Luke 2:10

Note

Shepherds keeping watch at night see an angel of the Lord, and the glory of the Lord shines around them. They are terrified. The angel's first words take their fear away, and the reason he gives is the good news of this verse.

Luke sets this night inside Roman history: "a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census should be taken of the whole empire" (Luke 2:1). The decree brings Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, where the child is laid in a manger because there is no room for them. The first to hear of the birth are shepherds out in the fields. The angel goes on to say what the news is: "Today in the city of David a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord!" (Luke 2:11). The sign is a baby in a manger, and a multitude of the heavenly host sing of peace "on earth" to those on whom God's favor rests (Luke 2:14).

The verb is euangelizomai in the very form a dictionary gives: present middle indicative, first person singular, "I bring good news." Its object is "great joy" (charan megalēn, chara), so that word for word the angel says, "I announce to you great joy." The news and the joy are one thing. It is for "all the people" (panti tō laō), which in Luke usually means Israel, God's own people; yet in the temple Simeon soon calls the same salvation "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32). The message rests on three words: good news, "Savior" (sōtēr) and, in the angels' song, peace.

The KJV reads "I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people." The BSB and the LSV both say "good news of great joy" and "all the people," keeping the Greek article that points first to Israel; the KJV's "all people" reaches at once to everyone. Here too the versions keep to "good tidings" and "good news," and the gospel arrives in the plainest speech: news told to working men in a field at night.

In the Catena a Greek expositor says that the angel not only soothes their terrors "but pours gladness into their hearts" a Greek expositor, and he reads the joy as meant "not to the Jewish people only, but to all" a Greek expositor. Chrysostom notes where the angel went and where he did not: he "went not to Jerusalem, sought not for Scribes and Pharisees" Chrysostom, but came to simple men. Matthew Henry carries it into his own day: "It is still proclaimed in our ears that to us is born a Saviour, Christ the Lord. These should be glad tidings to all" Matthew Henry.

Good news, savior, peace: all three were also the emperor's words. An inscription of the province of Asia praised Augustus as a savior who had ended war and would set all things in order, and traced the world's good tidings, euangelia, to his birth the Priene calendar inscription. Whether Luke knew that decree we cannot say. But in a story he begins with a decree of Augustus, an angel announces another birth as good news and names another Savior, who lies not in a palace but in a manger.

The news came first to frightened people, and the Savior was born for them. The shepherds went and saw, and "they spread the message they had received about Him" (Luke 2:17). To anyone who hears it now, the angel's first word is the same: do not be afraid.