Episode 142: First Hymn

John Dickson singing in Oxyrhynchus

Studio – John Dickson
That’s me standing in the vault of a ruined basilica in the deserts of Egypt.
It is an amazing structure, built to hold almost two thousand people – a mega-church of ancient history.
And I’m singing a song that hasn’t been heard here for nearly 18 hundred years.

John Dickson singing in Oxyrhynchus

Studio – John Dickson
The location is the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, and that song is a Christian hymn composed by believers sometime in the 200s.

It’s also the song at the centre of a documentary Undeceptions is releasing early next year – we call it ‘The First Hymn’.

‘First’ because it’s the oldest Christian hymn yet discovered that has both lyrics and musical notation – so we know what to sing and how to sing it. It was found in the mounds of an ancient rubbish dump on the edge of Oxyrhynchus by two Oxford scholars.

In 1897, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt decided to mount an expedition to what was once the second-largest city in ancient Egypt. Together they uncovered an incredible horde – half a million fragments of papyrus. For the discipline of ancient history, it is the most important find … ever … even more than the famous Dead Sea Scrolls because the breadth of documents is astounding.

Grenfell and Hunt were only partly aware of the value of their discovery–it was just too much for two people to assess and understand. They packed this treasure trove in lots of biscuit tins – or cookie boxes for my American friends – and shipped them back to Oxford, where they’ve been lovingly cared for, catalogued, and analysed for the last century.
Inside one of those biscuit tins was Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1-7-8-6 – P.Oxy 17-86, our First Hymn.

This scrap of papyrus is a mere 30 centimetres by about 5 centimetres. It has an ancient corn contract on one side and our song on the other. Paper was never wasted in antiquity!
If you want to know about corn prices in Roman Egypt in the 200s AD, you’ll have to go to the show notes :). I’m more interested in what the First Hymn tells us about music and Christianity in its earliest phase, the period before Constantine, before Christians were invited to the seats of power, a period when Christians were still being persecuted for their funny beliefs.

In fact, found in the same rubbish dumps in Oxyrhynchus were things like an arrest warrant for a Christian, mention of a recently removed church, and a formal certificate to prove that a local citizen had offered pagan sacrifice in public—one of the measures the Romans used to weed out Christians in the period!
But the curious thing is: this ancient hymn has all the hallmarks NOT of a church hiding away in the shadows, scared of the Romans. The Christians who composed and sang this song seem to have been using it as a piece of ‘public Christianity’.

The musical style isn’t anything like later church music. It’s written in pop style (for ancient Greek speaking Romans). It uses the melodic structures we know were being used in taverns and on stage in the pagan theatres. It’s designed to capture the ears of a wide audience, and draw that audience into a message that also seems deliberately constructed to move people away from local deities to the — as Christians saw it — one true Lord of the universe!!
And that one true Lord — so proclaims this hymn — is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Forget Zeus — our daring ancient songwriter suggests! All creation must bow before the Holy Trinity, the only Giver of All Good Gifts.

I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme song begins

Each episode we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture, or ethics that’s either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they’re talking about, we’re trying to ‘undeceive ourselves’, and let the truth ‘out’.

Undeceptions theme song ends

Studio – John Dickson
My personal ‘First Hymn’ story starts nearly 8 years ago on a research trip, as I was looking over ancient Greek fragments in the Papyrology Rooms in Oxford’s Sackler Library—although they recently changed the name to the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, because of the billionaire Sackler family’s association with the opioid crisis in the US. See the shownotes for that story!!

Anyway, I was led to P.Oxy 1786 by a footnote in an article about ancient memory and education. Then I learned that some very serious scholars had done a complete an alysis of the language and musicology.

So, I had to see the thing myself … I went to the Papyrology Rooms, asked to inspect no.1786 of the Oxyrhynchus collection, and began to gaze down the microscope at the squiggly words and even squigglier musical notation above the words.

My imagination ran wild—who wrote this, who sang it, how did it get discarded in an ancient rubbish dump, along with 100s of 1000s of other Greek fragments?
And then, in a maybe 30 second stream-of-consciousness, I wondered if the song could be brought back to life, if some of my muso friends could rearrange it for a modern audience, and if we could film the whole thing—from Egypt to Oxford to Sydney to Nashville.
At first I thought … Nah!! Too much work! Probably too niche! So, I sat on the idea for the next 5 years … until I spoke to my team—mainly Director Mark—who loved the creative challenge of it all. Then I spoke to one of m y musical mates in Sydney — you’ll meet him later in the episode — and he said, “John, I have tingles down my spine!”

