Good news

εὐαγγελίου: good news, glad tidings, ‘gospel’.

Words are slippery little beasts. The Greek word “euangelion” seems to have started out referring to a gift you give to a person who brought you good news – the opposite of “shooting the messenger”. Later on, first the plural and then the singular come to mean the good news itself. The word seems to have become a bit of a buzz word a decade or so before the time of Christ, when it gets used by the spin-doctors working on Augustus’ public image. There is a famous inscription in Priene, from 9 B.C.:

The providence which has ordered the whole of our life, showing concern and zeal, has ordained the most perfect consummation for human life by giving to it Augustus, by filling him with virtue for doing the work of a benefactor among men, and by sending in him, as it were, a saviour for us and those who come after us, to make war to cease, to create order everywhere… ; the birthday of the god [Augustus] was the beginning for the world of the glad tidings that have come to men through him…

I’m reasonably firmly convinced that the word was still revolving with this theologico-political spin when it first got taken up by the early Christian movement, and that there was at least a hint of subversion involved in using it to describe the news of a different Lord – a different kingdom.
The word then slips slowly but surely into Christian normality – becoming, it seems, first simply one of the normal words Christians use to speak both about the message they spread about Jesus, and the message that Jesus spread (as far as I can make out, with very limited investigation, there seems at least initially to be some ambiguity about which of these is meant), before becoming as it were the official name for a written account of Jesus’ life.

The use of the word here in Mark 1:1 is caught up in that history, and a lot of the debates about how it should be read are attempts to position it more accurately in one episode or another. Is ‘good news of Jesus Christ’ a subjective or an objective genitive? Is there still a consciously subversive political spin? Is this a title for the book, or a description of the content, or simply a description of the message about Jesus of John the Baptist, which Mark is about to describe?

Now, I don’t want to say that we can’t make decisions about this. I’m pretty happy to say, for instance, that (if you’ll permit me switching to English) “Gospel” here does not refer to a style of music associated predominantly with black American church choirs (which is not to say that there’s no chance that some accidentally illuminating fun couldn’t be had by running with that meaning for a moment). Nevertheless, I suspect that there is no way of answering all the questions just posed firmly, and not just because our information is not good enough, but because precisely because it is caught up in a complex history, the word is bound to be somewhat unstable, dragging with it associations over which the author has little control (in this case trailing politics whether Mark wanted it or not), and acquiring new connotations by being used in this particular context (in this case beginning its journey towards becoming a book title precisely by being used in this incipit).

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