The Evangelical Universalist Forum

What is a Gospel?

Recently I’ve been hearing that to the Romans of Jesus’ day, a “gospel” was an announcement of the government of a new ruler, whether a new Caesar or governor of some province, or etc. and it consisted of a flattering bio and a listing of the advantages of being a subject of this new ruler, told how great he was, etc. Therefore the “gospel” of Jesus was a highly subversive idea and amounted to an open declaration of opposition in the eyes of the current government – so the story goes. I like the sound of it and apparently so do at least a handful of current authors . . .

But I looked up the etymology of “gospel” and “euangelion” and I can’t find this supported anywhere on-line. So, is this a half-baked assertion, or is there some truth to it? Does anyone here know?

Thanks!
Cindy

While it sounds plausible–the NT authors demonstrably picked up Greco-Roman terms and phraseologies as marketing for Jesus–I do not recall ever reading this claim, including in books discussing the genre of the Gospels in-depth (which tend to discuss what the meaning of the term would be).

I’ll poke around a little tomorrow to see if I can turn up something I’ve forgotten, though. :slight_smile:

Hi Cinders -

I’ve been keeping an eye out on this one - but can’t find any corroboration that the Romans used the term euangelion’ in their Imperial propaganda (but I will continue to keep an eye open). However…

In Greek, Augustus’ official title was “Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of god.” An inscription from Pergamum reveals Augustus as “The Emperor Caesar, son of god, Augustus, ruler of all land and sea.” A coin of Tiberius, his successor, reads “Son of the Divine Caesar, the Divine Augustus.”

Augustus, like Jesus was spoken of in messianic terms, as the savior of Rome. Virgil wrote in his fourth eclogue wrote, ‘predicting’ the birth of Augustus (after the event)-

The firstborn of the New Ages is already on his way from high heaven down to earth

With him, the Iron Age shall end and Golden Man inherit all the world.

Smile on the Baby’s birth, immaculate Lucina [goddess of childbirth];

your own Apollo is enthroned a last.

(Some Renaissance Christians saw this as a Roman prophecy of the birth fo Christ - but I think/know their reasoning was a bit muddled/badly informed on this point). And Augustus’ project was to unite the world in Peace (Pax Romana) through the force of Roman imperial might. So our Gospel really does subvert the Gosepl of Caesar - I’ve seen it argued that this is especially clear in Luke/Acts.

love

Dick :slight_smile:

  1. The Greek noun translated as “gospel” is “εὐαγγελιον” (euangelion).

  2. The verbal form of this word is “εὐαγγελιζω” (euangelizō)

  3. And this verb is formed from the prefix “ευ” (good) and “αγγελος” (“angel” or "messenger)

  4. Thus “εὐαγγελιον” means “good message”.

Yes – that all makes complete sense Paidon.

When I did an academic search on Google about this topic I saw that there are some some quite extreme and sceptical studies of Christian origins with Gospel of Caesar v. Gospel of Christ as a theme as a theme. For example one continental scholar has argued that the ‘Gospel of Caesar theme suggests that the prototype for Jesus was Julius Caesar, the murdered Roman leader – and perhaps the gospels of Jesus are simply a code for the story of Julius Caesar -but this bloke is looked on as something of a crank (and it sounds as if he is). Another doctoral dissertation from a Yale graduate suggested that Luke/Acts drew upon the story of Israel as a prop0hcy of Christ in the same way that Virgil – the propaganda poet of Augustus – drew upon the story of the wanderings of the exiled Trojan Prince Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome as a prophecy of Augusts’ ‘Age of Gold’. IN connection with Paidon’s point about the original meaning of euvangelion - I note htat there are also angelic meesengers from the heavenly realm that appear in the Aeneid.

In my view the parallels between the Gospel of Rome and the gospel of Caesar in no way suggest that the Gospel of Christ is derived from the Gospel of Caesar. We all agree that or Gospel is in some way a challenge to Caesar rather than a borrowing from his cult. Blah, blah, blah –

And bless you Cindy

Dick

Just to pursue Cindy’s theme one little step further – and really bore you – if Johnny can go around quoting Bob Dylan, I feel empowered to quote a few stanzas from John Milton, classical scholar and poet of Christian liberty, on the theme of the two competing Gospels found in his beautiful ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (stanza IV evokes the world of Caesar made impotent, and note the subversive reference to the classical ‘Age of Gold’ in the final stanza I quote - XIV - and the universal hope implicit in the idea that hell too will one day pass).