So, off we set to see what we could do. First stop. Back to Oxford.

Among the old wooden shelves of the Jesus College library (founded 1571), I talked with Armand D’Angour, Professor of Classics at Oxford, a classical musician, and expert in ancient Greek music.

John Dickson
Amon, thanks so much for joining us. What were the main settings for music in the ancient world?

Armand D’Angour
As far as we know, there was music everywhere, just as there is in today’s world. The main musical fragments that have survived relate to such things as music in theatre, so music of tragedy. Um, there’s something called a scolion, which is a drinking song.
Uh, with an epicurean theme, live now because, uh, we all die. There’s, um, music from, uh, performances that might have taken place in large scale, uh, places such as, uh, open, open air theatres, uh, but also stuff that might have been sung in smaller venues. So, I think we just have to accept that, uh, it was a very musical world, ancient Greece and Rome.

John Dickson
Can we say anything about whether different styles of music, uh, were used in different settings? So was a drinking song musically different from a song that was sung in a temple of Asclepius or something?

Armand D’Angour
We don’t have enough to say that the styles of music were vastly different. But what we do have, uh, a part of the issue is that what we have is music from, let’s say, the 5th century BC all the way through to the 3rd century AD. So you’re talking about 800 years of music and perhaps, um, 50 fragments covering that in these different venues, as I say, more or less more formal ones. Um, there is some indication that the music changes and that we have, for example, more melismata, which is where notes get split up, syllables get split up into Uh, several notes, uh, in some of the later stuff.

Studio – John Dickson
Melisma (or Melismata in the plural) really just means ‘melody’ … but it typically refers to singing a series of notes on one syllable of text.

We do it all the time in pop music (maybe a bit too much) but it was an innovation or evolution in ancient music.

When we were in Cairo for the filming of the First Hymn Project, we couldn’t resist getting some ancient melisma on tape, courtesy of the Coptic Church.
Maistro George Kyrillos is an internationally recognised expert in Coptic music and the founder of the renowned David Ensemble for Coptic Hymns.

Beautiful!

But how did the ancients write all this down—I’m sure I was taught that musical notation was invented in 11th century Europe or something. But I was off by about 15 centuries!!

John Dickson
What is the earliest evidence of musical notation? And do we know how that concept of noting the melody developed?

Armand D’Angour
The earliest notation we have, uh, goes back to a papyrus of, uh, play by Euripides that we know was produced in 408 BC. Now, although the papyrus, Notation is perhaps a hundred years later than that. Um, it implies that that piece would have been notated. Uh, the first evidence we have that music was notated comes from shortly after that in the fourth century.

It’s talked about by a great musical theorist called Aristoxenus. So the assumption is that sometime in the fifth century BC, not just one, but two forms of notation were invented. One of them for instruments, the other for voice. The vocal notation is essentially the Greek alphabet, and the higher in the alphabet, the higher the pitch of the note.
And, uh, that would have been invented, in my view, because music that had been sung and Uh, the, the, the sounds that would have been in the ears started to become more complicated. And the way in which it, I think the complexity happened largely was that ancient Greek as a language has a natural tone system.

So if you say a word like good, Agathos, your voice goes up on the last syllable. So when that was sung to music, if you had say three or four notes, da, da, da, you’d get Agathos. You wouldn’t go Agathos that would have sounded odd. So I think that that was the basis and I think most scholars do of musical singing, melodic singing, from the early period And then in the 5th century you get quite well documented changes and you get something called the new music.

We call it the new music around the middle of the 5th century coming in and causing quite a stir And the conservative critics, uh, like, uh, the, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and then later Plato, says, you know, everything has gone to pot, this, these musicians are having all sorts of new ways of doing things.
And one of the things Plato actually says is that the melody should follow the words. And the implication to me is that the melody was no longer following the words literally, in that. If you had this da da dum, agathos, you no longer had melody being set in order to follow, to accord with the Greek accents.

So, I think there was a change with the new music, uh, and that was then difficult for singers to set words to music. Because if you have a language which is naturally tonal, you can set those words to a set of musical notes without much thought. But once you have Musicians and composers, like Euripides, who was both a composer of words and of melodies, setting their words to music with that regard for the pitch accents, or with less regard for the pitch accents, then how are you going to tell your chorus how to sing it?
Uh, and I think that’s when notation started becoming necessary.

Studio – John Dickson
The First Hymn demonstrates that the early Greek-speaking Christians were using this notation. They just embraced their surrounding musical culture.
That shouldn’t really surprise us. Believers were always musical.

