gospel [OE] The Good News Bible is an English translation of the Bible, published in 1976, whose name refers to the root meaning of gospel itself. The word is not related to *God, but was formed from Old English gōd ‘good’ and spel ‘news, a story’, and was a translation of Greek euangelion ‘good news’, the source of our words evangelism [E17th] and evangelist [ME].