The Soweto Gospel Choir performing in Graz, Austria, 2014
28 June 2023
The word gospel has a rather straightforward etymology. It’s an alteration of the Old English godspell, a compound of god (good) + spell (news, account). In Old English, the meaning was not restricted to the four books of the Christian Bible that detail the life of Christ—although it was used in that particular sense too—but the word could also be used to refer to the entire body of texts that professed Christian doctrine. While the word is formed from two Germanic roots, it is actually a calque of one of several Latin phrases evangelium, bona adnuntiatio, or bonus nuntius. These in turn are based on the Greek εὐαγγέλιον, meaning good news. (A calque is a loan translation, a term borrowed from another language but translated in the process.)
The sense of spell meaning news or account continued on into the early modern era, falling out of use in the seventeenth century. The sense of spell meaning a magical incantation or charm arose in the sixteenth century, a set of words that one could speak and have a magical effect, and that’s the definition that prevails today.
The d was dropped from godspell, at the end of the thirteenth century. The change was unusually sudden. While some later texts, notably the C text of Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, continued to use the older spelling, most texts written after 1300 drop the d.
One of the appearances of godspell is in Ælfric of Eynsham’s homily for the fifth Sunday after Easter, which opens:
Sume menn nyton gewiss, for heora nytennysse, hwi godspell is gecweden, oþþe hwæt godspell gemæne. Godspell is witodlice Godes sylfes lar, and ða word þe he spræc on þissere worulde, mancynne to lare and to rihtum geleafan; and þæt is swyðe god spell.
(Some men do not know for certain, because of their ignorance, what godspell is called, or what godspell means. Godspell is indeed God's own teaching, and the words that he spoke in this world, for the instruction of mankind and for true faith; and that is a very good message.)
The more general sense of gospel meaning something that is true, particularly in phrases like their word is gospel, appears in the thirteenth century. The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, written c.1250, has these lines, ascribing an adage to King Alfred the Great:
Forþi seide alfred swiþe wel—
And his worde was goddspel—
Þat “euereuch man þe bet him beo
Eauer þe bet he hine beseo.”(About this, Alfred spoke very well—
And his word was gospel—
That “the better off any man might be
The better he should look after himself.”)
Gospel music is a genre of Christian music that originally arose out of eighteenth-century Scottish religious music but in the twentieth century was transformed by African-American folk and religious music traditions into the genre we know today. The phrase gospel music appears as early as 1846 in this announcement of a change of editorial staff in the Star of Bethlehem newspaper, published in Lowell Massachusetts:
Star of Bethlehem. The Editorship and Proprietorship of this paper has passed into the hands of Br. W. Bell, for which all Universalists will be very thankful. Br. Bell used to chime good excellent Gospel music amongst the Green Mountains years ago; and we dare say he has not forgotten how to ring the notes of Gospel truth as of yore.
It’s not clear if this use of gospel music is referring literally to music, or if it is simply a play on the name Bell and the phrase refers to his preaching. But even if the latter is the case, this use shows the phrase on the path to becoming the name for the genre.
By 1875, we see uses of gospel music that clearly refer to a musical genre. Here is one from the 25 October 1875 Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal that refers to children in the local “House of Refuge” singing:
And yet there isn’t a Sunday-school class of boys and girls in any of the schools in the city that can sing like these bad little boys. They know they have to sing or suffer the consequences, and they seem to forget that they sing because they have to, and they throw open their great big mouths and convert all the yelling and howling that belongs to their boyish nature into sweet gospel music. And it is music, too, that some of our great men, who go to the house every Sunday to see the boys and hear them sing, weep over and enjoy more than all the music they are accustomed to hear in higher places.
The music may have been Christian, but in all likelihood the “consequences” were anything but good news for the children.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Dominica Quinta Post [Pascha].” The Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. John C. Pope, ed. Early English Text Society 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 357.
Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2003, 31, lines 1269–72.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. god-spell, n.
“Editorial Etiquette.” Star of Bethlehem (Lowell, Massachusetts), 7 March 1846, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Little By Little.” Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 25 October 1875, 4/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gospel, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gospel, n.
Photo credit: Christine Kipper, Info Graz, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.