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Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
This 1,700-Year-Old Song Is the Oldest Christian Music We Have
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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:31]
B
Music is an integral part of many Christian worship services, but what do we know about the earliest use of music in Christianity Today? I am joined by Dr. Charles Cosgrove to talk about music and the very earliest Christian hymn that we have available to us. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus Podcast. Before we get back, one breaking announcement that came together after we recorded this episode. I'm really excited to announce our first ever live event. It's called the Biblical Studies Symposium, or BSS, and it's happening November 21st in downtown Denver. BSS is an intimate one day gathering where eight leading scholars tackle the biggest questions about how the Bible came to be capped by a live debate featuring bard. Seats are limited to 75 and they're going to go fast. You can also get special early bird pricing through July 11th. You can learn more at bart erman.com BSS as one final note, if you can't make it to Denver, then virtual passes are available as well. Again, you can visit barterman.com BSS to sign up. So Dr. Cosgrove, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. For those who are unfamiliar with you, I'm just going to give a very brief introduction and then we can get into the topic. So for those who are unfamiliar with him, Dr. Charles Cosgrove is an Emeritus professor of Early Christian Literature from Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. He earned his PhD in New Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books and articles on the literature and institutions of the early church, as well as studies of ancient music and poetry in antiquity. He's here today to talk to me, as I said, about the very first Christian hymn in existence. Dr. Cosgrove, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited about this.
- [02:26]
C
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, Megan.
- [02:28]
B
Now, to start with, when and where was this hymn found exactly? Like, how old is it?
- [02:35]
C
So this hymn was found on papyrus, which is ancient Greek paper, in Egypt at a city called Oxyrhynchus. That's the old name for the city, which was in Middle Egypt about 100 miles south of modern day Cairo and not too far from the Nile River. It was found in a garbage dump. The archaeologists went to Oxyrhynchus hoping to find interesting things, monuments, of course, and so forth. And it was practically nothing there, some things. But they were disappointed until they turned to the garbage dump, and then they discovered hundreds and hundreds of sheets of papyri, mostly fragmentary, but with a good deal of literature that could be read. And among these papyri were Greek musical documents. And among those documents was this hymn. And it was discovered at the end of the 19th century and has been published in a couple of short editions along the way, until I turned to it about 15 years ago and wrote a monograph on it.
- [03:40]
B
I have never met an archeologist who is not very excited by the idea of an ancient garbage dump, because they have. They're just absolute treasure troves. Now, how old is the hymn? When does it date to?
- [03:54]
C
The hymn is on the back of a grain account in Egypt. So the musician or scribe who wrote it down reused some paper, and that grain account is from the early third century. So we think the hymn is probably from the late third century. And the handwriting fits that, and certain features of its music also fit that. In some ways, however, the text of the hymn sounds a little bit later, so it's difficult to say. But reading the text is more subjective than the fact that it's on a grain account with a date on it.
- [04:33]
B
How do we know it's a hymn? What is there that tells us this is a piece of music and not a poem or a prayer or something similar?