Esau McCaulley
We know there’s a lot of hymns that the Christians sung because there are hymns in the Bible that Christians, that we have as a part of our ongoing record.

Studio – John Dickson
The Rev Dr Esau McCalley, a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, as well as a contributing writer for the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He’s a gun!

John Dickson
Esau, what evidence do we have early, you know, in the New Testament itself that Christians sang songs and maybe even invented songs?

Esau McCaulley
Well, that’s probably one of the easiest questions to answer because we actually have Psalms, songs, to Jesus in the New Testament. And so we have, uh, Philippians chapter two, verses six to 11, which is a hymn. And there is a big debate in biblical scholarship, whether or not this is original to Paul or something that predated Paul that he then put into his letter. In either case, we have a song written by the early Christians that were, that was clear to him. There’s another one. In Colossians verses 15, Colossians verse 1, 15 to 20, another hymn to Jesus.

READING
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
By him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.
For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell;
And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.
Colossians Chapter 1

READING
Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians, Chapter 2

John Dickson
Sadly the sheet music didn’t, uh, get passed down with the New Testament.

Esau McCaulley
One of the other things that’s a little bit tricky is that because we translate any one time you have a poem or anything that’s translated into English Some of the rhythm and the things that mark it out as poetry and as music are lost But it’s pretty clear to anyone who takes a close look at those passages and maybe first Corinthians 13.
It was poetic About love you have these this this reality early Christians were creating art related to the person of Jesus in particular and of praise and worship of him that speaks a lot about his divinity, you know, and both of those, both of those passages in Colossians and Philippians make a lot about, speak a lot about Jesus’s identity.

Studio – John Dickson
The First Hymn comes out of this context.

Christians arrived in Egypt almost certainly in the mid to late first century. The local Coptic Christians insist that it was St Mark—the author of the Gospel of Mark—who brought Christianity to Egypt, to the northern most city of Alexandria, to be precise. They may well be right, in the early 300s AD Eusebius of Caesarea reports, “they say that this Mark was the first that was sent to Egypt, and that he proclaimed the Gospel which he had written, and first established churches in Alexandria.” This is hearsay, not solid evidence, but there is no reason to doubt the report. Mark was a greek-speaking Jew, and the city with the largest population of Greek-speaking Jews in the first century was Alexandria.

In any case, Alexandria quickly became an important centre for Christianity – we start to have solid evidence of a Christian school—more like a university or seminary—in the second century.

Nonetheless, Christians were a tiny minority of the population in this early period. The religious traditions of Egypt, especially northern Egypt, were a blend of local indigenous spiritualities going back to Pharaonic times and the practices of the Greeks (who took over in the fourth century BC) and the Romans (who took over in the 1st century BC).
Among philosophically-minded Alexandrians, Zeus was the only God, or at least the one that all creation, including the lower deities, looked to as King.

Down south in a place like Oxyrhynchus we meet other deities with more Egyptian origins: like Oxyrhynchus himself, the deified ‘sharpnosed fish’. In the myths, he had eaten part of the god Osiris and so became in a sense divine.

Osiris was a big deal. He was the god of the underworld, protector and king of the dead.
If you go to Oxyrhynchus today, you can still descend into temples and tombs dedicated to Osiris – I’ve done it with Director Mark. We were told by our archaeologist friends to be careful of snakes! You should have seen Mark—he was terrified!!

Anyway, somehow—and unfortunately we don’t know precisely how—Christians convinced locals to turn from Osiris and the others and worship Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the one and only God. You can hear a little about that, and the proliferation of the so-called Desert Fathers of Egypt, in our episodes ‘Cultural Christianity’ and ‘Question Answer 12’. Researcher Al will put links in the show notes for you.

All this to say, by the time Grenfell and Hunt turned up, the ruin of Oxyrhynchus had seen pagan, Christian, and even Islamic traditions—but it was all swept away by the sands of time.

Stephanie Boonstra
So the, uh, papyri themselves were, uh, found in rubbish dumps, actually, at the city of Oxyrhynchus. So I guess after they had finished using these texts, they had thrown them away, uh, swept them away, uh, and they were in these massive mounds that were all littered on the site.

Studio – John Dickson
Dr Stephanie Boonstra is the collections manager of the Egypt Exploration Society. She was a delight to work with. We are so grateful to the Society for giving us access to everything and to Stephanie for being our expert guide through it all.

