The Hymns of the Apocalypse.
It has been suggested that the choral passages of the Book of Revelation are quotations from current hymns. If that were true, how could the little gatherings of Christians have risen to the majesty of these marvelous hymns of adoration, either vocally or spiritually? They are so intimately a part of the stupendous scenes in which they appear as to make their being merely quotations seem impossible. Only the itch of a German-type scholarship to press out the last drop of possibility from any given historical material, and the calm assurance that the results must be true, since it has recognized them, can explain this hypothesis.
These hymns are too integral a part of the scenes, too consonant with their elevated spirit, and logically too inevitable, that they should have been mechanically introduced or even adapted from current hymns—they are too choral in the grand manner.
In general, we may accept the same judgment of Dr. Lyman Coleman, in his work The Primitive Church. “The argument is not conclusive, and all the learned criticism, the talent and the taste, that have been employed on this point, leave us little else than uncertain conjecture on which to build a hypothesis.”
“The Odes of Solomon.”
“The Odes of Solomon” is a Syriac collection of hymns which good authorities claim to be of the Apostolic Age; one authority, Mrs. Gibson, insists that it precedes Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, while the most conservative concede that it belongs to the first century, or the first half of the second.
Its discoverer, Dr. Rendell Harris, Director of studies at Woodbrooke, the Quaker center at Selly Oak, England, says of the “Odes”: “They are utterly radiant with faith and love, shot through and through with what the New Testament calls ‘the joy of the Lord.’” He quotes one of them: “A great day has shined upon us; marvelous is He who has given us of His glory. Let us, therefore, all of us unite together in the name of the Lord, and let us honor Him in His goodness, and let us meditate in His love by night and by day.”[1]
The first stanza of Ode XXVI is translated as follows:
I poured out praise to the Lord,
For I am his: