Greek Geek Speak: Gospeling the Gospel

My apologies for skipping the month of February in this new series of emails/blog posts, Greek Geek Speak. I have been hard at work on writing a new Bible study on the book of Galatians. Lord willing, this study will be ready this fall, so I am trying to keep to a schedule—it is now completed through Galatians 2!

Since Galatians is what has kept me from Greek Geek Speak, Galatians will be the source book for this installment. I discovered some things in my studies of Galatians 1-2 that I could only have seen by considering the original Greek. In showing you what I discovered, I want to demonstrate the tools that I used to help you make the same kinds of discoveries in God’s Word.

As I read the NASB version, I noticed the word preach was used six times just in Galatians 1. I went to my favorite tool for Greek study online, www.blueletterbible.com to explore this word. At the homepage, there is a search box, where you can type in the book name and chapter (Galatians 1), then choose your favorite Bible version from the pop-up menu. This search takes us to the text of Galatians 1, listed verse by verse. The first appearance of preach is in verse 8 (see screenshot below).

When you touch or click the blue TOOLS button next to verse 8, a menu pops up, where you can choose “Interlinear.”

This opens a new box with the Interlinear arrangement of this verse, with the English in one column, the Greek words in another column, and the Strong’s number in between. A Strong’s number is an indexed number of every word in the original language of the Bible. Scroll down through the list of English words until you find preach, then touch or click on the Strong’s number next to it to open the lexicon (fancy word for a dictionary) for this word.

There are all kinds of tools on this lexicon page for word studies, from information about the part of speech and pronunciation, to root words, definitions, and how many times it appears in the Bible. One of my favorite tools in the lexicon is to scroll all the way to the bottom and see the concordance results that include every verse of the Bible that contains this word.

Using these tools, I discovered that the Greek word for preach in Galatians 1:8 is euangelizo, from the root words eu (good) and angelos (a messenger). When those root words are combined into one, the meaning is to bring good news—in Biblical terms, to preach the gospel. Scrolling down to the concordance, I found this is the same Greek word used behind every occurrence of preach in Galatians 1. You may recognize this Greek word as the source of our English word evangelize.

Using the same tools I found another closely related word in Galatians 1, which is euangelion, the noun form. This word shows up in Galatians 1:6, 7, and 11 and is translated as gospel. Throughout Galatians 1, whether Paul chooses a verb form to describe the act of preaching or a noun form to name the content of his preaching, the focus is the gospel. If you will permit me to form a verb out of the English noun, Paul is gospeling the gospel.

This discovery gets even more interesting when we see that euangleion is not the only word used for preach in the New Testament. In fact, in Galatians 2:2, when Paul speaks of “the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles,” he sticks with the same euangelion word for gospel, but he switches to kerysso as the Greek word translated here as preach. Kerysso also means to preach or proclaim, but the focus is more on the act of preaching and less on the content. When Paul uses euangelizo to describe his preaching, the content of the preaching is wrapped up in the verb that describes the action. This enhances his focus in Galatians 1, where Paul is emphasizing that the content of the gospel he preaches was received directly as a revelation from Jesus Christ.

The Bible translated into our native languages is a tremendous gift that cannot be diminished. But having access to tools that allow us to consider the original Biblical languages is also a gift that should not be overlooked. As we seek to know God deeply in His word, our study can be enhanced by considering the deliberate word choices—including both repetitions and variations of words—used by the original authors of Scripture.