The double reference of the Apostle to “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” would indicate that the Christian Church very early began to use chants and hymns other than those taken from the Psaltery. The younger Pliny, in 112 A.D., wrote to Emperor Trajan from Bithynia that the Christians came together before daylight and sang hymns alternately (invicem) “to Christ as God.”
These distinctively Christian chants were the Gloria in Excelsis, or the “Angelic Hymn,” so called because its opening lines are taken from the song of the angels at Jesus’ birth; the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise; the Benedictus, the song of Zacharias, father of John the Baptist; and the Nunc Dimittis, the prayer of the aged Simeon when he held the Christ-child in his arms. Other chants that were used very early in the Christian Church included the Ter Sanctus, based on the “thrice holy” of Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8; the Gloria Patri, or “Lesser Doxology;” the Benedicite, the “Song of the Three Hebrew Children,” from the Apocrypha; and the Te Deum Laudamus, which is sometimes regarded as a later Latin chant, but which undoubtedly was derived from a very ancient hymn of praise.
Eminent Biblical scholars believe that fragments of other primitive Christian hymns have been preserved in the Epistles of Paul and in other portions of the New Testament. Such a fragment is believed to be recorded in 1 Timothy 3:16:
He who was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the spirit,
Seen of angels,
Preached among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.
The “faithful saying” to which Paul refers in 2 Timothy 2:11 also is believed to be a quotation from one of these hymns so dear to the Christians: