Three months ago I announced on the blog that I have been invited to be one of the panellists for a session entitled “What Happened to Mark in Early Christian Exegesis” for the upcoming SBL annual conference in San Antonio. It is always challenging to travel to the U.S. from Australia in November as that is my marking season at the end of the semester, but I was looking forward to going. Yet it was not too long after I accepted the official invitation that my wife and I got the great news that she is pregnant with our second child. We were still planning to go as a family, especially as we could then visit my extended family who would have also made the trip from Canada. However, it is no longer possible for her to go and I do not want to leave her alone with our toddler at that point in her pregnancy. I was hoping that I could either zoom in to the panel or ask someone to read the paper that I prepared, but SBL has restricted the use of zoom since they have a virtual meeting and the session chairs did not think that it would facilitate discussion in the session if someone else read the paper in my absence. I respect their decision and my paper has been withdrawn from the program book. I would still encourage everyone to attend the session because it features a great group of scholars. If you are interested in some of my thoughts on the early reception of Mark’s Gospel since I did my PhD on the topic 10 years ago, I have written some posts on the blog and hopefully will one day publish something on the topic again.

When many people hear the term “gospel” today, they often define it in the following three ways. First, for many evangelicals the “gospel” is the message about how to be saved. Second, for many Christians since the second century CE, a “Gospel” is a book about Jesus. Third, some people like to listen to “gospel” music.” All of these definitions reflect later understandings of the term. I have already posted some thoughts about how Paul and Mark may have understood the term “gospel” (Greek euangelion) and I want to build on those points here.

As I mentioned in the previous post, a great place to start when investigating the term euangelion is Steve Mason’s open-access online article “Methods and Categories: Judaism and Gospel” over at the popular website Bible and Interpretation. I will continue to use the translation “gospel” or “good news” in this post, but I do like how he tries to defamiliarize the term by translating it as “the announcement.” Second, the article does a great job of showing how rare the neuter noun euangelion appears in the singular (cf. Hom.Od. 14.152, 166; Josephus, J.W. 2.420; Plutarch, Ages. 33.4; Demetr. 17.6; Mor. [Glor. Ath.] 347d) or even in the plural euangelia (Josephus, J.W. 4.618, 656; Aristophanes, Eq. 647, 656; Plut. 765; Isocrates, Areop. 10; Xenophon, Hell. 1.6.37; 4.3.14; Aeschines, Ctes. 60; Menander, Peric. 993; Diodorus Siculus, 15.74.2; 2 Sam 4:10 LXX) in pre-Christian literature composed before the Pauline Epistles. For example, euangelia only appears once in the Septuagint, when a messenger who thought that he was bringing David “good news” about the death of King Saul ironically found out that he had made a fatal error in reporting it to him (cf. 2 Sam 4:10 LXX). This can be contrasted with the uses of the noun in the New Testament (see here and here):

• Undisputed Pauline Epistles: Rom 1:1, 9, 16; 2:16; 10:16; 11:28; 14:24; 15:16, 19, 29; 16:25; 1 Cor 4:15; 9:12, 14, 18, 23; 15:1; 2 Cor 2:12; 4:3, 4; 8:18; 9:13; 10:14; 11:4, 7; Gal 1:6, 7, 11; 2:2, 5, 7, 14; Phil 1:5, 7, 12, 16, 17, 27; 2:22; 4:3, 15; 1 Thess 1:5; 2:2, 4, 8, 9; 3:2; Phlm 1:13
• Disputed Pauline Epistles: 2 Thess 1:8; 2:14; Col 1:5, 23; Eph 1:13; 3:6; 6:15, 19; 1 Tim 1:11; 2 Tim 1:8, 10; 2:8
• Mark: 1:1, 14, 15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9 (longer ending: 16:15)
• Matthew: 4:23; 9:35; 24:14; 26:13
• Acts: 15:7; 20:24
• Rest of the New Testament: 1 Peter 4:17; Rev 14:6
• A form of the verb euangelizō (“preach good news”) also appears in the following New Testament texts: Matt 11:5; Luke 1:19; 2:10; 3:18; 4:18; 4:43; 7:22; 8:1; 9:6; 16:16; 20:1; Acts 5:42; 8:4, 12, 25, 35, 40; 10:36; 11:20; 13:32; 14:7, 15, 21; 15:35; 16:10; 17:18; Rom 1:15; 10:15; 15:20; 1 Cor 1:17; 9:16, 18; 15:1, 2; 2 Cor 10:16; 11:7; Gal 1:8, 9, 11, 16, 23; 4:13; Eph 2:17; 3:8; 1 Thess 3:6; Heb 4:2, 6; 1 Pet 1:12, 25; 4:6; Rev 10:7; 14:6

