However, there was only one “the Lord,” and that person was Caesar. Repeatedly Paul calls Jesus “the Lord.” Such a claim was radically subversive. Early in its history, the church had to decide who was its Lord—Caesar or Jesus. The earliest confession of the church was, “Jesus is Lord.” I would suggest that 21st century Christians have forgotten or never even learned the revolutionary nature of that claim. (Most of Paul’s letters were written while he was in Roman prisons. I would suggest that some of those imprisonments were related to his dangerous claims that Jesus and not Caesar was “the Lord” not only for Christians but for the whole world.)
The Jewish background to the word “Lord” can be appreciated by the way the Septuagint (the primary Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures available to Jews in Jesus and Paul’s day—Paul consistently quotes from the Septuagint). Before the time of Jesus, Jews considered the name Yahweh to be too sacred to pronounce. So, whenever they came to the divine name Yahweh, they substituted Adonai (“my Lord”). Translators of the Septuagint translated Adonai by the Greek word for Lord (Kyrios). Paul was making divine claims for Jesus as well as referring back to passages like Psalms 2, 72, and 78 which present the Davidic king as King of the world. Jesus, not Caesar, was King of the whole earth and all its peoples. Yahweh had become King through Her Son—through what we have called the Christ Event.
One could argue that for Paul, gospel was the announcement that through Christ, God had fulfilled all Her promises to Israel, had become King of Israel and the whole world, and had begun the transformation of the whole universe where justice, peace, love, and reconciliation were at long last becoming reality. N. T. Wright writes the following about this nature of the gospel: The gospel was about “a true story—about a human life, death, and resurrection through which the living God becomes king of the world. A message which had grasped Paul and, through his work, would mushroom out to all the nations. That is Paul’s shorthand summary of what ‘the gospel” actually is.
He continues: It is not, then a system of how people get saved. The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved. But ‘the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus. As the announcer of this good news, Paul becomes the Herald of the King…His announcement was that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead; that he was thereby proved to be Israel’s Messiah; that he was thereby installed as Lord of the world. Or, to put it yet more compactly: Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is Lord.
Since Jesus reveals the true nature of God, the gospel redefines God in radical and shocking ways. (See I Corinthians 1.) God’s power is seen in what the world would see as the weakness of love, forgiveness, compassion, and mercy. We are talking about what Paul called God’s grace. Wrights writes: The word “grace” is a shorthand way of speaking about God himself, the God who loves totally and unconditionally, whose love overflows in self-giving in creation, in redemption, in rooting out evil and sin and death from his world, in bringing to life that which was dead. Paul’s gospel reveals this God in all his grace, all his love.
Wright concludes his chapter entitled “Herald of the King” with these words: My proposal has been that ‘the gospel’ is not, for Paul, a message about ‘how one gets saved,’ in an individual and ahistorical sense. It is a fourfold announcement about Jesus:
- In Jesus of Nazareth, specifically in his cross, the decisive victory has been won over all the powers of evil, including sin and death themselves.
- In Jesus’ resurrection the New Age has dawned, inaugurating the long-awaited time when the prophecies would be fulfilled, when Israel’s exile would be over, and the whole world would be addressed by the one creator God.
- The crucified and risen Jesus was, all along, Israel’s Messiah and her representative king.
- Jesus was therefore also the Lord, the true king of the world, the one at whose name every knee would bow.
It is, moreover, a double and dramatic announcement about God:
- The God of Israel is the one true God, and the pagan deities mere idols.
- The God of Israel is now made known in and through Jesus himself.
Regarding the efficacious nature of the gospel, Wright says the following: The royal proclamation is not simply the conveying of true information about the kingship of Jesus. It is the putting into effect of that kingship, the decisive and authoritative summoning to allegiance. Paul discovered, at the heart of his missionary practice, that when he announced the lordship of Jesus Christ, the sovereignty of King Jesus, this very announcement was the means by which the living God reached out with his love and changed the hearts and lives of men and women, forming them into a community of love across traditional barriers, liberating them from the paganism which had held them captive, enabling them to become, for the first time, the truly human beings they were meant to be. The gospel, Paul would have said, is not just about God’s power saving people. It is God’s power at work to save people.
My hope is that this article will help us understand how Paul understood the gospel. Perceptive readers will realize that this interpretation of what Paul meant by gospel raises a lot of questions. Among the most pressing in my mind are:
- How tethered are we to Paul’s understanding of the gospel? Do we need to see the gospel as announcing the great event Israel had been waiting for over the past 500 years? How Jewish should our interpretation of the gospel be? What should we keep and what might we let go in our own time and place?
- What should be the response of 21st century people to the gospel of Jesus Christ? What place do repentance, forgiveness, justification, redemption, sanctification, etc. play in our response to this announcement of God’s grace?
- Paul and the New Testament use a lot of metaphors to refer to the “saving power” of Jesus’ death. What did those writers intend by those metaphors? Are any of those metaphors useful in our day? What metaphors might we find more helpful?
- Paul and most in the earliest church believed that the final consummation of God’s plan for the world would take place very soon after Jesus’ death and resurrection. And yet, here we are 2000 years later and “Caesar” is still on his throne, greed, violence, and arrogance still strut across the pages of history even into our day, and evil seems to be entrenched in virtually every aspect of human existence. How do we understand and deal with this “delay” in God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven?
These are some of the questions we shall consider in a future article.
(The quotes from N. T. Wright come from his book What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? in a chapter entitled “Herald of the King”, pp. 37-67.)
