Angelos

Before Christianity appropriated angelos, ancient Greeks used it for human messengers and heralds—think of Hermes, the divine courier. The word literally meant "one who announces," and applied to anyone carrying news, from battlefield runners to town criers. When the Septuagint translators needed a Greek word for Hebrew mal'akh, they chose angelos precisely because of this messenger function, not because Greeks had a concept of winged celestial beings.

In Revelation, John addresses letters "to the angel of the church in Ephesus," creating centuries of theological debate: are these celestial guardians, human bishops, or personifications of the congregation's spirit? This ambiguity reveals how angelos forced early Christians into interpretive gymnastics—the same word could mean the pastor, a protective spirit, or even the collective character of a community. Your modern phrase "company culture" captures something of this third interpretation.

Jesus himself is called an angelos in the Septuagint version of Malachi 3:1 ("the messenger of the covenant"), and John the Baptist's disciples are called angeloi in Luke 7:24—plain human messengers, nothing supernatural. This dual usage means that every time you encounter "angel" in scripture, you face a translation choice that shapes theology: celestial being or human agent? The ambiguity isn't a bug; it's a feature that keeps the boundary between human and divine delightfully porous.

Our word "evangelical" comes from euangelion (good news) which contains angelos at its heart—literally "good messenger-ing." This means evangelism, angels, and even our modern "evangelists" for products or causes all share DNA in the concept of message-bearing. When a tech company hires "developer evangelists," they're unconsciously reviving the ancient Greek notion that certain people become living vessels for transmitting important information.

Biblical texts use angelos democratically—there's no inherent ranking in the word itself. Yet by the medieval period, Pseudo-Dionysius had constructed elaborate nine-tier celestial hierarchies (seraphim, cherubim, thrones, etc.) that the original Greek never suggested. This linguistic inflation reveals how a simple job description ("message carrier") became an entire bureaucratic cosmology, much like how "assistant" spawned "executive assistant," "administrative assistant," and endless org-chart complexities.

Here's the twist: angelos emphasizes function over essence—these beings are defined entirely by their task of carrying messages, not by what they intrinsically are. This makes angels perhaps the first "medium" in Marshall McLuhan's sense: entities whose entire purpose is transmission. When you're "just the messenger" in a difficult conversation, you're inhabiting the original angelic role—a neutral channel whose identity dissolves into the act of communication itself.