However, I disagree with Mason’s article on two points. First, I recognize that the earliest occurrences of the noun euangelion, and the vast majority of the occurrences, are in the Undisputed Epistles of Paul, but I am not convinced that Paul was the first to employ the singular noun euangelion because he sometimes speaks of “my gospel” (Rom 2:16; 16:25; cf. 2 Tim 2:8) or “our gospel” (2 Cor 4:3; 1 Thess 1:5; cf. 2 Thess 2:14). I think that earlier creedal formulations have been preserved in Corinthians 15:3-5 (i.e. Christ died, was buried, and was raised according to the Scriptures), Romans 1:3-4 (i.e. Jesus was a descendant of David according to the flesh and appointed as God’s son in power from his resurrection from the dead), and 2 Timothy 2:8 (i.e. Jesus the Messiah is from the seed of David and is risen from the dead) and doubt that Paul was the first to apply the term euangelion to the first two creedal statements (cf. Rom 1:2; 1 Cor 15:1; cf. 2 Tim 2:8). Paul’s contribution was to articulate the implications of the euangelion about Jesus’s lordship for the inclusion of the nations in the family of Abraham, for he understood himself as the unique ambassador of the euangelion for the nations and critiqued rival Jewish messengers who had a very different understanding of what the members of the nations who positively responded to their euangelion ought to do to fully become part of that family (cf. Gal 1:6-9). The fact that euangelion appears more in Mark’s Gospel than in any other non-Pauline writing in the New Testament does not prove that it is a Pauline work. The Markan Jesus defines the euangelion as the proclamation of the kingdom of God (cf. Mark 1:14-15) and it is that message that the disciples surrender everything for (8:35; 10:29) and that spreads around the world (13:10; 14:9). The latter two verses fits the traditional expectation for the eschatological ingathering of the nations. Since the kingdom has been at least inaugurated in Jesus’s ministry (e.g., Mark 4:30-32), Mark can include the whole ministry of the proclaimer from his baptism to his resurrection as part of the euangelion (Mark 1:1). Matthew’s Gospel is hardly a Pauline work, yet its author chose to retain the term euangelion. The key difference is that Matthew does not refer to his account of Jesus’s life as a euangelion in the opening verse and three times qualifies the term to explicitly refer to the kingdom (Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14; contra Mark 13:10).

Second, while I cannot explain why the early Jesus followers did not put the noun “good news” in the plural nor followed the preference of the author of Luke-Acts in using the verb to “proclaim good news” more often, I disagree with Mason in downplaying the use of the plural euangelia in the Priene Calendar Inscription or the verb euangelizomai in deutero-Isaiah (cf. LXX Isaiah 40:9; 52:7; 61:1) as parallels for their use of euangelion. I rather suspect that the book of Isaiah was a key source shaping their Christology and eschatology and that their claims about a kingdom and a royal Davidic Messiah would have been heard as a challenge against Roman imperialism. In the end, the euangelion was originally an announcement about the reign of God or the lordship of the crucified and risen anointed one. Thus, the euangelion was initially a royal announcement. Sometimes the term continued to be used as a shorthand for Jesus’s message, or for oral proclamations about the messenger, in the second century CE, but it also came to denote written accounts about Jesus too. For my summary of this development, see Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 111-124.