- [04:41]
C
So you're asking how do we know that it's musical as opposed to simply being a poetic text in praise of God or on some other Christian subject? Well, it has musical notation. And this is the extraordinary thing about this hymn. It's the earliest piece of ancient Christian music before Gregorian chant manuscripts from the early 9th century, which have little notations called neumes. So there's a huge gap between this papyrus at the end of the third century and those ninth century manuscripts, and they use very different musical notations. They're from two different traditions. And the way the Greeks wrote out musical notes was they assigned notes to Greek letters of the Alphabet, and then they had to add other symbols to have enough. And so they have a whole system of notation that they place above the words. And I can show this now on a slide of the hymn. You see here, the papyrus I'm marking with my cursor, this rectangular shape of the papyrus. This is from a sheet, but this is all that's left of the Hymn. And there's a big gap in the upper left hand area where the hymn was destroyed. The papyrus was destroyed with the hymn. And there are letters up here we can hardly read. And there is at the very end a blank space, which is very helpful. That tells us this is the end of the hymn. There's something else that is a clue to that. You know, Greek letters became the basis for English letters in many cases. And our A looks like the Greek alpha and our M looks like the Greek mu, and our N looks like the Greek nu. And the these two words at the end are amen. Amen, Amen, Amen. And you can see it's handwriting, so it's a little hard to read. But I'll show you at the bottom here in this close up here's the alpha A, the mu, a letter that means A. And then the N. So amen, Amen. And then blank space. So amen, Amen tells you that's an ending of something. And then the blank space says the hymn doesn't go on from here. So that's a very significant piece of information. And then there's another clue. The hymn has in its text a motif called a call for stillness. And those usually came at the beginning of Greek hymns, close to the beginning. And that call for stillness shows up in the middle of the hymn, right up in this area. So this is probably where the beginning was. I'm pointing to the far left and that means that we don't have stanzas. And stanzas probably above what you're looking at in the lost part of the papyrus.
- [07:45]
B
That is absolutely fascinating. And the musical notation, is that visible on the close up there?
- [07:52]
C
Yes, you can sort of see it here. I'll show it here. These are words. And then this is musical notation here in the larger image. Here's the musical notation. These are Greek letters. And then there's some other little signs. They call this a hyphen, this little half circle, and then this stroke above the letter. There are two letters here. These are rhythmic signs that show these notes go together. And then there's some more notation here and three more here. So this is amen. And the extraordinary thing about this hymn, you can't really read it very closely, but up here on the top where we can first see some words and notation, this is the end of something because then there's a blank here in the beginning of a new line. And this tan, which probably means neither night nor day, that is, it's the end of that phrase. It runs just like this. Amen so the hymn echoes itself, which is a. A really nice musical feature that is beautiful.
- [09:11]
B
And does this hymn just. Do the musical notations preserve things like volume marking or speed, or is it. Is it purely rhythm and. And notes?
- [09:26]
C
Oh, that's really a great question. No, there are no indications of how it should be performed, how fast, or any dynamic markings. No crescendos or diminuendos or anything like that.
- [09:40]
B
There's no forte marking in that.
- [09:42]
C
These are very basic musical symbols, and we know them because ancient Greek musicologists wrote treatises on ancient Greek music in which they included descriptions of scales, because Greeks knew how to figure out notes by dividing strings according to ratios. If you take a string and you divide it in half, you have an octave that is the relationship is one of an octave. And they know that's two to one. And so they can describe what all the ratios are for all their intervals. And then they lay out a scale system with these notations that we looked at, and that tells us what the scales are. And then we can read the notation and know what the sound is, the intervals are in the music. It's not absolute intervals. Like, for those of those listening who are musicians, know what a 440 is, it's an exact vibration setting for the note A. The Greeks don't tell us things like that. But because it's vocal song, in this case and many others, we can guess pretty much where the range was. But it's not important to know exactly what the exact absolute pitch was. The important thing is the way the notes relate by interval, because I can sing any song in any key, and most of those listening will have no idea what the key is. But we can sing Happy Birthday to you, or we can sing Happy Birthday to you, or we can sing it somewhere else. Doesn't matter. The importance is how. What the relationship between the notes are and what those precise intervals are.
- [11:29]
B
That's fascinating. Thank you. Do we have any idea who composed this?
- [11:34]
C
Not by name, but because of the nature of the papyrus, we can say several things. And also the text. This is a highly literate person. They've written a poem that's metrical and it's a text, it's written out. It's not simply part of oral tradition. And they've used musical notation, which is a highly technical field used only by professional musicians. So this hymn is not the product of someone who wasn't highly trained as a musician and who did not have an education. They have both of those high training in music and in education and a Professional training, where they would have learned musical notation. Most of the music of antiquity was not written down with notation.
- [12:25]
B
That's really interesting.
- [12:27]
C
They're a Christian because of the text tells us that. And their song ended up in Oxyrhynchus, where there were churches at the end of the third century. Now, the. The composer of this hymn knew this hymn by heart. The composer didn't have to write it down in order to know it. Just like a modern songwriter doesn't write down a song that they're going to sing to the piano as a solo with. With singing it themselves or to a guitar. Composers write things down when they're more elaborate, like for a symphony or a jazz band arrangement for 16 jazz musicians. But a soloist is going to sing to a simple musical accompaniment. Like the string instrument of antiquity didn't need to write it down. They composed it. And as they composed it, they memorized it and then they knew it. So the fact that it's written down means that there was some reason to transmit it, that is, to either to transmit it over space from one place to another, or to transmit it through time. I think in this case it's likely that it was an effort to transmit it over space, that somebody wanted this hymn and requested a copy of it, or through maybe letter correspondence, there was some agreement that would be copied and sent. So it was copied in Oxyrhynchus and stayed there, perhaps because a traveling Christian musician had been there. It's possible it was sent to Oxyrhynchus, but maybe less likely.
- [14:06]
B
So we're not looking at an ancient hymnal. We're looking at something that was created by a musician for another musician so that they could play it in their own church or if they were visiting elsewhere.
- [14:19]
C
Yes, exactly. And here's a difference between ancient Christian experience and use of music and what modern churchgoers are used to. Modern churchgoers have a hymnal or something, music projected on a screen, and everybody sings all the words together in unison. And there's some kind of accompaniment by a piano, an organ, a band, or some other kind of arrangement of instruments. In the ancient church, there were no musical instruments as a rule, because people didn't play them. And the church had not developed to the point of that kind of organization. But there were some professional musicians who probably accompanied themselves when they sang. And the singing was, from what we can tell, predominantly solo. By solo, I don't mean these were professional soloists. A few may have been like this one. But the ordinary Christian would be invited to sing a song At a church gathering. And they would sing it, probably with no accompaniment, as a soloistic song by themselves. And nobody else knew it, so they didn't sing along. Only if it was repeated many times would others know it. And we don't have any references, at least not clear ones, to unison. Group singing in churches in the earliest centuries certainly can't be ruled out, but we don't have direct evidence. We do have some direct evidence of solo singing by members of the church at meetings.
- [15:58]
B
Do we know if these solos would have been performed during worship services or in more social gatherings? Or possibly both.
- [16:09]
C
The worship gathering of the earliest church took place at a meal, typically. And so the singing took place in a worship service and at a social meal. We have a direct description of this from Tertullian, a North African Christian writing around 200 of the common era. He says that when his church gathers after instruction and after the eating of a meal, they have a hand washing ceremony. That's to clean their fingers, I guess, after eating the food. And the wine is probably poured at that time, or more wine, and then each one is invited or even challenged to sing from his or her own genius, is the expression or ingenuity or, or compositional ability, or from scripture. And then they do this one by one in front of the group. They probably stand where they are and sing to the group. So this is a picture of one of the earliest Christian services, but it's a. All of it takes place in a collegial or convivial meal setting with people of all ages.
- [17:35]
B
Do we know how this compares to the use of music in Greek religion or Egyptian religion around the same time? Was this something that would have been happening in other worship settings with other deities? Or is this more of a Christian tradition?
- [17:54]
C
There were groups of pagan worshipers who had clubs and they would gather in their buildings for festive meals. And there was song. There's some indications that the songs performed by choruses, Some clues that maybe the members of the club would have parts, singing parts or other roles and those kinds of events. There are some instructions in rules of at least one club that people are not to sing except when they're given a direction to do. Not to do all kinds of things, talk or sing or anything, unless they're given an instruction. So there may have been an impulse at a social gathering of a club to, once you've been drinking, to fall into song, invite your companions to sing with you. Because it was a long tradition of singing in social meals in Greek and Roman antiquity. So there's that parallel. But most pagans went to a temple to offer a gift and to pray. And the temples had their own cult singers who performed hymns to the God. So in that respect, these practices of the early church are different from what was typically the case for a pagan worshiper. And pagan religion was not as communal in this respect as early Christianity was, in that you or I could go to a temple and not be part of a group of worshipers that we met with on a regular basis. We would be there with whoever else attended, would participate in the rites to the extent that we were to participate or simply to watch and then to make our offering or simply to go when no rites were taken place and to make an offering.
