Repent and Believe in the Gospel

Repent and Believe in the Gospel.  While we cannot easily recognize the name of the ancient Greek courier, Pheidipiddes (sometimes spelled Philippides), without a little help from Google®, we can immediately recognize the foot race that Pheidipiddes inspired: the marathon. Versions differ, but Greek lore tells that Pheidipiddes sprinted the 42.2 kilometers (26.2 miles) back to Athens with urgent news from the Battle of Marathon, where Darius I first invaded Greece in 490 bc. “Joy, we win,” Pheidipiddes declared, his last words before his sudden death. The Battle of Marathon was the watershed victory in the Greco-Persia Wars where Greece first learned, if the City-States banded together, that they could defeat Persia despite Persia’s overwhelming number of soldiers.

We may not easily recognize the places Athens or Sparta or the name Darius either, but we can all recognize the role that Pheidipiddes filled. He was an evangelist, euangelion, a proclaimer of the gospel, the good news. From Classical Greek literature, which predates the New Testament, the word euangelion already existed, though rarely. A secular evangelist proclaimed victorious news from afar. The angels, announcing Jesus’ birth, masterfully commandeered this uncommon word, euangelion, recasting it in an exclusively Christian sense. “And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news [euangelion] of great joy that will be for all the people’” (Luke 2:10). The rest of the New Testament follows the angelic pattern of speech; every New Testament occurrence of euangelion refers to Christ’s victory.

Therefore, the term gospel in the New Testament is either the good news of Christ’s redemption (76 times) or the action of proclaiming of Christ’s good news (77 times). Or we might repurpose Pheidipiddes’ words, “Joy, we win,” to summarize the gospel, yet in a sense that Pheidipiddes could have never imagined. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel [euangelion]” (Mark 1:15). Our great joy comes from Christ’s victory over death.