Singing hymns to deity was an established practice in the Greco-Roman world long before the emergence of Christianity. Christian hymns differed from pagan hymnody, however, in celebrating a redemptive historical event; they have a “prophetic” quality.
With Stephen and those who followed him, the early Christian mission reached out to offer its message to those who lived in Greco-Roman society. In that world, the singing of hymns to the deities of contemporary religious cults was already an established practice. The use of hymns in corporate and private worship in that culture went back a long way, but it reached its high point at a time when the finest and most sensitive spirits in late classical civilization were becoming conscious of their need for “salvation.” The immediate occasion was the onset of pessimism and despair caused partly by Greek science, which offered a naturalistic explanation of the universe, and partly by Eastern astrology, which placed a vast distance between human beings and the gods Homer and Hesiod had described. A valiant attempt to relate the traditional deities to human life was made as an answer to belief in impersonal fate or chance or iron necessity. These terms imply that human life is at the mercy of cosmic forces alien to humans.
New Testament examples of hymnic prayer are quite different, as they center on the basic idea of “remembering” construed in a dynamic way (drawn from Old Testament worship, which celebrated Yahweh’s mighty acts) and carried over into the new Israel and its worship. The events of the “new Exodus” were similarly rehearsed and recalled in a dramatic retelling. At this point, we are touching on the shift in an understanding of New Testament canticles that focus on Christ’s saving achievement. Unlike the earlier species of “messianic psalms,” these hymns seem to have been newly created as spontaneous utterances of gifted, Spirit-filled members of the community (1 Cor. 14:15; Eph. 5:18–20; Col. 3:16–17), who may be further identified as prophets. If this title is accurate, it suggests that their role was one of instruction and exhortation (paraklēsis), according to 1 Corinthians 14:3. Their ministry was intended to build up the congregations and to do so in one specific regard, namely to ward off erroneous teaching by a positive statement, at services of worship, of how the faith was to be understood and applied with particular reference to Christ’s redeeming mission.
We find several extensive pericopes in Paul where, on lexical, stylistic, and contextual grounds, we may well suspect that he has taken over and set into the flow of his epistolary correspondence these preformed liturgical passages. The more obvious examples in the Pauline corpus are Philippians 2:6–11, Colossians 1:15–20, and 1 Timothy 3:16, though the list can be considerably enlarged. Extending the survey to include, along with Paul, the rest of the New Testament, M. Hengel speaks of “a dozen Christological texts originating within a fifty to sixty year period (a.d. 40–100).” After that terminal point at the close of the century, there are several well-known references tocarmina Christi or “Hymns to Christ” in Pliny, the Letters of Ignatius, and the Odes of Solomon (an early Christian “hymnbook”). Interestingly, by the time of Justin, in the mid-second century, the flow of such compositions has apparently been checked.