- [19:45]
B
How were scholars able to decipher this hymn? It's very rare to find this kind of document. Were people surprised? Was it difficult to work out what was going on?
- [20:00]
C
Yes, a good deal of this. The papyrological record comes from the late 19th century. But a handful of hymns of the court musician to the emperor Hadrian were preserved in books, and they were known, and thanks to the musicological tradition, music books, we had information about how to decipher those. So in the 19th century, a number of scholars were producing descriptions of ancient Greek music and transcribing what texts were available. But this really got underway in the 20th century.
- [20:48]
B
So how similar is this hymn to other ancient music of the same time?
- [20:53]
C
You know, the Oxyrhynchus hymn is very similar to the Greek hymnody on papyri from the era in which it was composed, that is the late third century. We have Greek musical documents that go all the way back into the Hellenistic period. So perhaps as many as five or six centuries of music. And some of it may reflect the music of the classical period, because there are a few hymn, a few not hymn texts, but a few texts of Euripides plays. So I've just snippets of them, not the whole thing, but there are bits of Euripides, and those could be music that was performed in the 5th century BC, even though the papyri show this music in the 3rd century BC, and they may have put it to different melodies. That's. That's what I'm saying. They had the right words, but they may have changed the melodies or they may have evolved along the way. That music is different from this music in a couple respects. First, in those days, the rhythm of a song was given almost entirely by the words themselves. In Greek poetry, syllables were either long or short. And so poems are Made out of words with long and short syllables, arranged in a way that created a rhythm, a rhythm of long and shorts, Dum bum bum, bum, bum bum and much more complex combinations. By the Roman era, composers were still using those methods of rhythm, but they were singing more than one note per syllable. And we heard that in our hymn, the Amen.
- [22:46]
D
Amen.
- [22:49]
C
So this is something characteristic of the Roman era, and especially the second and third centuries. So there's a great deal of continuity between the hymns of the Hellenistic era and the hymns of the Roman era. But that's one of the changes that our hymn reflects along with others of its time period.
- [23:11]
B
What is the hymn about? How's it been translated?
- [23:14]
C
We should look at the hymn text. Here's an English translation of it. The first part, this phrase here together, all the eminent ones of God. This is part of a sentence that cannot be fully read. And I'm just guessing. The eminent ones of God may be angels, and then there's some reference to night or day. Maybe the eminent ones of God are called to do something or described as doing something, night and day. Then finally, we get to the point where our hymn text can be read. Now, there are some gaps in this hymn, so we can't read everything. But the part we can read begins, let them, or let it be silent, then let not the luminous stars. And then there's a gap, and then there's a reference to all the surging rivers, and then there's a gap. Comparing this language to other calls of silence in ancient Greek hymns and poetry, we can make some educated guesses that in the gaps there were references to other natural elements or things that we're called to stop moving or to be silent. And the origin of this call to silence is from cultic ritual, where just before the priests began the ritual, there was a call for everyone present to be silent, so that no one would say something that might offend the God, and then the ceremony would begin. So what Greek hymnists did is they dramatized this in their own hymns, even though their hymns are already underway, that represent the cult singing at the ritual. They describe calls to silence. It's a little paradoxical, but there are hymns which are sung in cultic settings where probably the priest first said, everyone be silent, and then the hymn begins. Now everyone's quiet, and they're listening to the hymn, and the hymn says, let everybody be silent. So that's what we're seeing in our hymn. A Call to Silence dramatizes the event of the hymn itself, and it pictures these Persons besides human beings participating, heavenly beings. The hymn just says that we, that's the church, while we Him, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers, and these are almost certainly angels, answer Amen. Amen. Strength and praise and glory forever to God. That's a doxology, the sole giver of all good things. Amen. Amen. So we have an earthly scene in which heavenly beings participate, and they're being directed by the anonymous voice of the singers here, who are part of the hymn telling the powers to respond. So it's not the angels directing the church, but the church directing the angels. In the imagination of the hymnist and the description of God as the gear of all good things. That sounds like a typical Christian Jewish idea or. But it uses a phrase that's very classically Greek for describing Zeus. So this shows just another indication of what a classical education our hymnist had.
