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Scholar Finds First Christian Hymns While Cleaning Office
The strange tale of the “Odes of Solomon”
As a scholar of early Christianity, J. Rendel Harris of Birmingham, England, had manuscripts mailed to him from all corners of the Middle East. His procedure was to remove them from their envelopes, place them on a shelf, and return to them a few years later.
On January 4, 1909, he would write:
“…having a little leisure time, I thought I would devote it to sorting and identifying a heap of torn and stained paper leaves written in the Syriac literature, which had been lying on my shelves for a long time, waiting for attention and not finding it.”
One manuscript was a Syriac copy of a known text, the Psalms of Solomon. He realized it was bound with another work, which he recognized from quotations by early Christians. This was the lost Odes of Solomon, the first hymnal of the faith — some forty-two songs, nearly two thousand years old.
At a lecture at Mansfield College, Oxford, on February 18, 1909, Harris announced the find. Covering the event, The Guardian reports the text was “recently discovered” and “of rare beauty,” ranking “with the finest expressions of Christian devotion…”
