Evangelist: meaning of the word in the Bible

The word evangelist comes from the Greek euangelistes, formed on euangelion, «good news, glad tidings». In turn euangelion breaks down into eu, «well», and the root of angello, «to announce» — the same as angelos, «messenger». Literally, then, the evangelist is the one who carries and proclaims a good announcement.

The term has roots in the profane Greek world: the euangelion was the news of a victory or the advent of a sovereign. The New Testament appropriates it to express the news par excellence, the advent of the kingdom of God in Christ. The Hebrew bridge completes the picture: behind euangelion stands the Hebrew besorah, «good news», and the verb bisser, «to announce» — the verb of the «messenger of good news» who runs upon the mountains (Isa 52:7). Thus the Greek evangelist inherits the figure of the Hebrew mevasser, the herald of salvation.

An important semantic point: originally «evangelist» does not designate the author of a book, but a living function — the one who proclaims aloud. The sense «author of a Gospel» is later, and arises when the oral announcement is fixed in writing in the four texts.

In the New Testament the noun euangelistes occurs only a few times, and never to denote an author. In Ephesians 4:11 Paul lists the gifts given to the Church: «some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers». The evangelist is here a ministry, a gift alongside the others, oriented toward missionary announcement.

In Acts 21:8 we find the only character called this by name: Philip «the evangelist», one of the seven (Acts 6:5), who had announced the Gospel in Samaria and to the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8). The title attaches to him precisely because of his activity of proclamation. Finally in 2 Timothy 4:5 Paul exhorts Timothy: «do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry» — again, a task, not a literary genre.

The related verb euangelizomai, «to announce the good news», is by contrast very frequent (Acts 8:35; Rom 10:15, which quotes Isa 52:7 itself). It is from this widespread activity that, later, the title «evangelist» would be reserved for the four who set its content in writing.

In the first decades of the Church the announcement is oral and itinerant: the «evangelists» are missionaries who carry the besorah from city to city. The written fixing of the four Gospels takes place in the second half of the 1st century, and the texts first circulate anonymously or without the title «evangelist» for their authors.

It is in the 2nd century that the term slides from ministry to author. Tradition attributes the four texts to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and with the consolidation of the canon «evangelist» begins to designate specifically these four. The number four itself becomes an object of reflection: the late-2nd-century Antiochene-Lyonese writer argues that the «authentic» Gospels are four like the cardinal points and the winds.

In parallel arises the iconography of the symbols. The Christian reading combines two texts: the four creatures around the throne of Ezekiel 1 (man, lion, ox, eagle) and the four «living creatures» of Revelation 4:7. The patristic tradition distributes them among the four authors, fixing the image of the Tetramorph that would become a standard of Christian art.

The Orthodox tradition reads the four evangelists as a single voice in four tones: not four competing biographies, but four angles on the one Gospel (euangelion remains in the singular). The symbols of the Tetramorph are not decoration but theology in image: according to the most widespread patristic distribution, the man belongs to Matthew (who opens with Christ's human genealogy), the lion to Mark (the voice that cries in the wilderness), the ox — the animal of sacrifice — to Luke (who opens in the Temple with Zechariah), the eagle to John (the gaze that fixes on the Logos «in the beginning»).

Here the Hebrew root returns decisive: the Gospel is not a new idea but the fulfillment of the announcement of Isaiah's mevasser (Isa 52:7; 61:1), the awaited besorah. The Christian evangelist is the heir of the prophetic herald: he carries the news that «your God reigns». For this reason in Orthodox iconography the evangelists are often depicted in the act of writing under inspiration, with the symbol beside them — a sign that their pen prolongs the voice of the biblical messenger.

The most common loss is flattening «evangelist» onto the author of a book, forgetting that the term arises for a living ministry of announcement. When one says «evangelist» thinking immediately of Matthew or Luke, a step is skipped: before the pen there is the voice — Philip «the evangelist», the missionaries of Eph 4:11. Recovering this is not pedantry: it explains why even today «to evangelize» means to announce, not to write.

The second loss concerns the symbols. Often man, lion, ox and eagle are reduced to a pretty heraldic device. In reality they are a theological reading rooted in Ezekiel and Revelation, and the very distribution onto the four authors has known variants in the ancient tradition — a sign that it is interpretation, not a fixed label. It must be said honestly: the «classic» pairing is not the only one attested.

Finally the Hebrew bridge is readily lost. Without the mevasser of Isaiah, the evangelist becomes a chronicler; with it he recovers his weight — the herald who, upon the mountains, cries that salvation has come.