Luke 2:17-18 vs. “Go Tell It On The Mountain”

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“After they had seen the Child, they spread the message they had received about Him. And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.”

Shepherds outside Bethlehem have been told by an angel that a Saviour has been born, and given a sign to look for. They go, they find the child, and these two verses report what happened next. They make known what was told to them, and the people who hear are amazed. Two details are easy to skim. First, what they pass on is the message they were given, not only the scene they walked in on. Second, the reaction Luke records is amazement, not belief. The next verse turns to Mary keeping these things in her heart, and the one after that sends the shepherds back to their flocks glorifying God.

What the song says, described not quoted

The song is two documents, and they have different histories. The refrain is anonymous and traditional, carried in the oral tradition of enslaved African Americans and first printed in the Hampton collection *Religious Folk Songs of the Negro* in 1909. The stanzas almost everyone now sings are written work, credited to John Wesley Work Jr. of Fisk University, and they are attached to a refrain that existed before them. Sources disagree about when they were written. Hymnary and several popular accounts put Work's text at 1907. The Hymnology Archive holds that the 1909 verses were lost and that Work supplied replacements published in the 1940 Fisk collection *American Negro Songs and Spirituals*, edited by his son. Some accounts credit his brother Frederick J. Work instead. The disagreement is real and unresolved, and the entry names it rather than picking a side. The seam shows in the text as well as in the history. The stanzas cover Luke 2:8-16, the watch, the angel, the manger. The refrain does in the imperative what Luke 2:17 reports in the past tense: the shepherds made the message known, and the refrain tells the singer to go and do it. Luke 2:18, the amazement of the hearers, has no counterpart in the song at all. Hymnal editors have read the refrain the same way, indexing it to Matthew 28:19 rather than to Luke 2, while indexing the stanzas to Luke 2:8-20. The 1909 printing carried the same refrain attached to material that was not about the nativity, including a seeker's testimony and a watchman on the city wall. The refrain has held more than one set of verses.