"Gospel" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Good news everyone! Today we’ll be delivering the Good News! I mean, welcome to the Endless Knot, and today, as part of a We Create EDU group collab, we’re going to talk about Good News!

We could all use some good news these days, so let’s start with the words good news. Good, from Old English gōd, which basically had all the wide range of senses that the modern word does, comes from Proto-Germanic *godaz, which meant something like “fitting, suitable”. This likely goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ghedh- “to unite, join, fit”, also the source of the words gather and together. So the sense shift was “brought together”, “united”, “fitting, suitable”, “pleasing”, and finally “good”. And it should be said that good, with that long /o/ sound in Old English gōd, is not etymologically related to the word god with its short /ɑ/ sound, and so in the word gospel, which means literally “good news”, that first element is the word good not god. It’s mere coincidence that they sound somewhat similar. We’ll get back to that in a minute. As for the word news, obviously it’s the plural of new, meaning basically “new things”, which goes back to Old English niwe, and ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European *newo- “new”, which through Latin novus also gives us words such as novel, novice, and renovate, and through Greek neos the prefix neo- in words such as neologism and neo-classical. Now that word gospel was coined in Old English as godspel “good news”, with the second element spel, from which we get both spell as in a magic spell and spell as in spelling, meaning “story, saying, tale, history”, from the PIE root *spel- “to say aloud, recite”. And of course gospel refers to the biblical books which tell the Christian story of Jesus.
But what actually is a gospel, and why is it called that? Well, first of all we have to establish some basic assumptions about the historical textual study of the gospels (leaving any faith based arguments aside). There are various views about the texts, but what follows is the general scholarly consensus. It’s believed that all four gospels were written sometime between 65 CE and 95 CE. The names of the evangelists (that is the supposed writers of the gospels) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to them only later for reasons we’ll get to in a minute, so they were originally anonymous compositions. Following from these points, none of the gospel writers personally witnessed the events they wrote about, and thus, each writer used earlier sources to craft their texts, both written and oral. Indeed the events surrounding Jesus’ life were preserved only in an oral tradition for some time before being written down. Now given the textual parallels between the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, what are called the synoptic gospels, synoptic meaning literally “seen together”, they must have a direct textual relation, and biblical scholars have established that the earliest one written was Mark’s gospel, with both Matthew and Luke using it as their main source but departing from it in various ways. Luke, for instance adds the whole nativity story as Mark doesn’t contain anything about Jesus’ birth and growing up. There are also a number of hypothetical sources that, though they no longer exist, we can tell the evangelists used, such as the Q source, a collection of Jesus’ sayings used by both Matthew and Luke, but not by the earlier Mark. In terms of genre, one might be tempted at first to think of them as biographies, but ancient biography is very different from what we might expect of a biography today. Ancient biographies, called bios meaning “life” in Greek, are not really concerned with giving journalistically or historically factual narratives. Instead they use details from the life of their subject polemically, to make a point, and to make a moral or didactic statement about behaviour which should be either imitated, or, in the case of a negative portrayal, avoided. Some well-known authors of such biographies are Plutarch and Suetonius — both wrote primarily about political and military leaders such as Alexander, Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus, and use the lives of those men to demonstrate good and bad qualities of leadership. Another word sometimes used to refer to the gospels is Greek apomnemoneumata essentially meaning “memoirs”, the plural of apomnemoneuma, basically “anecdote”. Apomnemoneumata is the term used to refer to Xenophon’s “biography” of Socrates, and this genre is essentially a collection of anecdotes arranged to make a particular didactic point about Socrates’ philosophy and how to live a good life. Indeed the parallel between Jesus and his followers, and the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and his students, Plato and Xenophon, is very apt. And perhaps the best way of thinking about the gospels, and of the works by the students of Socrates (who, like Jesus, never wrote anything down himself), is as students’ notes from lectures by their teacher. And that makes sense given that the word gospel (or really its Greek and Latin equivalents) was originally used to refer not to the books themselves but the story they told: that was the good news. The texts as we have them show signs of having existed in an oral tradition at some point, so we can imagine the lessons being passed down from teacher to student before being recorded in writing. Those written versions were then named to lend them authority by indicating a connection to the early apostles. This was important because there were numerous other “gospels”, later considered apocryphal, that were floating around at the time. And it’s important to point out that though they are often referred to as the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, and so forth, grammatically speaking they are actually titled the Gospel According to Mark, and so forth. So in a sense, same gospel, same lesson, but recorded differently by different people. At least that’s one way to look at the gospels. But others have pointed towards the similarity between the gospels and the biographical texts in Hebrew scripture, like the stories of Samson or Elijah, so in the end, we may be looking at a hybrid genre combining Greek and Jewish generic conventions and traditions.