Stephanie Boonstra:
But the excavators, so mainly, um, Grenfell and Hunt, uh, when they got to the site, they didn’t just say, Oh, those rubbish dumps look promising. They were actually, uh, clued in to the fact that they held papyri by a local man. So he was the brother of a local sheikh named Ahmed Saeed and he, when, when they were walking around the site, uh, he said, Oh, You might find this interesting.

And he basically did a bit of digging in the ground and pulled out a great papyri fragment. Uh, so the, uh, Grenfell and Hunts, the Oxford scholars then spent, uh, six seasons over the course of the late 1890s to the early 1900s, uh, excavating these rubbish dumps.

John Dickson:
How did they do that? Do they have a method?

Stephanie Boonstra:
Uh, yes, they did have a method, um, and they had learned archaeological excavation method from a very famous Egyptologist named Flinders Petrie. And so what they did was they employed a team of roughly 200 men and boys from the local area and they excavated the dumps kind of, systematically. So they would take a team of four to six men and boys and they would each be assigned a trench. So they would dig a trench and going straight down, no further than nine meters because then you’d hit the water table and then the papyri were no good.

You couldn’t read them and they would sift through and often the papyri fragments are tiny little fragments and they would call those cornflakes because they kind of look like cornflakes, but I wouldn’t advise doing that, and they would have to sit these through and, uh, collect them in baskets. And then once they had finished a trench, they would move on to, uh, the area right beside it, and then they would backfill, uh, the, the soil that they find into that trench. And so they were able to kind of systematically go through these rubbish mounds, and in the process discovered, over probably around half a million papyri fritters.

Studio – John Dickson
Grenfell and Hunt turned up basically a historian’s wish-list of content.

Mundane stuff like corn contracts and building repair reports—which actually tell us loads about ancient economics and architecture.

Then there are the astonishing intellectual finds – Homer, Sappho and Sophocles. Stephanie showed me a fragment of Plato … and … the front page of the Gospel of Mark. Many of the earliest known New Testament fragments come from Oxyrhynchus.

Stephanie also showed me one of my now all-time favourite pieces of papyri (behind the Gospel, of course!).

John Dickson:
Okay. And what’s this?

Stephanie Boonstra:
So, this contract is between the guarantors or guardians of two young men. Uh, and the two young men are Nicantinous and Demetrius. And it’s not just a regular contract. It’s specifically about a wrestling match. But it’s a bit odd because, uh, in this contract, it’s specifically saying that Demetrius has to lose.

John Dickson:
No.

Stephanie Boonstra:
Yes. Yeah. And in return, if Demetrius does lose. He will be awarded 3, 800 drachma, which, according to another count, is about the equivalent of the price of a donkey. So, he must lose. If he doesn’t lose, then he has a fine of 18,000 drachma. So, high stakes. But it does, we do know that this isn’t just kind of, you know, Match fixing. This isn’t like, uh, wrestling that we have now. This is actually one of the first known evidences of, uh, cheating that’s shown on papyri because they specifically say that if the judges see anything untoward, then He doesn’t get sued . So it, it is absolutely rigging a match and hoping that nobody knows.

John Dickson:
Wow. So life has really changed over the centuries.

Stephanie Boonstra:
Oh, sure, sure. Nobody does things like that anymore.

John Dickson:
Can you put in a sentence or two the significance. of such an amazing collection?

Stephanie Boonstra:
Ooh, that’s a tough one, but the Papyrus Oxyrhynchus collection or the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection is the largest collection of papyri in the world. It gives us an unparalleled view of what life was actually like at a Greek Egyptian city at the time. So the fragments range from about the late first century BC up until the seventh century AD. And we have information about ancient cities, about the people, what they were doing. Um, and so it gives us a, an amazing view of that time, but also of things like their religion and it was a, um, uh, monastic, uh, city. So we have this Christian evidence as well.

Studio – John Dickson
And part of that Christian evidence is the First Hymn … stay with us …

BREAK 1

Charles Cosgrove Jazz Trombole Solo

Studio – John Dickson
That’s the world’s foremost expert on P.Oxy 1786 … on the trombone.

Dr Charles Cosgrove is a professor of early Christian literature.
He’s a kind of ‘triple threat’ of classical education: expert linguist, historian, and musician.
And he literally wrote the book on the First Hymn.

John Dickson:
As a musician, tell me is the first him a difficult piece of music for a modern musician to get their head around?

