The Odes Of Solomon.

        From the very beginning of the Christian movement, hymns and songs were part of its life. These were at first the psalms of Judaism; at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus and the disciples “sang the hymn” the second part (Pss. 115-18) of the Hallel. Paul recommends the use of psalms, hymns, and sacred songs to the Colossians (3:16). In the canticles of Luke-the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Gloria in excelsis, and the Nunc dimittis-we begin to see the dawn of a Christian hymnology, and we catch other glimpses of the same movement in the great arias, antiphonies, and choruses of the Revelation.

        Nothing like a collection of early Christian hymns seemed to have survived, however, until J. Rendel Harris, the discoverer of Aristides, in agog found, among some Syriac manuscripts gathered in the neighborhood of the Tigris, a group of Christian hymns he soon identified as the so-called Odes of Solomon, mentioned in the Synopsis of Holy Scripture that goes under the name of Chrysostom, which may be as late as the sixth century, and also in the Stichometry ofNicephorus (ca. A.D. 850). In both these lists the Odes appear not by themselves but as the Psalms and Odes of Solomon, and in Nicephorus their length is given as 2,100 lines. It is interesting to observe that in Harris' manuscript the Psalms of Solomon accompany and follow the Odes.

        The Psalms of Solomon are the well-known Pharisaic hymns, composed in the last century before Christ and extant in Greek in a few manuscripts. They once stood at the end of the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, after the New Testament and the two Letters of Clement, for they are listed in its table of contents, although they have long since been lost from the manuscript.

        But the Odes of Solomon had never been found in modern times until Harris discovered them in his Syriac manuscript on January 4, 1909. A second manuscript of the Odes and Psalms was soon after identified by F. C. Burkitt in the British Museum. Neither manuscript is entirely complete, however. The Pistis Sophia, a Coptic product of Egyptian Gnosticism of the Ophite or Setbite type, about A.D. 250-300, quotes five of the Odes, the first of which is missing in both Syriac manuscripts. The nineteenth ode is quoted by Lactantius in his Divine Institutes 4:12 (A.D. 311). He introduces his quotation with the words, “Thus Solomon speaks.”

        The Odes, forty-two in number, are followed in the Syriac manuscript by the eighteen Psalms of Solomon, which are numbered continuously with them, from 43 to 60. The Odes introduce us at once to a very well-marked religious atmosphere which pervades them all but is utterly unlike that of the Psalms of Solomon that follow them. The Odes are spiritual, mystical, imaginative, and boldly, even harshly, figurative, a trait they share with the Letters of Ignatius, with which they have other affinities. They sometimes recall characteristic touches in the Gospel and Letters of John, and, of course, they owe much to the Hebrew Psalms. They also remind one of the meditative psalms found at Qumran. In fact, some scholars regard them as Jewish hymns made over by revision and expansion to serve Christian purposes; but the Christian strain in them is probably too pervasive to be thus explained. “Love,” “light,” “life,” and “truth” are words often employed by the odist, and the combination seems Christian, although admittedly they are also present in late Judaism.

        Why were these hymns of devotion and aspiration ascribed to Solomon? Probably for the same reason that the Song of Songs and the Psalms of the Pharisees were-among the Hebrews Solomon was credited with five thousand songs (I Kings 4:32). Certainly their amalgamation with the Psalms of the Pharisees which went by his name carried the fiction of his authorship with it. Judaism had long enjoyed these sweeping literary verdicts-all the Law by Moses, all the Psalms by David, all the Proverbs and Wisdom writings by Solomon. The closing of the Psalter turned new song writers to Solomon, in view of his record in that field announced in Kings. Such verdicts were, of course, no more than dedications or gestures of respect to great figures of the past.

        Who really wrote these Odes no one can say. They have come to light only in Syriac, and some scholars have thought they might be the work of the Syriac poet Bardaisan (Bardeisanes), A.D. 154-222. But they were almost certainly written in Greek some time near the middle of the second century, before Christian theology had begun to assume something like fixity of form. What may well be the Greek original of one of them-the eleventh-has been discovered among the Bodmer papyri and was edited in 1959 by M. Testuz. It is entitled “Ode of Solomon” and is almost identical with the Syriac version. The use of the Odes in the Pistis Sophia shows that they were acceptable to some groups of Gnostics but does not prove that they were of Gnostic origin, although what looks very much like Gnostic influence can be traced here and there in them. Probably some imaginative and devout Greek Christian, perhaps of Ephesus (the Johannine atmosphere) or even more probably of Antioch (for they sometimes make us think of Ignatius), poured out his soul in them. Certainly they seem to be all from the same hand.

        Soon after Harris discovered these Odes, he described them in a letter as being “redolent of antiquity and radiant with spiritual light.” It would be difficult to characterize them more vividly.

        In the same volume of Bodmer papyri Testuz published a liturgical hymn; O. Perler suggested that it might be a hymn for the Easter vigil by Melito of Sardis, although the grounds for assigning it to Melito are not very strong.[32] The hymn reads as follows:

(a) Hymn the Father, ye saints;

    Sing to the Mother, ye virgins.

(b) Let us hymn them and exalt them highly, ye saints.

(c) Be ye exalted, brides and bridegrooms,

For ye have found your bridegroom, Christ.

Drink of the wine, brides and bridegrooms.

This hymn, perhaps preserved only in part, recalls the fragmentary hymns of the New Testament (for example, Eph. 5:14) and looks forward to the more elaborate compositions found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria. There are also a few hymns among the early Gnostic remains; we may mention the one called “Harvest” which Valentinus wrote (Hippolytus, Refutation vi. 37. 7).