Μark 1: 1-8
1:1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
1:2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way;
1:3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”
1:4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
1:5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
1:6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.
1:7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.
1:8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
[1]Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ.
[2]῾Ως γέγραπται ἐν τοῖς προφήταις, ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου,
ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν σου ἔμπροσθέν σου·
[3]φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν Κυρίου,
εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ,
[4]ἐγένετο ᾿Ιωάννης βαπτίζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ καὶ κηρύσσων βάπτισμα μετανοίας εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν.
[5]καὶ ἐξεπορεύετο πρὸς αὐτὸν πᾶσα ἡ ᾿Ιουδαία χώρα καὶ οἱ ῾Ιεροσολυμῖται, καὶ ἐβαπτίζοντο πάντες ἐν τῷ ᾿Ιορδάνῃ ποταμῷ ὑπ᾿ αὐτοῦ ἐξομολογούμενοι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν.
[6]ἦν δὲ ὁ ᾿Ιωάννης ἐνδεδυμένος τρίχας καμήλου καὶ ζώνην δερματίνην περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐσθίων ἀκρίδας καὶ μέλι ἄγριον.
[7]καὶ ἐκήρυσσε λέγων· ἔρχεται ὁ ἰσχυρότερός μου ὀπίσω μου, οὗ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἱκανὸς κύψας λῦσαι τὸν ἱμάντα τῶν ὑποδημάτων αὐτοῦ.
[8]ἐγὼ μὲν ἐβάπτισα ὑμᾶς ἐν ὕδατι, αὐτὸς δὲ βαπτίσει ὑμᾶς ἐν Πνεύματι ῾Αγίῳ.
Comments
The evangelion of St Mark begins. What does this noun mean and how did it come to mean ‘good tidings’? This question takes us to still another chapter in ‘semantic shift’ in the Greek language from Homer to Lucian. In a war-torn culture (many contemporary examples leap to mind!) messengers likelier than not conveyed public news of military victory or its opposite. Perhaps that is why the term appears frequently but not exclusively in the setting of war.
[1] τοῦ εὐαγγελίου: εὐαγγέλιον, τό, is first attested in Homer, Odyssey 14.152, etc. where it means ‘a reward for announcing good news that is proven true’. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar in Ithaka, tells a local swineherd that King Odysseus (taken for long dead) will soon return and that he (the supposed beggar) will therefore expect an εὐαγγέλιον for the news (also noted in my comments on 11th Dec. 2022).
In cl. Attic (Athenian) poetry and prose the term is always in the pl., and means a sacrifice to a god in thanksgiving for good news or token of thanks given to the messenger who brings good news. Τὰ εὐαγγέλια is either i) a sacrifice for ‘good tidings’, most freq. about the progress of a war campaign (e.g., Isocrates 7.10) or ii) as in Homer, a reward for bringing good news, e.g., that the eyesight of the god Wealth has been restored and the virtuous poor can therefore become prosperous (Aristophanes, Wealth 765). This use of the pl. is attested also in LXX, 2 Samuel 4:10, where it refers to the reward given to a messenger for announcing that Saul was dead. The cognate fem. noun εὐαγγελία, ἡ, meaning ‘good news’ occurs, in a military setting, in 2 Kings 7:9, ἡμέρα εὐαγγελίας, ‘the day of good news’, of the retreat of the Aramaeans.
Cicero (d. 43 BC)—who brings us close to the time of Jesus— uses the pl. εὐαγγέλια (written in Greek) to refer to the good news about a judicial victory (Ad Atticum 2.3.1). Good tidings from the war front and news about the restoration of prosperity combine in a Greek inscription from Priene in Asia Minor, dated to ca 9 BC (IK Priene 14, now in Berlin). The Greek community declared that they honoured (and in effect rewarded) Augustus Caesar by adopting the 23rd September, his birthday, as the inception of their local calendar, for the day of his birth brought the εὐαγγέλια, the ‘good news’ for the world that his reign was to usher in order and prosperity (see further https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_Inscription_of_Priene). It is a humorous coincidence that the mid- and late 2nd c. AD satirist Lucian uses the sg. to mean ‘the good news’ in his Lucius, or The Ass 26, as does St Mark. In Lucian the donkey brays the εὐαγγέλιον, the ‘good news’ that a girl has been rescued from robbers (Asinus 26). This suggests that the sg. was already current by Mark’s time as an alternative.
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In fine, εὐαγγέλιον occurs from the classical period on in the pl. in the sense of ‘thanks for good news’ (a sense adumbrated in Homer), but by Cicero’s time if not earlier the pl. was extended to denote simply ‘good news’. The sg. form in the sense of ‘good news’ traces back to St Mark’s time if not earlier.
Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ: as in cl. Gk, no article is necessary before a proper name. This is both a genitive of subject (Jesus delivers the good news) or a genitive of object (‘the good news about Jesus’); see EDNT s.v. εὐαγγέλιον, p. 70, section 1.
[4] βαπτίζων: βαπτίζω,in cl. Gk, ‘dip, plunge’; ‘soak’; in the Gospels, ‘baptise’. It derives from βάπτω, ‘Ι dip, immerse’, first attested in the Odyssey 9. 392 in the Cyclops episode, where it refers to dipping a red-hot iron axe in cold water.
[5] ἐξομολογούμενοι τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν: ἐξομολογοῦμαι, ‘I confess in full’ (LSJ); the preverb ἐξ- denotes thoroughness. The vb occurs in LXX Daniel 9: 4, 20 where it is also construed, as here, with the acc. obj. τὰς ἁμαρτίας. The notion of public confession of sins seems to be alien to ancient Greece, although one could ‘admit, confess’ (ὁμολογῶ, προσομολογῶ) something to another, e.g. ignorance, wrongdoing, etc.
Insights into Biblical Greek Grammar and Syntax 