Charles Cosgrove:
No, not at all. The, uh, the first hymn uses a kind of music that is very familiar to Westerners. It’s diatonic music, and all that means is it’s made out of the whole steps and the half steps that our music is made of. When you go to a piano, if you play keys on the piano in a row, you’re playing whole steps and half steps. And our scales are made out of combinations of those. So the, the, uh, first hymn has that kind of scalar structure. It’s also very accessible to us because it does something we’re very familiar with. It has a kind of a home base in its tones, its sounds. And ancient Greek hymns, It tended to start at a home base, the melody would kind of move around tonal centers. That just means certain notes that were repeated would move around those notes, and then come back to the tonal center, maybe to one note, a center note that started on and ended on.
And the first hymn is like that. In fact, I can illustrate it by, uh, if you’ll bear with my singing. I’ll sing just a little.

This hymn is in two parts as it’s been preserved. A first part, we don’t have the beginning of it, comes to an end, and then the second part of the hymn restarts, and then we have a lot, and then we do have the ending.

So, the first part, Ends this way … da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then the next, the last half, picks up this way. La, da, da, da, da, da, da. And those notes. Da, da, da. Those are the focal notes of the piece. They are repeated, emphasized, so the hearer gets used to them. And then listen how the hymn ends.

That’s almost the same ending as the first. Sections ending. Da da da da da da da. So in these ways too, it’s a lot like our music, especially folk tunes and popular songs that have a simple form, which will repeat a verse and, you know, have a starting point that’s familiar and an ending point that’s In other ways, it’s not anything like modern music because between the composition of this hymn and our era, modern chordal structure was invented. That’s it. Right, around the time of Monteverdi, and then Bach, and we’re just, it’s just built into our ears to hear harmonic patterns. Even if you’re not a trained musician, you’re, you’re, um, they’re ingrained into you so you expect certain things because those tonal patterns are there, those, those harmonies are there.
Ancient Greek music had none of that.

Studio – John Dickson
Anyone who’s had to sit through piano lessons knows that notes in a scale are identified with letters of the alphabet — a, b, c, d …
Well, ancient Greek music also used the alphabet in an even more concrete way …

Charles:
Ancient Greek music used notation from at least the classical period. So this is the time of the great playwrights, Euripides and Aristophanes, and before them, uh, the tragedians, Aeschylus. It’s the time of Plato toward the end of that time.

And we have a few scraps of music. several bars for some of Euripides songs for his plays, because they were musicals, those old Greek plays. And the way the notation communicates the music is by assigning letters that represent notes in a scale and placing them above syllables of words. So, the Greeks started out with just their ordinary Greek letters, and they said, this will represent these, uh, intervals, or these notes of a scale.
And then when they needed more, they got to the end of their alphabet, and then they invented new symbols, they modified some of their Greek letters, they created brand new symbols. And eventually there was a very complex system of notation, because the ancient Greeks didn’t do what we moderns do. We repeat the note names at the octave.

So if I sing, if we say this is a C, and I don’t have perfect pitch, so I’m not telling you it’s a C, it’s just going to stand for a C. Da da da da da da da da da da. The first note I’m calling a C, that last note I call a C. And so then we go up another octave, I can’t sing that high, and we get another C.

And the same for the next, the, the second note, so C, D, and then we get a D up above.
And if you have to explain this technically, in terms of the vocal register, you assign a number, and you say C1, C2, C3. But ancient Greeks just had the letters go from whatever the bottom was where they started all the way through, and that’s why they ran out of letters.

Actually moving in both directions, moving down and moving up. So, they created a notation system, but only literate people and highly professional musicians used So most of the music was oral, was transmitted orally, was learned orally, most of the musicians weren’t educated, and even if they were educated, they weren’t trained to read notation.

Studio – John Dickson
Here’s something interesting to get your head around. The Jewish tradition of praising God is full of calls for all creation to worship God out loud.

Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Psalm 150: “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”
Psalm 98: “Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy.”

Creation gets excited to sing God’s praises!

But … in the Greco-Roman tradition, it’s quite different. Ancient Greek hymns—to Zeus or Dionysus or whatever—begin with a call to silence.
This ‘cosmic silence’ motif is everywhere in pagan song but very rare in biblical song.

But here’s the thing: The composer of P.Oxy 1786 uses this pagan motif to introduce a thoroughly Christian theology. “Let all be silent. Shining stars not sound forth. Rushing rivers be stilled …” It’s like the composer is trying to get his pagan friends’ attention or may be make them feel at home!!
But there’s more.

All of the experts note that this First Christian Hymn with musical notation is in exactly the style of ancient Greek tavern and theatre music. It’s not the lofty sacred music we associate with later monks and churches.

