New Testament Christological Hymns

Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance

Matthew E. Gordley

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780830852093
• eBook ISBN: 9780830880027
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

We know that the earliest Christians sang hymns. Paul encourages believers to sing "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs." And at the dawn of the second century the Roman official Pliny names a feature of Christian worship as "singing alternately a hymn to Christ as to God." But are some of these early Christian hymns preserved for us in the New Testament? Are they right before our eyes?New Testament scholars have long debated whether early Christian hymns appear in the New Testament. And where some see preformed hymns and liturgical elements embossed on the page, others see patches of rhetorically elevated prose from the author's hand.Matthew Gordley now reopens this fascinating question. He begins with a new look at hymns in the Greco-Roman and Jewish world of the early church. Might the didactic hymns of those cultural currents set a new starting point for talking about hymnic texts in the New Testament? If so, how should we detect these hymns? How might they function in the New Testament? And what might they tell us about early Christian worship?An outstanding feature of texts such as Philippians 2:6-11, Colossians 1:15-20, and John 1:1-17 is their christological character. And if these are indeed hymns, we encounter the reality that within the crucible of worship the deepest and most searching texts of the New Testament arose. New Testament Christological Hymns reopens an important line of investigation that will serve a new generation of students of the New Testament.

Notes

One - The Place of Hymns in the New Testament and in Scholarship

1. Ralph P. Martin, Worship in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 39.

2. For a summary of the history of early scholarship, see Reinhard Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit, SUNT 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 11-21; Jack T. Sanders, The New Testament Christological Hymns: Their Historical Religious Background, SNTSMS 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1-5. Deichgräber pointed to the pioneering work of Eduard Norden in the first decade of the twentieth century, which was broadened and furthered by the 1920/1921 publication of Josef Kroll, Die christliche Hymnodik bis zu Klemens von Alexandria (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968).

3. As I explain below, we will look specifically at Phil 2:5-11; Col 1:15-20; Jn 1:1-18; Eph 2:14-16; 1 Tim 3:16; Heb 1:1-4; and 1 Pet 3:18-22. We will also examine Lk 1:46-55; 1:68-79; 2:14; 2:29-32 as well as the hymns in Rev 4–5.

4. The important works noted above by Deichgräber and Sanders were written half a century ago. More than two decades have passed since the insightful but more devotionally oriented volume by Robert J. Karris, A Symphony of New Testament Hymns (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996).

5. For discussion of these various genres see Richard N. Longenecker, New Wine into Fresh Wineskins: Contextualizing the Early Christian Confessions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 7-23. In spite of their differing lengths and stylistic features he proposes to “give priority to content and classify all these materials under the generic rubric ‘early Christian confessions’—that is, to speak of them as formulaic statements that express the essential convictions of the earliest believers in Jesus” (24). While that is appropriate for Longenecker’s purpose, for the purposes of this volume more specificity is necessary.

6. A study of hymns in praise of God would be another task altogether. Among the hymns to God in the New Testament, see Rom 11:33-36, as well as possible hymn fragments in 2 Cor 1:3-4; Eph 1:3-14; Col 1:12-14; 1 Pet 1:3-5; and Acts 26:18. These and others are explored at length in Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus, 60-105. Longenecker adds Rev 15:3-4 in this category (New Wine, 10-11).

7. On the many complexities of defining the concept of worship, both in ancient and modern contexts, see Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 2-8. While McGowan ends up focusing his study on worship on the “practices that constitute Christian communal and ritual life” irrespective of what the New Testament connotes as worship (7), he acknowledges that within the ancient world and within the New Testament, the terms that we translate as “worship” have a broader scope: “not a specific realm of activity like ‘liturgy’ but the orientation of all forms of human activity, including the liturgical or ritual, toward a particular allegiance” (4). As we will see, that broader notion of orientation is an important concept for interpreting the New Testament hymns. On the New Testament concept of worship, see James D. G. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 7-28.

8. Seminal studies of worship in the New Testament by Gerhard Delling, Worship in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1962); Martin, Worship in the Early Church. More recently, see Paul F. Bradshaw, Reconstructing Early Christian Worship (London: SPCK, 2009); Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship.

9. See, for example, David E. Aune, “Worship, Early Christian,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:973-89; Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship: The Context and Character of Earliest Christian Devotion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Litu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• One - The Place of Hymns in the New Testament and in Scholarship
• Two - The Cultural Matrices of Early Christian Worship
• Three - The Philippian Hymn
• Four - The Colossian Hymn
• Five - The Prologue of the Gospel of John
• Six - A Wider Look
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright