The ‘Odes of Solomon’: a Late 1st Century Christian Hymnbook

An early papyrus fragment (not of this text)

I am putting on the love of the Lord…
I have been united to Him, because the lover has found the Beloved.
Because I love Him that is the Son, I shall become a son.
Indeed, whoever is joined to Him who is immortal, shall truly be immortal.

These striking words come from what has been hailed as the earliest Christian hymn book. Prior to 1909, nothing was known of the Odes of Solomon except one quotation by Lactantius (died 320). Then a Syriac manuscript was found containing, among other writings, 40 odes. Subsequent finds have shown that there were originally 42, though because of the fragmentary nature of the papyri, Ode 2 and part of Ode 3 have not survived.

An ode is simply a piece of lyrical poetry written for a particular occasion, which in Greek at least had a fixed form. However, scholars quickly established that, stylistically and ideologically, the Odes of Solomon are not from a Greek stable but a Jewish one. Dating evidence suggests late 1st – early 2nd century, at any event before the Bar-Kokhba Revolt of 132-135, when Christian Jews were evicted from synagogues.

These verses are not odes other than in a general sense, then, and there is nothing to link them to Solomon except by analogy of phrasing with the Song of Solomon in the Bible. For these Odes are clearly Christian (at one time scholars thought Gnostic, but the consensus today is that they are orthodox) and praise the person and attributes of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the titular use of Solomon’s name was a way of safeguarding the documents in a volatile political time when radical Jews were highly suspicious of Jewish followers of Christ.

What makes the Odes particularly exciting is that they clearly emanate from a community of Jewish disciples of Jesus, almost certainly from Syria. Church history from earliest times has majored on Gentile Christianity to the extent that the average reader can forget that Jewish believers continued at all beyond the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Fresco of Jesus, from the catacombs in Rome

There is a Helper for me: the Lord… He became like me, that I might receive Him.

I trembled not when I saw Him, for He was gracious to me.

Like my nature He became, that I might understand him; and like my form, that I might not turn away from Him.    Ode 7:3-6

It becomes clear that the writer was familiar with the biblical book of Psalms. It is nowhere exactly quoted, but in many places there are direct parallels. To give just one example, Psalm 84:10 reads: For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere, and in Ode 4:5 we find: For one hour of Your faith is more excellent than all the days and all the years.

What is also clear is that the writer, almost certainly a Jewish Christian in Syria, was very familiar with the writings of the Apostle John. If, as is generally agreed, the Odes date from the very end of the 1st century, it is well possible that the writer was a disciple of John. The link is noteworthy, because other (fragmentary) Jewish Christian texts, like the ‘Gospel of the Nazarenes‘ and the ‘Gospel of the Ebionites‘ lean heavily towards the more obviously Jewish slant of Matthew’s gospel (follow this link for a scholarly overview of early Jewish Christian writings).

Some of the odes are meditative expansions of Johannine themes like light and dark. John 1:1-18 presents Jesus Christ as “the light of the world”: In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it [v.3-4]. Ode 15:2 says: He is my Sun and His rays have lifted me up; His light has dismissed all darkness from my face.

Christians worshiping, from the catacombs in Rome

The general tenor of the Odes is similar to John’s gospel in its meditative, worshipful response to the truths of Jesus. See, for example, the writer’s treatment of the incarnation [Odes 7,19], death [Ode 28], resurrection and ascension [Ode 42].

A fine example is Ode 27, which is only three verses long and which clearly grew out of worshipful contemplation of the Cross:

I extended my hands and hallowed my Lord,
For the stretching out of my hands is His sign,
And my stretching upward is the upright cross. Hallelujah.

To read the Odes of Solomon for yourself, follow this link. The Odes have of recent times been set to music – for more details, visit The Odes Project.

Prepare to Meet Thy Dome? Some Mediaeval Christian Attitudes to Baldness – and its Treatment

Embracing baldness – or compensating for it?

Synesius of Cyrene (died AD 414), was a North African aristocrat and a Neo-Platonist philosopher. He married a Christian woman and embraced her faith, in time becoming bishop of Ptolemais (in modern Libya). He enjoyed debate and, it appears, humour. In the latter vein is his short essay entitled Eulogy of Baldness. Aptly, a eulogy is a speech in praise, typically of one now departed!

He bills it as a riposte to Dio Chrysostom (c. AD 40-115), a Greek orator, philosopher and historian who led a colourful life in the highest circles of Imperial Rome. He had produced an Encomium on Hair. An encomium was a celebratory speech. Here we read: After rising in the morning and praying to the gods, as is my custom, I attended to my hair. I happened to be in poor health at the time, and it had been too long neglected. Most of it had become knotted and entangled, like that which hangs about a sheep’s legs, but much coarser than this, for it is tangled with fine hairs.

What had led Dio to embrace grooming? Consideration of the importance of hair to human beauty and dignity. Homer rarely mentions anyone’s eyes (except Agamemnon’s), he reflects, while Achilles, Odysseus, Menelaus and more are specifically praised for their hair. Dio also considers those around him who love beauty and give their hair great importance, and who not merely give it serious attention but even keep a sort of reed in the hair itself, with which they comb it when they are at leisure… They think much more of keeping their hair clean than of sleeping agreeably. 

A splendidly hirsute Spartan warrior

Synesius admits the Encomium is “so brilliant a work that the bald man, in the face of its arguments, must be covered with shame.” Even so, he jumps to the defence of the follicly challenged. His Eulogy is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek. Besides taking issue with Dio’s reading of Homer, Synesius makes points like these:

Wild animals are hairy; bald animals are intelligent
The most intelligent of all people, the philosophers, are all bald
A sphere is a perfect, even divine form
The glimmer of a bald head is a source of light

He includes a riotous account of a battle between Alexander the Great and Darius of Persia, where the Persians found they could seize a Greek by his long hair and beard and dispatch him with ease. Alexander was forced to retreat and set the barbers loose on his troops. Thereafter, the Persians, the campaign no longer proceeding according to their hopes, as there was no longer anything to hold on to, were condemned to struggle in armour against much superior adversaries.

A mediaeval tonsured monk

Quite where the tonsure, the shaved bald patch of monks, fitted into this scenario, I have yet to find out. ‘All things to all men’?

Fast forward to the 12th century and we find no less than Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), abbess, writer, composer, philosopher and general polymath, with things to say about baldness. In her On Natural Philosophy and Medicine she sees a link between male head hair and facial hair and male fertility – one of the first to do so. And as for male pattern baldness, she even lists a cure :

Take bear fat, a small quantity of ashes from wheat straw or from winter wheat straw, mix this together and anoint the entire head with it, especially those areas on the head where the hair is beginning to fall out.  Afterwards, he should not wash this ointment off for a long while… Let him repeat this often and not wash his head. For the warmth of bear fat has the property of causing much hair to grow… When these ingredients are mixed as described, they will hold a person’s hair for a long time so that it does not fall out.

No doubt the sheer smell and unpleasantness would also have appealed to the contemporary love of penance and punishing the flesh?