Again, the composer is trying to communicate to the surrounding culture.

It’s secular sounding music with a pagan literary motif to begin … but then we’re hit with the most striking of Christian themes:

ὑμνούντων δ’ ἡμῶν
πᾳτέρα χ υἱὸν χ ἅγιον πνεῦμα

“As we sing our hymn to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”!!
The Trinity!

John Dickson:
The Trinitarian line … Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Tell us about, uh, that insight of the hymn.

Charles Cosgrove:
This is one of the most interesting things about the hymn, especially when it comes to dating, because the fight’s about the trinity took place in the fourth century. And in the first few centuries, the common way to speak this kind of doxological language was to say, to praise the Father through the Son, or praise God through the Son, or through the Son and the Spirit. But in the fourth century, when there were competing views of whether Jesus, or the Son, and the Spirit, and the Father were all equal, There were big fights about this language, this traditional language. And the formula, praise Father, Son, and Spirit, makes them all equal because they’re just ands in between.

Studio – John Dickson
On plenty of occasions I’ve had people tell me that the early Christians didn’t think that Jesus was divine—let alone that God was triune, Father, Son, and Spirit.
They say this idea was forced on the church by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century (more about that in Episode 61, ‘Emperor Constantine’ … It’s in the show notes).

But here is the doctrine of the trinity sung in a song from the previous century.
If you want to hear just how early this belief in Jesus’ divinity was and how early we can trace back the concept of the Trinity … well, you’ll need to become a Plus subscriber and here Prof Esau McCaulley unpack the evidence he finds in the NT itself. Plus subscribers … well, you just let the pod play!!!

John Dickson:
My favorite line, I don’t know about your favorite line, but my favorite line is, um, the last Uh, To the only giver of all good gifts, pantone, agathon. These are interesting words because Zeus was commonly called giver of gifts, giver of good things. So I want to just put the question to you, is this songwriter, in saying only giver of all good gifts, Being a little bit cheeky, being derivative, being evangelistic, being critical. How do you read that line? It is the climactic line of the

Charles:
Yes, well, the hymn writer is doing two things. One is to speak in a neoclassical way, by taking up the language of a venerable tradition and dignifying the hymn and God with this language. At the same time, the hymn writer is asserting that Christian idea that only one God gives all the good things, not many gods.
So this Christian is affirming that, uh, peculiarly for, peculiar form of Judeo Christian monotheism in that phrase.

John Dickson:
Would ancient pagans, that is, non Jews, non Christians in Alexandria down to Oxyrhynchus, have, if they’d walked into a church and heard this, would they have recognized that as the sort of thing you could hear in the theater and, uh, in a pagan temple? I mean, melodically, I mean.
Yeah, well, it does reflect the music of its time, which was evolving. Since we have some scores from the Hellenistic era, it So you have the classical era, the Hellenistic era, and then the Roman era, in terms of Greek music evolving. It has features that are like other music of the era. But a great deal of the folk music, uh, ordinary music, would have had this character. And that Sekilos hymn that I mentioned –

Studio – John Dickson
The Seikilos hymn is very cool. It’s a complete song or ditty inscribed in marble near Ephesus from the first century. It too has musical notation. It basically says, try be happy because death is coming for you!!!!
“As long as you live, shine,
let nothing at all grieve you.
Life exists only for a short while,
and time demands its end.”

Charles:
… it’s not so much different from the Christian hymn, which is, is simple. It’s melodically simple. At the same time, it’s very charming. It’s very appealing. Uh, once you’ve sung it multiple times, you like it – it’s also accessible in terms of its words. So in that way, it was very much reflective of its time.

Studio – John Dickson
Well, accessible to ancients … for sure. But does it stand the test of time.
Coming up we hand the First Hymn over to a modern choir to see what they can do with it.

BREAK 2

Choir sings ‘Bread of Heaven’ hymn

Mark Noll:
In the New Testament, we read many times in the life of Christ where people sang a hymn. So when Jesus was going to his last attempt, to his last trial, eventually the crucifixion, he with his disciples sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives. Then the rest of the New Testament, there are many injunctions from particularly the Apostle Paul to churches, telling people, in one instance, sing and make melody in your heart as you, as you speak to one another with songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. So actually wherever the Christian faith is gone, people are singing.

Studio – John Dickson
That’s Mark Noll – one of America’s best known historians of Christianity. Formerly of the University of Notre Dame, he is now semi-retired as the Research Professor of History at Regent College. He makes the point that hymns have always tried to connect eternal truths with contemporary needs.