Now another strong association of the word ‘gospel’ is gospel music. Gospel music has its ultimate origins in the the 17th century in the American South in the context of slavery. Enslaved Africans brought with them their musical and other cultural traditions. However, they weren’t allowed to engage in their traditional religious practises, and many of them were converted to Christianity, so they combined their own musical forms, and the field hollers that also developed among the enslaved people based on African traditions, with the European hymn tradition. And it’s in this context that we see the emergence of spirituals and later gospel music. The hymns would be sung in a call and response form drawn from the African music and were sung, at least initially, a cappella accompanied only by hand claps or foot stomps. We’ll talk in a little more detail about these early origins of African American music, including field hollers and the influence of Islamic musical traditions, in an upcoming video coming out soon. As for spirituals, a word which comes from Latin spiritus originally meaning literally “breath”, probably from the Proto-Indo-European root *peis- “to blow”, it was first recorded in its current musical sense in 1858, but ultimately stems from the King James Bible’s translation of Ephesians 5:19, which says, “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord”. As for the musical use of the word gospel, the term gospel song, first used by composer Philip Bliss and sometimes now referred to as shape note music, was used in the 19th century to refer to a simplified kind of religious singing with a swung rhythm and repeated refrain, but without all the complex arrangements and harmony of the hymn tradition. It appeared in the context of the 19th century Great Awakenings, particularly in the Methodist Church and aimed at working class people in large cities, and came out of the association between American evangelist and publisher Dwight L. Moody and singer and composer Ira D. Sankey. But what we would now understand as gospel music, that is traditional Black gospel, was a product of the early 20th century, though the term gospel or gospel music wasn’t used to refer to it until as late as the 1950s. That gospel music grew out of the African American spirituals and the blues, as well as hymns and the 19th century gospel song. By the 1920s and 30s, gospel music found a new popular audience outside of church meetings, with radio airplay and records, due in large part to the work of composer Thomas A. Dorsey, bringing in elements of jazz and the blues, and singers Sallie Martin and Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith, who performed his music. The first big commercially successful African American gospel recording artist was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was known not only for her electrifying vocal performance but also for accompanying herself on the electric guitar in a style that led the way for electric blues and rock & roll guitar soloing. There was of course initially some pushback from more conservative church leaders about the blending of religious music and more worldly styles of music, but the performances of these early gospel musicians won the day. And by the the 1950s and early 60s gospel music spawned a new genre of secular music called soul, which you can hear more about in our video “Soul Food & Early Black Women’s Writing”.
So Sister Rosetta Tharpe, born Rosetta Nubin, is remarkable for a number of reasons. Not only was she a gospel recording sensation, with one of her records being the first gospel song to “crossover” into popular territory and charting at #2 in Billboard’s “Race Music” chart, which was later named “Rhythm & Blues”, but she was also a pioneer in what became known as rock & roll, soloing with a distorted electric guitar sound, and she was later inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 as an early influence, inspiring rockers such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. But in addition to breaking records and breaking ground, she also broke many of the social conventions of her day, most obviously by being a guitar virtuoso, with guitarist being a very male centred role at the time. She first started playing guitar when she was just 4 years old and within 2 years she was already performing with her mother’s travelling evangelical troupe in churches across the South. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singer, mandolin player, evangelist and preacher for the Church of God in Christ, which was founded by Black Baptist bishop Charles Mason, who encouraged rhythmic expression, dancing in praise and allowing women to preach in church. By age 20, Tharpe had moved to New York to pursue her musical career, and by age 23 she began her hugely successful recording career, recording four songs for Decca Records in 1938. And in addition to be a woman in the spotlight, a Black woman no less, she was also a queer Black woman, in charge of her own destiny often performing her gospel music in secular settings and incorporating secular styles. It was a fairly well known secret that she was bisexual, being married several times (first to preacher Thomas Thorpe from whom she derived her stage name Sister Rosetta Tharpe), but also maintaining romantic relationships with women throughout her life. One of the women she is rumoured to have had a relationship with is fellow gospel singer Marie Knight (born Marie Roach but keeping the last name Knight after a brief marriage to preacher Albert Knight). Tharpe first encountered Knight in 1946 when she performed on a bill with yet another gospel great Mahalia Jackson at the Golden Gate Auditorium in Harlem, and recognizing “something special” in Knight, Tharpe invited her to join her on tour. Tragically Knight’s two children died in a house fire while the two were out on tour. Nevertheless, Tharpe and Knight collaborated extensively throughout the rest of the 40s, not only touring but making very successful recordings together. In 1951, Knight decided to go solo again, but the two continued to be good friends and regularly reunited on stage. Knight later helped arrange Tharpe’s funeral in 1973, and contributed to a tribute record for Tharpe in 2002.
