What Is the Gospel? Reclaiming the Radical Meaning of “Good News”

So today we’re diving into a word that shows up everywhere in church circles but often without much clarity—the gospel. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times. “Just preach the gospel!” “Believe the gospel!” But let’s be honest: most of us were handed this word without much explanation. And if we’ve been in church for a while, we just assume we know what it means. But do we?

That’s what I’ve been wrestling with. What does this word actually mean? Where did it come from? What did it mean to Jesus? To the first-century Christians? And how did they understand it when they first heard it proclaimed?

This isn’t a one-and-done conversation—it’s going to take a couple of videos and articles to unpack. But in this first one, I want to lay some groundwork by talking about the origin of the word, how it’s used in the book of Acts, and how deeply political and subversive it actually was when it first began to circulate.

I’ve been sitting with Acts 14 in my devotional time—using the Lectio Divina Bible, which removes chapters and verses and lets you just read the story—and I noticed something. Three times in that one chapter alone, Luke tells us that Paul and Barnabas were “proclaiming the good news.” In verse 7, they “continued to proclaim the good news.” In verse 15, they say, “We are proclaiming the good news to you.” And in verse 21, “After they had proclaimed the good news…”

That’s not filler. Luke is making a point. And yet, if we’re honest, most of us have no idea what exactly they were saying. He doesn’t spell it out for us in that chapter. It’s just assumed that we know what it means. But if we trace it back, that word—good news, or gospel—had a very particular meaning long before Jesus was even born.

The Greek word used is euangelion (noun) and euangelizō (verb). It means “good news,” but it wasn’t a neutral or generic kind of good news. This was a loaded word in the Greco-Roman world. In fact, around 9 BCE, in a city called Priene in Asia Minor, an inscription was written about Caesar Augustus that said, “The birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the world that came through him.”

That’s gospel language. Before Christians ever used it.

This was propaganda for the Roman Empire. When a new emperor came into power or when some great victory was won, they would send messengers into towns and cities to announce the euangelion—the good news that Rome was still strong, that Caesar reigned, and that peace was secured. And that word—euangelion—was the one the early church writers chose to describe what Jesus had done.

Now let’s just pause and sit in that for a minute. That’s not just a spiritual statement. That’s a political one. The early followers of Jesus took a word that was already being used by Rome to proclaim Caesar’s greatness and said, “No, no, no—the real good news isn’t about Caesar. It’s about Jesus.”

And that’s risky. That’s bold. That’s dangerous.

So when Luke tells us in Acts that Paul and Barnabas were proclaiming the good news, he’s tying it back to something much bigger. It’s not just about personal salvation. It’s not just “ask Jesus into your heart and go to heaven when you die.” It’s about an entirely new kingdom breaking into the world. A new reality. A new peace. A new way to be human. And it’s rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—not the military power or politics of Rome.

Luke isn’t just writing history here. He’s doing theology. He’s making meaning out of the events. And he’s doing it deliberately, from the very beginning of his writings. Go back to Luke 2, where the angel appears to the shepherds and says, “I bring you good news of great joy for all people.” Same word—euangelizō. And notice how subversive that statement is. The angel isn’t proclaiming the good news of Augustus. He’s proclaiming the good news of Jesus.

That’s how Luke sets the stage: from the first breath of Jesus’s life, he’s reclaiming and redefining what power, peace, and salvation look like.

This is why I think we need to recover the full meaning of gospel. It’s more than a religious term. It’s more than a tract or a sinner’s prayer. It’s a declaration that another way is possible—that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. That Jesus brings peace, not violence. That Jesus invites us into a new kingdom, not just out of the world but for the sake of the world.

And so, when we read Acts and we see Paul and Barnabas going from city to city proclaiming the good news, we need to understand the cost of that message. This wasn’t safe. It wasn’t neutral. It was a direct challenge to the existing powers of their day. They weren’t just preaching sermons—they were announcing a revolution.

Now, as for the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—they weren’t originally called “gospels.” They were written anonymously. No one signs their name. The titles were added later by the early church to give each account an apostolic voice—meaning that it came from an eyewitness or someone close to an eyewitness of Jesus. For example, Mark traveled with Peter, so his Gospel likely reflects Peter’s memories. Luke was an investigator, gathering firsthand accounts and compiling them into a narrative. Only Matthew and John, as far as we know, were actual disciples who walked with Jesus.

So those titles—“The Gospel According to…”—were added not to create a genre, but to clarify authorship and authority. And eventually, that word gospel became the dominant label for these four writings. But it’s worth remembering that what we call “The Gospel of Mark” was originally something like “The good news according to Mark,” or even “Mark’s proclamation of the good news about Jesus.”

That’s why I tend to call them biographies. Not modern biographies, of course—they have theological agendas. But they’re stories meant to lead you somewhere. To call you to trust. To provoke a decision.

These biographies were written with one aim: to help you see that trusting Jesus is, in fact, good news.

So maybe, instead of simply saying “preach the gospel,” we need to ask, “What kind of good news are we proclaiming? Who does it challenge? Who does it lift up? And does it still sound like Jesus?”

I’ll stop here for now. But in the next piece, we’ll dig further into how Jesus himself used this word—how Peter and Paul picked it up—and what it meant in their context. Because the more we understand the word, the more we’ll understand the weight and wonder of the message behind it.