Mark:
Hymns are always speaking to the people that write them and sing them, as well as trying to do something with the deposit of Christian teaching, with the Bible or Christian themes, which means then, that as the circumstances of life change, So also to the themes of hymns change, not necessarily dramatically and not, uh, uh, in entirety, but hymns, like almost everything else in artistic life, reflects the cultures in which they develop.

One example of this was a course I taught at the University of Notre Dame some years ago now on the era of the American Civil War. The main project of the course was to ask the students to do a major research paper on their own. And a young woman did a phenomenal job looking at hymnals published in the United States in the 1840s and 50s, so right before the American Civil War, and then in the 1870s and 80s after the American Civil War.

She found a lot of continuity. Many of the hymns that were published before the war were published after the war. But the newer hymns that entered the hymnals After the American Civil War, disproportionately presented themes of divine comfort, often directly related to those who had lost loved ones, as almost everyone in the American population had in some manner because of the seven or eight hundred thousand fatalities in the Civil War.

And this, this would be an example of how the conditions in of life at a particular time influence how hymns were at least chosen and then how they were sung.

John Dickson:
So, what was the heyday of, uh, modern Christian hymnody, would you say?

Mark:
Well, the hymnity existed all through what’s called the Middle Ages and, and early church. Monasteries often kept alive. The, the, the, the singing of hymns, the, um, university structures of the Middle Ages included as one of the seven liberal arts the study of music, often keyed to mathematics, but, but also its expressive amount. But then in the 16th century, with the rise of Protestantism, there’s a huge burst in singing hymns, songs, and spiritual songs, partly because of the, uh, urgency of individuals like Martin Luther to present not just his, or a clear understanding of the Christian gospel, but But an understanding of the Christian gospel that appealed to the people.

Studio – John Dickson
And just for our Undeceptions ‘Plussers’, I asked Mark about the rumour I’d heard that great theologians pinched tavern tunes and turned them into hymns.
But you’ll have to subscribe for that.
Subscribers … carry on!

Studio – John Dickson
Let’s press ‘pause’. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you.

Singing was everywhere in Jesus’ culture.

In fact, there were at least 150 songs regularly sung by devout Jews in the period. We think of them today as the Psalms, a huge part of the Old Testament.

But the ancients didn’t think of the Psalms as part of the Scripture you read for Bible study or read out loud in the synagogue.

This was the song book … or, more accurately, a cross between a song book and a prayer book. From long before Jesus, Jews sang the Psalms in the home, during the synagogue service, over meals, in the temple, and at various outdoor festivals.

As a historical matter, we can say for sure that Jesus knew at least 150 songs — many he will have known by heart.

We know of another song people were meant to know by heart. It’s called the First Fruits song (Based on Deut 26). At the great First Fruits festival in Spring. We have a first century report of this from the Jewish intellectual Philo of Alexandria. He tells us: the worshiper brings a little bit of their early produce to the temple and “recites the very beautiful and admirable hymn prescribed for the occasion; and if he does not happen to remember it, he listens to it with all attention while the priest recites it. And the hymn is as follows:—“The leaders of our nation renounced Syria, and migrated to Egypt. Being but few in number, they increased till they became a populous nation. Their descendants being oppressed in innumerable ways by the natives of the land …”

Jesus will have sung that one, too.

There is an explicit, if passing, reference to Jesus himself singing in Mark 14, at the Last Supper. Mark says, “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.”
We’re pretty sure we know which hymn this is referring to, because the songs set down for the Passover meal—which coincided with the Last Supper—were Psalms 113-118, “Praise the LORD, you his servants; praise the name of the LORD. Let the name of the LORD be praised, both now and forevermore. From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, the name of the LORD is to be praised …” and on it goes.

It’s because of this Jewish practice of singing … lots … that, ever since Jesus, Christians — whether Jewish or Gentile — also sang and prayed the Psalms.

It probably seems weird now … but systematically singing the full catalogue of songs in the book of Psalms (all 150 of them) was a key part of Christian spirituality until the very modern period.

And, actually, for most of church history, this was thought to be exactly what the apostles laid down for us. In Col 3, for example, the apostle Paul said to the church, “Let the word of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.”
The words “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” are the very words used in the book of Psalms to describe the different kinds of things you might sing—psalms, hymns, songs. So the church just interpreted this as mainly a call to use the actual book of Psalms in the church service.

