To most Jewish people, the phrase “the gospel” sounds like some goyische (Gentile) thing. Maybe it has something to do with Jesus.

Yes, the term “gospel” comes straight out of the pages of the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible). In Hebrew, the word is besorah and is found in verses such as 2 Kings 7:9. The related word mebasser is someone who brings good news (as in Isaiah 52:7). What the word really means is “good news”: an announcement that God was going to save his people from their enemies or that he would be present with them.

As a first-century Jew, it’s not surprising that Jesus used the word:

“Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:14–15)

Besorah (gospel) was a special term that came from life in the ancient world. When wars and invasions were common and news traveled slowly, announcements of victory and peace were highly significant. When your king conquered your enemies or when a new king was crowned, the news would go out as a special announcement to the king’s whole domain: besorah, or good news.¹

It was a word that announced an important new reality for your nation.

These announcements were so common and important that many languages had a specific word for them.² It is similar to how today we use the term “election results.” It was a word that announced an important new reality for your nation. But where our election results might be good or bad, the ancient announcements were always good news!

In the Tanakh, where the ideal was for God himself to be Israel’s king,³ a besorah (good news / gospel) took on a meaning centered more on God than on national leaders. So when the prophet Isaiah tells of a coming day when God will forgive Israel’s sins and rescue the nation from its enemies, he looks forward to a gospel:

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those [gospelling], who proclaim peace, who [gospel] good things, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7 NIV)⁴

In first-century Israel, when Jews were oppressed by Gentile overlords and yearning for God’s kingdom to finally appear, Isaiah’s words and others like it were heavy on their minds.

And that is the very thing that Jesus is announcing in the New Testament. The “gospel” is good news for Jewish people (see Luke 1:46–55, 67–79 in the New Testament)! God is about to act in a powerful way to save Israel from its enemies. So, he called people to turn from their sins and believe the gospel.

A key reason Jewish tradition will often cite against Jesus being the Messiah is that he didn’t bring peace or destroy the enemies of Israel. In fact, one of the central events of Jewish history is that the Romans destroyed the Temple and much of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. And before that, Jesus ended up being killed on a cross—what kind of good news was that?

Gentile oppressors were not the root cause of Israel’s problems.

The answer is that Gentile oppressors were not the root cause of Israel’s problems. The story of Israel we find in the Bible says that the Jewish people were oppressed because of the failure to obey God, which led God to allow other nations to hold sway over Israel. This means that the biggest enemy of Israel is sin, something that plagues us all, whether Jewish or Gentile. Sin is the root cause of all the human evil in the world, leading to wars, strife, famines, etc.—and ultimately to death. And it is what led Rome to oppress Israel.

In other words, the overthrow of Gentile oppressors alone would not have brought about the Kingdom of God. To see peace in the world, we first need atonement for our sin. We need shalom (peace) in our hearts in order to become the kind of people who can bring God’s shalom to the rest of the world. And this is what Jesus did through his death and resurrection.

In addition to forgiveness, Jesus also makes us into better people. When we give our lives to him as our Messiah, God puts his Spirit into our hearts (see Ezekiel 36:26–27). That starts to slowly transform us into the kind of selfless people God always intended humanity to be.

For believers in Jesus, the gospel of the Messiah has always been two-part. We celebrate the fact that he has atoned for our sin and given us the gift of God’s Spirit. And we look forward to the day when he comes to bring his ultimate kingdom on earth—as the Tanakh promised.

That two-part scheme was not how most first-century Jewish people thought things would go. Most expected the Messiah to destroy Israel’s enemies and bring permanent peace. Jesus, however, argued that the Torah and the prophets actually were telling us that first the Messiah must atone for sin before coming as a reigning king. Jesus’ followers proclaimed that very way of reading the Scriptures in synagogues across the diaspora (for example, Acts 13:13–43).⁵

The anointed king of Israel has triumphed over all the powers of sin and death.

For many modern Christians, the word “gospel” is simply shorthand for “Jesus died for our sins so that we can have peace with God.” That’s not wrong, but it leaves out a core idea: that in the first century, a gospel was the good news of the victory of a king. The word Messiah (in Hebrew, Mashiach, “anointed one”) refers above all to a king. And Jesus’ death atones for Israel’s sins because he is Israel’s king. It also atones for the sins of all humanity, because Israel is the covenant people God has chosen to use to repair his relationship with the whole world.

The gospel is the good news that the anointed king of Israel has triumphed over all the powers of sin and death. He has broken the curse of sin. He has opened the way to set his people free. And he now offers love and redemption to all of us sinners—Jewish or Gentile—who put our trust in him.

Endnotes

¹ These announcements typically meant the deliverance of a nation’s people from danger, so they were usually “good news.” But sometimes a besorah could be felt as bad news depending on how the recipient felt about it (2 Samuel 4:10).

² So, Besorah in Hebrew is euangelion in Greek. The English word “gospel” comes from attempting to translate the biblical term into Old English. The Old English words for good and news were merged into gōdspel (which might be familiar to you if you’ve seen the musical Godspell). So it entered English with heavily religious connotations.

³ See Numbers 23:21, Deuteronomy 33:5, 1 Samuel 8:7, 12:12.

⁴  For another good example of this idea in the Tanakh, see Psalm 40:9–10.

⁵ Acts 13:13–43 is basically a synagogue drash (sermon) from the Apostle Paul. He places the gospel of the Messiah in the context of the entire history of Israel. See similar speeches in Acts 2 and Acts 7. Jesus’ disciples convinced a great many of their fellow Jewish people that Jesus was Messiah, though they also faced a lot of hostility from those who didn’t believe.