I often post old hymns here, especially on Fridays. But I’ve never posted one this old — it’s “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hylarion) a hymn still used in Orthodox churches, and first known from a manuscript around 300 AD. But it could be older.
I should mention that others promote a hymn called the Oxyrhynchus Hymn. You can decide for yourself.
Have a good weekend.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
We respect your privacy. Would you like to accept some freshly baked cookies?
Websites store cookies to enhance functionality and personalise your experience. You can manage your preferences, but blocking some cookies may impact site performance and services.
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
These cookies are used for managing login functionality on this website.
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Service URL: policies.google.com (opens in a new window)
Marketing cookies are used to follow visitors to websites. The intention is to show ads that are relevant and engaging to the individual user.
A video-sharing platform for users to upload, view, and share videos across various genres and topics.
Service URL: www.youtube.com (opens in a new window)
The LCMS did a setting for evening prayer offices.
https://youtu.be/0T0IP0ftJhY?si=rcjG8uzQmckEk1QU
Fascinating – thank you! Following up the linked “Oxyrhynchus Hymn” article with some help from YouTube, I find that I do have a CD with a performance of it, but I had never looked into its history further (the autoplay which usually drives me wild just provided me with a Greek performance of ‘Phos Hylarion’ with Greek text as well!).
How little I know ‘my stuff’, but I am struck by the use of ‘dynameis’ in the Oxyrhynchus Hymn having earlier been struck by St. Jerome’s use of “virtutum” (etc.) in Psalms – I suppose following the Septuagint – where the Hebrew has ‘sabaoth’ – and the King James “of hosts”. And I wonder if Tolkien’s decision to translate ‘Valar’ with “Powers” has such things in the background – and now I also wonder if he knew the Oxyrhynchus Hymn!
Funnily enough, I just ran into reports of “a 1,600-year-old tomb” in Oxyrhynchus with “the first known evidence of a Greek literary text that was ‘deliberately incorporated into the mummification process'” – a papyrus scrap with an excerpt from the ‘ship catalogue’ in Book II of Homer’s Illiad “tucked beneath the wrappings on the mummy’s abdomen” (!).
Most people are not aware how thoroughly Hellenistic culture came to dominate the whole Mediterranean world.
Indeed – and beyond: I clicked through from the article where I met the Oxyrhychus ‘Iliad’ scrap to another one about a Fourth-c. A.D. mosaic in Roman Britain apparently depicting details of a variant version of the Trojan War story attested to by surviving quotations, etc. from Aeschylus’s otherwise lost play, The Phrygians!
Tangentially, Christine Mohrmann’s ‘Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character: Three Lectures’ also comes to mind, about how the early Greek Christian liturgy in Rome itself was eventually supplanted by a Latin one as more people were baptized who neither spoke the ‘Koine Greek’ of the ‘lower’ classes nor knew the Greek classics in Greek the way the ‘upper’ classes did.