- [26:58]
B
How is the music itself or the melody, how does it differ to what we might think of a hymn sounding like?
- [27:09]
C
Well, there's one very important way in which this hymn is like our music, and it makes this hymn accessible to us. It's diatonic. Now, that's a musical term. I'm going to explain it as simply as I can. If you think of the notes on the piano, they're diatonic. They're in half steps and whole steps and combinations of those. But ancient Greeks in the classical era and before, they had notes in between the notes of a piano, microtones. So in addition to all the notes of the piano, so to speak, they had these additional notes and they made scales out of them and they sang them. Those microtones were pretty hard to sing even in the ancient world. And one of Aristotle's students, Aristoxenus, tells us in his day, in the third century bc, people could no longer sing those intervals, only perhaps cult singers who had been trained. And so they began to die out and the music became almost completely diatonic in the ensuing centuries and was so predominantly in the Roman era. So that diatonic music made out of whole steps and half steps is the same as our music. So that's why the Greek hymn can be. It sounds like our music intervallically.
- [28:33]
B
Is it in that way similar to the previous earliest Christian music, similar to the Gregorian chants?
- [28:40]
C
So the later. Yes, yes, it is. Gregorian chant is also diatonic. Gregorian chant, however, is not based on metrical poems. This hymn is all the Greek music is. It's based on the systems of ancient Greek poetry, which are metrical, you know, like our metrical poetry. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. To take a simple example, it's got this very fixed rhythm that repeats as opposed to blank verse, which is when the psalms are translated into Greek, they sound like blank verse. And this influenced a great deal of early Christian music and Gregorian chant has that character.
- [29:28]
B
We do have a recording of the hymn. Would you like to play it for us?
- [29:32]
C
I would. I'll say before I play it that it's impossible to match a literal English translation like this one to the melody, the notation, for two reasons. One is that the Greek words tend to be longer than many of the English words of the translation. So they don't match up in terms of rhythm and. And also there are places where we have notation, musical notation, and don't know the words. And so we have to fill those in and vice versa. So I've had to create a paraphrastic translation of this that you'll see doesn't match up with the text in a word to word way, although it does in sense. And we'll hear a. A member of the Toledo Symphony sing it.
- [30:28]
D
Let sirens fall. Let stars withhold their light. Let them close their shining eyes. Let all the roaring rivers and the winds die down. And as we lift up our hymn to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, let the powerers all add their voices and sing on the Amen. Strength and praise forever and glory to God who gives all good things, who alone gives all good things. Amen. Amen.
- [31:42]
C
So one thing you may have noticed about that melody, which I think is just lovely, and it's like any melody that it may, that from another culture it tends to sound a little foreign at first. But the more you listen to it, the more you begin to appreciate its inner logic and it grows on you. The melody doesn't really repeat. It's not like a hymn in a hymn book where you have stanzas and they repeat to the. The words change and the stanzas of the music stay the same. This melody seems, some people would think it's wandering, it's going here, then it's going there. There was that little echo that I sang to you earlier of the Amen. Amen. But besides that, there are no similar direct repetitions of the melody line. And this is typical of all the Greek music of the era and going back into the Hellenistic era. It doesn't have a repetition quality or it's not built on formulas of repetition or stanzas. There was ancient Greek music that was stanzaic, but a lot of the music was just like this. And in the same way, Gregorian chant has this quality. The melodies don't repeat, they. They move, they weave. And that's a different kind of musical logic than much of the certainly than popular music, which has repeats its, its basic verses and then often has a chorus with a hook that repeats. Or classical music where a motif might be repeated like bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. See, repeat, repeat, repeat with different notes. So this music has its own logic. It's not like Western music. It's a little bit more like Gregorian chant in that respect.