I
It was the Winter wild,
While the Heav’n-born-child, 30 ]
All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;…

IV
No War, or Battles sound
Was heard the World around:
The idle spear and shield were high up hung;
The hooked Chariot stood
Unstain’d with hostile blood,
The Trumpet spoke not to the armed throng,
And Kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was nigh…

V
But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of light
His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The Winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave…

XIV
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the Age of Gold,
And speckl’d vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day… :slight_smile:

A bit more trivia: the simpler root behind {aggelos} involves something being literally within reach, close enough to grab (even by the throat!) We have something similar in English when we say something is “handy”.

Consequently, whether there was a pun in Aramaic or not I don’t know, but there’s a sort of Greek pun in the Synoptics whenever Christ (or someone else) is portrayed as preaching the gospel (euangelion) with the exhoration that “the kingdom of God is at hand”! (The term “gospel” and the term for “at hand” or “near” being linguistically closely related.)

Probably the messenger concept derived from messengers carrying written correspondence by hand, so the notion of a written Gospel being carried and given by ambassadors of God is actually quite fitting, too. :smiley:

Edited to add: but I still haven’t found evidence of {euaggelios} or cognates thereof being a common imperial term. I kind of think I recall reading that at one point, from somone who had a respectable command of the sources, but I haven’t been able to turn it up again if so. Not yet anyway. :wink: Unless I am simply imagining it, though, I recall it being a proclamation of specific help or peace for an area from the Emperor, not a promotional bio.

May I just add that if Virgil’s Aeneid is the nearest we have to the Gospel according to Caesar I count it as a matter of pride that I failed my Latin ‘O’ level because I got bored with memorising big chunks of it. The other ancient tome that seem dot be mentioned a lot in the two highly sceptical articles I read about Christian origins when goggling Cindy’s question is the life of Apollonious of Tyre, the prophet of caesaro-paganism. The tired old charge is that he was a miracle worker just like Jesus – so the two are equivalent. However, I read a very interesting article about the sorts of miracles that Apollonius performed. Once he came to a city tormented by plague and disorder. He went to the forum, gathered the citizens and told them that that a destitute old man in their midst was responsible for the contagion. At first everyone laughed at how a poor old man could e responsible for all of this misery. But later with a little more passion injected by Apollonius’ oratory they looked into the old man’s eyes and saw fire. Then in fury they lynched him and felt the god Hercules visiting them in their frenzy; and this brought them peace. This horrible miracle is contrasted by Girard with Jesus saving the woman taken in adultery, also from a lynch mob. He draws the parallel between Jesus keeping his eyes on the ground so as not to reflect and fan the fury of the mob and the way Apollonius acts in the opposite way. The Gospel of Caesar had its miracles – but these were (and are) counterfeit.

The one piece of light relief I get when considering the Gospel of Caesar is that not all Romans believed the lie. When the Emperor Claudius was deified a Roman satirist wrote in praise of the ‘pumpkinification of Claudius!’. And we get the joke because Christ lead the powers in triumph in his death on the cross

May I just add that if Virgil’s Aeneid is the nearest we have to the Gospel according to Caesar I count it as a matter of pride that I failed my Latin ‘O’ level because I got bored with memorising big chunks of it. The other ancient tome that seem dot be mentioned a lot in the two highly sceptical articles I read about Christian origins when goggling Cindy’s question is the life of Apollonious of Tyre, the prophet of caesaro-paganism. The tired old charge is that he was a miracle worker just like Jesus – so the two are equivalent. However, I read a very interesting article about the sorts of miracles that Apollonius performed. Once he came to a city tormented by plague and disorder. He went to the forum, gathered the citizens and told them that that a destitute old man in their midst was responsible for the contagion. At first everyone laughed at how a poor old man could e responsible for all of this misery. But later with a little more passion injected by Apollonius’ oratory they looked into the old man’s eyes and saw fire. Then in fury they lynched him and felt the god Hercules visiting them in their frenzy; and this brought them peace. This horrible miracle is contrasted by Girard with Jesus saving the woman taken in adultery, also from a lynch mob. He draws the parallel between Jesus keeping his eyes on the ground so as not to reflect and fan the fury of the mob and the way Apollonius acts in the opposite way. The Gospel of Caesar had its miracles – but these were (and are) counterfeit.

The one piece of light relief I get when considering the Gospel of Caesar is that not all Romans believed the lie. When the Emperor Claudius was deified a Roman satirist wrote in praise of the ‘pumpkinification of Claudius!’. And we get the joke because Christ lead the powers in triumph in his death on the cross

Wow!

