New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance

Review "Like a good hymn, Gordley's work creates exegetical harmony that is pleasing and helpful to interpreters." -- Channing L. Crisler, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 2020 Product Description We know that the earliest Christians sang hymns. Paul encourages believers to sing "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs." And at the dawn of the second century the Roman official Pliny names a feature of Christian worship as "singing alternately a hymn to Christ as to God." But are some of these early Christian hymns preserved for us in the New Testament? Are they right before our eyes? New Testament scholars have long debated whether early Christian hymns appear in the New Testament. And where some see preformed hymns and liturgical elements embossed on the page, others see patches of rhetorically elevated prose from the author's hand. Matthew Gordley now reopens this fascinating question. He begins with a new look at hymns in the Greco-Roman and Jewish world of the early church. Might the di