Jews still do this in the synagogue. Highly traditional Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox also still do it in church services. Modern style churches have replaced this practice with our own songs.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing to invent new songs in addition to the songs of the book of Psalms, but I can’t help wondering if something has been lost by the fact that Christains don’t find a way to sing and pray the very song lyrics that have been left to us by ancient Israel, Jesus, and the early church.

But I don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy about all this. We have excellent evidence that Christians were inventing songs—right alongside the Psalms—from the beginning. We have the hymns embedded in the NT. The pagan governor Pliny mentions to Emperor Trajan that Christians sing to each other in tandem “hymns to Christ as to god”. And, of course, the First Hymn, P.Oxy 1786, the first Christian song with musical notation, is a perfect example of how the ancient believers took the Jewish psalm-singing tradition … and extended it.

You can press ‘play’ now.

John Dickson:
What do you see as the purpose of hymns? Talk, talk me through it.

Mark:
Hymns, um, are designed, uh, for making teaching, or praise, or testimony, or comfort memorable, but also visceral, by syncing Christian truths into the heart as well as the head. So there’s the, the, uh, medieval formula that was actually taken over by some of the, um, the more formal hymn writers of Europe in the 16th and 17th century was that music in church had, had the task somewhere on the spectrum of explicatio and applicatio. So explication. Then application. And hymns in their purpose, I think, are designed ideally, written ideally, to be somewhere along that spectrum. So either expounding what God is like, expounding what Christian truth is like, or seeing how that Christian truth can be applied in the lives of believers, or perhaps as an appeal to those who aren’t believers yet.

Studio – John Dickson
The First Hymn is certainly one such appeal … religious silence and awe of the kind ancient Greeks could understand … revolutionary lyrics about the Trinity and the Christian God as the only giver of all good gifts … all packaged in the popular music of the day.
It’s praise and worship … but it’s also Public Christianity.
But enough teasing.

We’ve been talking about the First Hymn the entire episode, and you’ve only heard my own humble mumble. Here’s what it would have sounded like in Roman times, courtesy of my friends at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music.

Enjoy.

Choir performs P.Oxy 1786

Studio – John Dickson
“Let all be silent … as we sing our hymn to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … the only giver of all good gifts! Amen. Amen”

This may well have been designed (in part) for the ear of those who don’t believe but, of course, it is certainly a song that connects all brands of Christians through all of Christian history.

Mark:
One of the really most important Christian doctrines is to affirm the communion of the saints. And that means in our day, where the Christian faith is spread in so many parts of the world, there’s really a great possibility for the Christian churches anywhere to be aware, at least to some degree, of what is being sung elsewhere. And there are, uh, uh, Christian movements, uh, Christian, uh, composers, uh, Christian compilers of hymns and choral anthems for choirs who are intentionally trying to draw music from different parts of the world so that believers can have at least a taste of how the Christian gospel is being experienced in other parts of the world.

And the Christian teaching about the communion of the saints extends back in time. So when a, a, a church community sings a hymn that was written in the middle of the 20th century, middle of the 19th century, middle of the 18th century, often from the Middle Ages, usually with more modern music, they are affirming that the Christian faith extends over time as well as over space.

Choir performs P.Oxy 1786

Studio – John Dickson
We’re not just trying to uncover an ancient artefact in honour of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We want to take the first hymn, rearrange it, and give it back to the world … so believers and doubters alike can again hear about the only Giver of all good gifts.
So that’s what we’ve been doing. I say ‘we’. Actually, we wrangled the amazing musos Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding to do that heavy lifting. What they have done is astonishing.

The First Hymn for the 21st century.

But for that, you’ll have to wait till Easter. See ya.

Undeceptions theme song plays

Studio – John Dickson
If you like what we’re doing … please head to Apple Podcasts and give us a review. And please go to Undeceptions.com, pick up one of our T-shirts from the store. And, if you can, click donate. Help us cover the costs of each episode (currently about $3000 per ep). I appreciate it.
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See ya…

CREDITS
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Mark Hadley.

Alasdair Belling is a writer and researcher.

Siobhan McGuiness is our online librarian.

Lyndie Leviston remains my wonderful assistant.

Santino Dimarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant.

Editing by Richard Hamwi.

Our voice actors today were Yannick Lawry and Dakotah Love.

A big thank you to Michael Wilder at Wheaton College, and Tony Payne for his arrangement of the original First Hymn, and the 50-person choir led by John Trotter that brought this work to life – whooh!

Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan for making this Undeception possible.

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com – letting the truth out.