As for Mahalia Jackson, who was born in New Orleans but relocated to Chicago, she was not only a massively successful gospel singer and recording artist, she has also come to be thought of as the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement. She would always answer the call from Martin Luther King, Jr. to perform at events even in the segregated deep South in spite of death threats, including the March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery marches, and King’s funeral. At the March on Washington, in addition to performing, during King’s famous speech, Jackson called out “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”, inspiring him to depart from his prepared text and improvise the “I have a dream” part. And, of course, for his efforts at combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

The Nobel Prizes were established upon the death of Alfred Nobel in 1896, and first awarded in 1901. In his later years, after making a fortune through arms manufacturing, Nobel read his own obituary in the newspaper, mistakenly published following the death of his brother Ludvig. It read Le marchand de la mort est mort (”The merchant of death is dead”), and continued “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Concerned about how he would be remembered after his actual death, and having never married nor had children, he left 94% of his fortune for the establishment of awards in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Himself a chemist, engineer, and inventor, Alfred Nobel was born in impoverished circumstances, but showed an early interest in engineering, especially explosives, which he learned about from his father Emmanuel Nobel, also an engineer and inventor, inventing the veneer lathe used in plywood manufacturing, and experimenting with the explosive nitroglycerin, which led to the death of Alfred’s youngest brother Emil. Nobel is also the descendant of the Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck, known mostly for his work in human anatomy and linguistics. In addition to discovering the lymphatic system, Rudbeck also promoted his theory that Sweden was in fact Atlantis, the cradle of civilization, and that Swedish was the language of Adam and Eve, and the ancestor language of Latin and Hebrew. Though Rudbeck’s ideas were obviously refuted, with encyclopedist Denis Diderot using him as an example of etymology gone wrong, his ideas were an early example of the attempt to establish the relationship between languages. But getting back to Alfred Nobel, as a young man he travelled, meeting, studying, and working with a number of other scientists, including the inventor of nitroglycerin Ascanio Sobrero. Nobel acquired the company Bofors, which he shifted from primarily producing iron and steel to an arms manufacturer, and in spite of Sobrero’s warnings that nitroglycerin was dangerous and shouldn’t be used, and the death of his own brother Emil from a nitroglycerin explosion, Alfred set about working with the material in an attempt to make it more stable and safer to work with, and this he did with the invention of dynamite, and later gellignite and ballistite, which were used not only for military purposes, but also in mining and as a propellant, in the case of ballistite. Nobel’s most famous invention was of course dynamite, a mixture of nitroglycerin and kieselguhr (a naturally occurring, soft, siliceous sedimentary rock, basically the fossilized shells of diatoms, a type of plankton, which is also used in everything from toothpaste to cat litter to filters for making margarine, and whose discovery came out of the work marine biologist Viktor Hensen, who also coined the word plankton), which he had considered naming Nobel’s Safety Powder, but instead patented as Dynamite in 1867. He derived the name dynamite from Greek dynamis “power”, also the source of words such as dynamic and dynamo. The word dynamo, by the way is shortened from German dynamoelektrischemaschine “dynamo-electric machine”, invented by German electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist Werner von Siemens, also in 1867, founder of the Siemens company, who also built the first electric elevator, and the tubes with which Wilhelm Röntgen investigated X-rays, for which he won the first ever awarded Nobel Prize. Now Greek dynamis comes from the verb dynasthai “to be able, to have power, be strong enough”, whose etymology is uncertain, but possibly comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *deu- “to do, perform, show favour, revere”, which also comes into Latin as bonus “good”, from the idea of “useful, efficient, working”, which is used in the term bona annuntiatio “good news”, the Latin word for “gospel”. The word annuntiatio or adnuntiatio “message” comes from adnuntiare “to announce, make known to”, made up from the prefix ad- “to” plus nuntiare “to announce, narrate, make known, inform”, from nuntius “messenger, message”, whose etymology is uncertain, but possibly comes from Latin novus “new”, from the root *newo- “new”, which we saw as the source of English news.
