The gospel or good news is a theological concept in several religions. In the historical Roman imperial cult and today in Christianity, the gospel is a message about salvation by a divine figure, a savior, who has brought peace or other benefits to humankind. In Ancient Greek religion, the word designated a type of sacrifice or ritual dedication intended to thank the gods upon receiving good news.
The religious concept is found at least as far back as Greece's Classical Greece and Roman authors are known to have adopted it toward the end of the 1st century BCE. It is a central message of Christianity today, in which written accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ are known as .
Etymology
Gospel () is the
Old English translation of
Koine Greek εὐαγγέλιον, meaning "good news". This may be seen from analysis of ( + +
diminutive suffix). The Greek term was Latinized as evangelium in the
Vulgate, and translated into
Latin as bona annuntiatio.
In Old English, it was translated as gōdspel (gōd, "good" + spel, "news"). The Old English term was retained as gospel in Middle English Bible translations and hence remains in use also in Modern English.
In Greek the term originally designated a reward or Gratuity customarily paid to a Courier who has delivered good news. The term then came to designate the good news itself, and also a religious offering of thanks for good fortune.
In Greek and Roman religion
Ancient Greece
In Ancient Greek religion the word εὐαγγέλια means a sacrifice offered for good tidings or good news.
Like other Greek religious thanks-offerings, offerings took the form of
animal sacrifice, offerings of food and drink, and ritual dedications. News of military victory was frequently celebrated with an offering. In the play
The Knights by
Aristophanes of 424 BCE, the comic character Paphlagon proposes an excessive sacrifice of a hundred heifers to
Athena to celebrate good news.
This word in Greek has a double meaning: the singular form means a reward paid to a human messenger who brings good news, and the plural form means a thanks-offering to the gods for good news.
Rome
The Roman Imperial cult celebrated the gospel of the
Augustus Caesar or Divus Augustus, a mythologized version of the first
Roman emperor Octavian, also known as Augustus Caesar.
Augustus was both a man and a god, "a
salvation who has made war to cease and who shall put everything in peaceful order."
This period of peace is called the
Pax Romana. To celebrate the good tidings of peace with an unusually grand gospel offering, governor Paullus Fabius Maximus suggested the ritual dedication of the calendar to Augustus, starting the new year on Augustus's birthday.
This dedication to the August One served to synchronize diverse local calendars across the Empire, and is the origin of the name of the month
August. The idea of dedication to a divine king's birthday later formed the basis of the
Julian calendar and Gregorian calendars.
One implementation of this gospel calendar dedication is recorded in the Calendar Inscription of Priene. In it, the Koine Greek word for "good news" appears in celebrating the birth of the god and savior Augustus, sent by Providentia to bring peace. It announces the intention of the city of Priene to change their calendar so that it begins on the birthday of Augustus, the first day of the good news. The Priene inscription is the most famous pre-Christian use of the concept of the gospel. Dated to 9 BCE, a few years before the birth of Jesus, the inscription demonstrates that the gospel was used as a political term before it was applied to Christianity.
In the Bible and Christianity
Hebrew scripture
The
Mishnaic Hebrew noun בְּשׂוֹרָה (
besorah) appears to carry the same double meaning as the equivalent Greek word for gospel, used for both a messenger delivering good news and a thanks-offering to a god upon receiving good news. The noun and verb forms are used several times in the
Hebrew Bible.
Christian interpretation
Christian theology describes the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ not as a new concept, but one that has been foretold throughout the Hebrew scripture (known as the
Old Testament in Christian Bibles) and was prophetically preached even at the time of the fall of man as contained in Genesis 3:14–15,
which has been called the "
Protevangelium" or "Proto-Gospel".
[ The Proto-Gospel, by R. C. Sproul.][The Lutheran Study Bible, p20, "3:15...This points to Christ and His defeat of Satan on the cross, and for this reason this verse is often called the 'protevangelium' (the first promise of the Gospel)"]
New Testament
The Gospels
A
genre of ancient biographies of Jesus took on the name
Gospel because they tell good news of Jesus as the Christian savior, bringing peace and acting as a sacrifice who has redeemed mankind from
sin. The first four books of the Christian
New Testament are the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In addition, a number of non-canonical gospels exist or existed but are not officially included in the
Christian Bible.
In the Pauline epistles
Paul the Apostle gave the following summary, one of the earliest Christian Creeds, (translated into English) of this good news (gospel) in the First Epistle to the Corinthians:
Paul describes the gospel as being powerful and salvific:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.
Romans 1:16
In Acts
The good news can be summarized in many ways, reflecting various emphases. C. H. Dodd
[ What Does Kerygma Mean?] has summarized the Christian good news as taught by the apostle
Saint Peter in the Acts of the Apostles:
-
The age of fulfilment has dawned;
-
This has taken place through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus;
-
By virtue of the resurrection, Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God as messiah head of the new Israel;
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The Holy Spirit in the Christian Church is the sign of Christ's present power and glory;
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The Messianic Age will shortly reach its consummation in the Second Coming.
In various Christian movements
The good news is described in many different ways in the Bible. Each one reflects different emphases, and describes part or all of the biblical narrative. Christian teaching of the good news—including the preaching of the Apostles in the Book of Acts—generally focuses upon the resurrection of Jesus and its implications. Sometimes in the Bible, the good news is described in other terms, but it still describes God's saving acts. For example, the Apostle Paul taught that the good news was announced to the patriarch Abraham in the words, "All nations will be blessed through you." (Galatians 3:6–9;
c.f. Genesis 12:1–3).
Liberation theology
Liberation theology, articulated in the teachings of Latin American Catholic theologians
Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez, emphasizes that Jesus came not only to save humanity, but also to liberate the poor and oppressed. A similar movement among the Latin American evangelical movement is the
integral mission, in which the Church is seen as an agent for positively transforming the wider world, in response to the good news.
[Padilla 2004, p. 20]
Christian mission
The Christian missions movement believes the Christian good news to be a message for all peoples, of all nations, tribes, cultures and languages. This movement teaches that it is through the good news of Jesus that the nations of humanity are restored to relationship with God and that the destiny of the nations is related to this process.
Missiology professor Howard A. Snyder writes, "God has chosen to place the Church with Christ at the very center of His plan to reconcile the world to himself".
[Snyder 1999, p. 139]
Another perspective described in the Pauline epistles is that it is through the good news of Jesus' death and resurrection, and the resulting worship of people from all nations, that evil is defeated on a cosmic scale. Reflecting on the third chapter of Ephesians 3,
See also
Notes
Footnotes
Sources
-
Dodd, C. H. 1964 The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments Harper and Row.
-
General Directory for Catechesis 1997, Congregation for the Clergy
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Goldsworthy, G, 1991, According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible Sydney: Lancer Press.
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Johnstone, P, 2001, Operation World, Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Lifestyle.
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Köstenberger, A and P. O'Brien, 2001, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission New Studies in Biblical Theology 11, Leicester: Apollos.
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Padilla, R, 2004, 'An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission,' in The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission, T. Yamamori and C. R. Padilla, eds, Buenos Aires: Kairos Ediciones.
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Snyder, H. A., 1999, 'The Church in God's Plan,' in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, 3rd edn, Pasadena, California: William Carey Library.
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Jepsen, Bent Kim, 2009 The Origin of Good News
External links
