A new documentary First Hymn brings to light the discovery of the very first church hymn – lyrics written with musical notation in recorded history. It was a small piece of papyrus found in Egypt at a large archeologist’ s site. It was actually written on the back of a business contract( apparently it was still hard to find good scratch paper way back then too) and indicates that it cannot be dated before AD 220. The side of the papyrus the hymn is written on could have been written anytime between AD 240- 300, with“ mid-to-late-200s” being the most responsible description. This is the date the hymn was written down. There is no reason to rule out that the song itself- both words and music- predate the writing. Part of the plan to bring this ancient song back to the church involved two of our own modern worship songwriters … Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding. I had the privilege of viewing this quality documentary the day before sitting down with longtime friend of the magazine Chris Tomlin to hear his thoughts about this First Hymn project.
[ Bruce Adolph ] Chris, so for 20 years I published Christian Musician Magazine and deservedly so, Phil Keaggy was on the front cover more than anybody else. And now we’ ve got 23 years of publishing [ WM ] Worship Musician( some years concurrently with Christian Musician), but you are the guy. You’ ve been on the cover more than anybody else on [ WM ] Worship Musician.
[ Chris Tomlin ] Oh man, thank you so much.
[ WM ] You were on the cover of our third issue, and you also wrote a couple articles for us in that first year.
[ Chris ] Yes, I remember those days.
[ WM ] You’ ve been too kind to us. Let’ s dive into this special project. When you first heard about the First Hymn project, did it spark your curiosity? How did it come about?
[ Chris ] Yes, I was reached out to by Ben Fielding, our good friend. And obviously readers of [ WM ] Worship Musician Magazine would know Ben. And Ben’ s such an amazing worship leader and songwriter. Ben reached out to me about the project and was giving me a little bit of background to see if I’ d be interested in taking this little amazing artifact that we have of our faith and helping him bring this back to life. And I was like,“ Well, what are you talking about?” And he started explaining to me the idea of this piece of papyrus that was found that had this piece of a hymn on there that is the earliest known hymn of the church ever discovered. And he said with a friend of his named John Dickson, we’ re bringing this back to the world, bringing this back to the church. And he asked me if I would be up to helping him bring this song back to life.
And at first, Bruce, honestly … this feels like a really big deal. And I was like,“ I don’ t want to mess this up.” And so we talked for a little
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