Now it’s a curious thing that dynamite and TNT have become confused with each other in the popular imagination. TNT or trinitrotoluene, was actually first produced before dynamite in 1863 by German chemist Julius Wilbrand, not as an explosive but as a yellow dye. Its explosive properties weren’t discovered until much later in 1891 by another German chemist, Carl Häussermann, which gives a clue to one of the main differences between dynamite and TNT. TNT is very stable and not as prone to accidentally going off like the nitroglycerin-based dynamite. It’s also less powerful than dynamite, but easy to melt down and pour into explosives casings, and is waterproof, whereas dynamite can degenerate quickly under severe conditions, so as a result, dynamite was more frequently used for mining and civilian earthmoving, whereas TNT is better suited to military use. But nevertheless, the two are often thought to be the same thing, and one of the reasons for this may be animated cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny cartoons. The animators of Loony Tunes took to labelling any explosives, whether they were sticks of dynamite or barrels of black powder, with TNT, since it was short, easily visible on screen, and easily readable even by those with limited literacy, such as children. Similarly, the letters XXX were often used to mark bottles or barrels of alcohol. There are actually many of these visual shorthands conventions, which often go back to earlier cartoon strips. Another explosive cartoon convention is the use of the image of a round black ball with a fuse coming out of it for a bomb. By the time animated cartoons were being produced, bombs, by then made from dynamite or TNT, didn’t look like that anymore, but the image had already been established in the minds of the viewers by 19th century mortar bombs, which were spherical cast iron shells filled with black power meant to be fired from a mortar (similar to a cannon). The cast iron shell was necessary to contain the pressure of the black powder, which would just burn otherwise, until the whole shell exploded. And it’s probably in the editorial cartoons of the 19th century, such as during the American Civil War, that the image became fixed in the popular imagination.
Now when these cartoon explosions go off, very often the victim, such as Wile E. Coyote is left blackened but returns in the next scene for another attack. But sometimes, when the animator wants to show the character has actually died, you’ll see their soul slowly rising out of their body in the cliched form of an angel, white and semitransparent, and often with wings, a halo, and playing a harp. Sometimes you see the soul floating up to heaven, and sometimes you see it going the other way, and sometimes you even seen the soul being grabbed and stuffed back in the body! But where does this image come from and why is the departing soul depicted as an angel? Well, for more on the word soul see our video “Soul Food & Early Black Women’s Writing”, but as for angels, in the Hebrew bible angels are portrayed as a separate order of being, not as the souls of dead humans. Early Christian theologians argued about this point, with some like Origen teaching that souls, angels and demons were essentially of the same kind, whereas Augustine argued that souls and angels were different in kind, but mainstream Christian doctrine has never taught that human beings upon death become angels. It’s true that there have been traditions of representing souls with wings, though. In ancient Egyptian art, the human soul is often depicted as a bird with large wings, sometimes with a human head. The bird motif can also be found on Ancient Greek funerary monuments, but the soul is also often depicted as a small human figure with butterfly wings. This visual representation is not a replica or image of the dead person in question, but instead is generic in appearance. But this ancient winged visual convention of the soul disappeared from European art, and was instead replaced by an unrelated medieval Christian depiction, with the soul as a baby or youth departing the dying body through the head or mouth, and sometimes being received by angels to be brought up to heaven. The humanistic art of the Italian Renaissance, though usually returning to classical inspirations, didn’t in this case, maintaining the medieval representation of the soul as a baby or youth, and the scene depicted often shifted from the moment of leaving the body to the arrival in heaven (or hell). You can still find occasional representations of these scenes in later art, such as in the engravings of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake of the soul floating up from the body at death, but this visual convention has become much less frequent in modern times, except in the cartoons as described earlier. And it seems that those cartoons have helped spread the notion of the once-human angels in the popular imagination. Though not formally taught in Christian doctrine, there are traces of the notion that go back a fair way such as notes in 19th century family bibles about the death of a child who then “became again an angel of heaven” or even visual depictions of stillbirths as angels as far back as the Renaissance. And indeed it has become part of the modern grieving process, imagining the departed loved ones as becoming angels, even guardian angels watching over their family members.
But as for biblical angels, in both the Hebrew bible and the Christian bible, angels often fill the role of messenger or agent of God, and that’s a clue to the etymology of the word angel. The word angel actually came into English twice, first in Old English as engel with a hard g directly from Latin angelus, and then again in Middle English around 1300 from Old French angele with a soft g. Old English also had the word ærendgast, literally “errand-spirit”, for the same concept. Latin angelus came from Greek angelos, which outside of Christian contexts meant simply “messenger”, and is related to Greek angaros “mounted courier”. It gained its religious sense when it was used to translate the Hebrew word mal’akh (yehowah) “messenger (of Jehovah)” which comes from the Proto-Semitic root meaning "to send" [*l’k]. The ultimate etymology of Greek angelos is debated, but it seems to come from a non-Greek loanword. It might be related to Sanskrit ajira- “swift”, or it might come from a Semitic source akin to Akkadian agarru “hireling, hired labourer”, from the Proto-Semitic root meaning “to hire, rent” [*’gr]. In any case, when Greek angelos is combined with the prefix eu- “good”, it produces the word euangelos, literally “bringing good news”, and euangelion, which in classical Greek meant “the reward of good tidings”, but in Christian contexts meant “good news” or in other words the Gospel. And from this we get the English word evangelist, which can refer to the writers of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or to anyone who spreads and teaches the Christian message, including those evangelists and preachers in the US who are connected to the history of gospel music, which also spreads the good news.

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