Ev-angel-ise

Most Christians don’t realise that evangelism has an angel right in the middle of it. Nor do they know that angel isn’t a native English word – it’s a Greek word that got transliterated (carried letter-by-letter) into English. If we translated the meaning of ἄγγελος (angelos) instead of the letters, it would be messenger (like it’s normally translated in Matt 11:10, Mark 1:2, and Luke 7:24, etc.). The first part of the word ev-angelise is from the Greek εὖ (eu) which translates as well or good. (In other English words that use it, we use the eu- form like eulogy, euthanasia, etc.) So ‘to evangelise’ means ‘to tell the good message’.

Ok, so back to angels. If we read the first half of Judges 6 in an older translation, it tells us (v11) that an ‘angel of the LORD’ came and sat down under the oak tree and chatted with Gideon. It seems that Gideon isn’t startled by this supposed shining white creature with wings coming and talking to him. Gideon chats very politely to this ‘angel’, and after a some conversation, he goes and prepares a meal and offers some meat and soup and bread to his visitor to eat. But to his surprise, the visitor just asks him just to sit the food on a rock and then step back. The visitor touches the meal with his staff, and whoof, both the meal and the visitor disappear! Then in v22, we’re told that Gideon now recognises the visitor as an ‘angel’ of the LORD.

How could Gideon have been so thick as to not know an ‘angel’ when he sees one. The answer is that it (Hebrew מֲלְאָךְ in this case) should have been translated as ‘messenger’. There was no special ‘angel’ word in either Hebrew or in Greek—it’s a newly created English word that’s not actually in the originals. Reread Judges 6 substituting ‘messenger’ for ‘angel’ and it’ll all make more sense, and you’ll quickly realise that the messenger must have had the appearance of a (normal) man.

But wait, there’s more! Look at verses 14 and 16. Here, the messenger is called ‘the LORD’. So is it a man, a shining angel, or God? Well, it’s #1 and #3. A messenger that looks like a man but is really God. Haven’t we read about someone like that in John 1:1 ‘In the beginning was the message...’ (and then throughout most of the New Testament). Yes, because of getting confused over English inventing a new word for messengers, we can lose the connection with the man-God and miss seeing what was most likely Jesus there in the Old Testament.

The Open English Translation is committed to making our Bibles better. We don’t have a marketing department to tell us that our (free) Bible won’t sell if it doesn’t have angels in it, just as the Hebrew and Greek originals don’t.

(Yes, we’re aware that there’s more to it than this simplified intro.) Robert Hunt, July 2023