How’d I miss all this? Thanks, guys. Either I forgot to check the “follow topic” box or else something happened when we were off line. I thought my little question had died a quiet death and here I just now find all these helpful contributions. I believe one of a couple of places I read this in was Scott McKnight’s “The King Jesus Gospel”, but I’ll have to go back and make sure. Of course it only just now occurred to me . . . duh . . . I could ask him where he got that. It’s wonderful being able to write to all kinds of people from their web pages and have them, more often than not, actually answer our inquiries. :smiley:

I read this kind of thing and my first tendency is to just believe what the author said because why would he/she lie? But it isn’t infrequent that I find that the author wrote what he wrote because HE just believed what someone else said to him and so on and so on and before you know it we have eternal conscious torment. So it really doesn’t do to go swallowing down urban legends, does it?

Anyway, thanks for all your hard work researching this, Dick and Jason, and for your clarification, Paidion. I love the bits I’ve read of Paradise Lost, Dick, and maybe some day I’ll go the whole way and actually get past the garden. :wink: I’m still interested in any and everything you may happen to run across – and sorry about being tardy to join in here. :blush:

Love, Cindy

I still haven’t turned up any positive discussion of the theory that {euaggelion} was borrowed from a term for an imperial promotional biography form, but poking around in Hengel’s The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, I noticed he disposes quickly of some unstated mention of derivation from “the ruler cult” in his 7th footnote, while discussing with some detail occurrences of the term in the Greek OT. (It never appears as a biographical term there either, but is sometimes a royal pronouncement such as victory in battle.)

From the way he describes it, as “an inscription”, I doubt he’s talking about the same theory you’ve heard about, but this is the closest I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Paradise Lost is great - but I carry the ‘Hymn on the morning of Christ’s Nativity’ in my heart - I sang a beautiful setting of it when I was boy. As well as healing words and images, the rhythm is healing too - and Keats in his ‘Desolation Ode’ breaks into the rhythms of this poem when begins to cheer up :smiley: So I’m not alone in this view - indeed I’m in very good company :laughing: And in Wordsworth’s opinion -

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In chearful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

Today, we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John the four “gospels.” I noticed the 2nd century church called them “the memoirs of Christ” — in my opinion a more descriptive appelation.

The 2nd century church definitely did not like to refer to them as Gospels (plural), and wasn’t real keen on referring to even one at a time as a Gospel per se. This continues even after the proliferation of apocryphals. It’s a strong but subtle line of evidence that the composition of the texts precedes the 2nd century, even though they aren’t cited a lot in surviving extracanonical texts.

There’s a good chance that the competing “Gospels” (and “Acts”) got going precisely because the canonical texts were routinely treated (for various reasons) as being resources for church leaders (whom people would regard as the spiritually “elite”, whether the leaders promoted themselves that way or not) rather than as publicly available documents, even for liturgical purposes. People wanted to feel like they were also of the spiritually elite, maybe over-against those orthodox people who kept the texts to themselves, so alternative Gospels for the ‘real’ spiritually elite were fadged up to supply the demand.

Another point that I recall reading (I think in Hengel, since I mentioned his book :wink: ), is that one big difference between the canonicals and the apocryphals indicates a shift in how the attribution was used, with the canonicals on one side and the later apocryphals (whether orthodox or not) on the other: the original four texts used the form {kata Markon}, an accusative form “down-by Mark” or “down-from” or “according to”–with “The Gospel” added later with increasing embellishments but always for a long time in the accusative form “The Gospel According to Mark”. But the new texts treated the term “Gospel” as though it belonged to the author, thus as we still popularly say “The Gospel of Mark” which would have “Mark” in genitive form {Markou}.

Mark himself however calls his work {archê tou euaggeliou iêsou xristou} the start (or beginning or first or several other possible translations) of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It isn’t Mark’s gospel, it’s Jesus Christ’s gospel. Mark just wrote it down, {kata Markon}. :slight_smile:

Or maybe I’m misremembering what I read on that. I haven’t tried to recheck it yet (although if I read it anywhere I’m sure it was in Hengel primarily, referenced by some other authors, too.)

“Down-by Mark” :unamused: This is indeed an unusual translation!!!

You recognize that “markon” is in the accusative form. But “kata” means “down” only when it is followed by the genitive.

With the accusative it means only “according to” or “during”.

Oho! – yes, I had forgotten that. My bad. Thanks for the correction. :slight_smile:

(Of course, I didn’t say merely “down”–which would be the adverb {kato}, not the preposition {kata}, and which as the preposition {kata} in a genitive instead of accusative prepositional phrase typically means “against”, as in “down against”. “Against Mark” would be a rather different meaning! I did say “down-by” or “down-from”, which is what “according to” amounts to. :wink: The accusative {kata} means a whole lot of other things, too, being quite a general purpose preposition. The genitive is much rarer.)