- [33:36]
B
It was beautiful to listen to it. It's very. The word that came to mind when it was playing was complex. And I think that is definitely alien maybe to. To the way a lot of Western music is composed. But it was absolutely beautiful.
- [33:59]
C
Yeah. It's really a shame we don't have more of this ancient music. We know a lot of it was composed and some of it was surely written down with notation and ended up in a garbage dump, but got fully destroyed. And you know, we only have papyri like these because Egypt is so dry. All over the Mediterranean world, people were writing texts, including musicians, and their texts were destroyed because they didn't end up in the dry sands of Egypt.
- [34:33]
B
Is it possible, do you think, to see a line of continuity from this earliest music down to the music that people are still singing in churches? Or do you think that there's been too much time, too much distance and it's really a distinct separate tradition?
- [34:51]
C
I think there is one similarity probably strikes anyone who thought about it listening to the hymn or is reading it on the screen. We still have praise music. Many of the traditional hymns of the church in the modern era are praise hymns. There's a whole epic of so called Christian praise music, Christian contemporary music that is dominated by a lot of praise songs and ancient hymnody. Greek hymnody was full of praise. The praise took the form of using praise words and addressing them to God, or in the third person describing a God with laudatory terms, or describing what the God did or what benefits the God showed to human beings. More typically all the powerful things the gods did. In Christian hymnody, both praise and other themes show up because so much of Christian hymnody was influenced by the Psalms. Once the Psalms became the standard hymn book of the church, that diversity of topic became typical of Christian hymnody. And if you think about the Psalms, there are not only praises in the Psalms, there are laments in the Psalms, there's instruction in the psalms. So Christian Hymn of the Ages reflects all that. But this hymn happens to be a praise hymn and it dramatizes the moment of praise, whether it was sung at. So this is we're talking about the late third century. There were church structures by this time. Christians were going to church meetings on Sunday morning. And this hymn could have been sung in that kind of setting, but Christians were still eating together. And a hymn like this might have been sung at one of those social gatherings.
- [36:51]
B
For people who are interested in this, are there any generally accessible resources that they can seek out to learn more?
- [37:02]
C
Well, I wrote a monograph on this that may not be generally accessible, even though if any musicians are listening, I tried to explain everything in terms that a musician could understand, and there are probably chapters there that could be accessible. There's also a book on ancient Greek music. Again, it's technical, but it's written in very plain and understandable language by Martin West, a great classicist from Oxford, more recently deceased. And his book is called Ancient Greek Music. So for any musicians who want to read about ancient Greek music, they can look at that book. And this hymn is covered briefly in that book. I can't refer to anything else that's more detailed on this hymn. I'm going to include it in a book I'm writing on the history of early Christian music, but that book will be somewhere in between, meant for a general audience and technical.
- [38:11]
B
Well, thank you very much.
- [38:12]
C
By the way, you can look at the Wikipedia article, which it was there before I added information to it. You can check that out. And I guess now you can ask AI to summarize my book. Probably it will probably summarize my book, my monograph on the Oxa Rhynchus Papyrus, the earliest Christian hymn, and do so with whatever level of detail or technical or non technical one wants.
- [38:46]
B
Well, Dr. Cosgrove, those were all of my questions. Is there anything that you want to add or make sure the audience knows before we close out for the week?
- [38:53]
C
I don't think so. I'll probably think of something after we've closed out, but it's always the way. I've said enough.
- [39:00]
B
Well, Dr. Cosgrove, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute delight. Audience, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week along with Bart, and we're going to talk about whether Jesus wanted to suffer. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.