The Earliest Christian Songs and Prayers

What happened to Christian worship and Psalmody in the generations after the New Testament?

It is a question we would like history to answer more clearly than it can. The New Testament gives us abundant evidence of a church whose worship, prayer, proclamation, and understanding of Jesus were deeply shaped by the Psalms. Then the historical record grows remarkably thin.

The surviving evidence from the next two centuries is scattered. A Roman governor overhears Christians singing. A bishop imagines the church as one choir. An apologist describes a Sunday gathering centered on extended Scripture reading, prayer, thanksgiving, and the Lord’s Table. Early Christian songs survive. Teachers mention Psalms at meals, in marriage, and alongside prayer. These are fascinating clues. But they are clues, not a continuous history.

Most of that history has disappeared.

Rare Glimpses of a Largely Lost Period

Around AD 111–113, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus, wrote to Emperor Trajan about Christians who had been brought before him. He reports that they were accustomed to gather on a fixed day before dawn and to speak or sing a song to Christ “as to a god,” among themselves in turn.

Pliny does not tell us that this song was a Psalm. His testimony establishes something simpler but still remarkable: near the beginning of the second century, Christians were already known for regular, participatory, Christ-directed sacred song.

Ignatius of Antioch, writing at roughly the same time, gives us another glimpse. He pictures the congregation as a choir, singing with one voice to the Father through Jesus Christ. Whether or not he is describing a particular service, singing, unity, Christ, and the shared voice of the church clearly belonged together in his imagination.

By the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr gives us one of the earliest descriptions of a Christian Sunday gathering. People from the cities and countryside gather in one place. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read “for as long as time permits.” The leader exhorts the congregation from what they have heard. Everyone stands and prays. Bread, wine, and water are brought. Thanksgiving is offered, the congregation answers “Amen,” and gifts are gathered for people in need.

Justin also says that Christians honor God with prayers, thanksgivings, and hymns. He does not identify those hymns as Psalms. What he does give us is an early picture of a worshiping community in which extended Scripture reading, instruction, common prayer, thanksgiving, the Lord’s Table, congregational response, and generosity belong together.

Old Songs and New Songs

The Odes of Solomon give us something different: actual early Christian sacred poetry. Their date and setting remain uncertain, but they are unmistakably biblical in texture—filled with light, living water, Paradise, salvation, Spirit, resurrection, praise, and Hallelujah. The Odes are not the biblical Psalms. But they sound like songs written by people whose imagination had been formed by Scripture.

Around AD 200, Tertullian describes a Christian meal at which a person might stand and sing to God either from the holy Scriptures or from his own composing. That is an intriguing glimpse of inherited scriptural song and newly composed Christian praise inhabiting the same world.

The Psalms Come Into View

By the late second century, some references become more explicit.

Clement of Alexandria teaches Christians how to behave at meals and contrasts pagan banquet music with Christian song. His description is memorable: “the Psalm is a melodious and sober blessing.” For Clement, music is formative. Songs shape souls.

Tertullian gives us one of the clearest early glimpses of Psalmody outside a formal worship gathering. Describing an ideal Christian marriage, he says husband and wife pray together, fast together, teach and encourage one another—and that “Psalms and hymns” resound between them as they sing to the Lord.

He also explicitly describes Christians joining Alleluia and Psalms to their prayers, with those present responding. This is one of the clearest early indications that Psalmody and prayer belonged together in Christian practice. The Psalms were not merely songs performed alongside prayer; they could become part of the church’s praying itself.

The connection between Scripture and prayer appears earlier still. Near the end of the first century, 1 Clement preserves a long Christian prayer woven from biblical language. It is not a recitation of one Psalm, but the Psalter has helped furnish its vocabulary. The church calls itself God’s people and “the sheep of your pasture.” It asks God to make his face shine upon them. Psalm language has become language addressed directly to God.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp gives us a related picture. Polycarp’s final prayer is filled with biblical language. It would be too much to say that he is praying a particular Psalm. But Scripture has clearly formed the language with which he meets death.

These witnesses suggest several ways the Psalter could inhabit Christian life. Christians could quote Psalms. They could sing and pray identifiable Psalms. And they could become so saturated in Scripture that its words, images, and instincts became their own speech before God.

But we should be careful about what these scattered references can establish.

We Cannot Draw the Missing Line

The New Testament gives us strong evidence for extensive Psalm use and Scripture-shaped worship. The surviving sources of the next two centuries give us scattered evidence of song, Scripture, prayer, new Christian composition, and eventually unmistakable references to Psalmody in Christian life.

What they do not give us is a continuous history.

We cannot trace decade by decade—or even generation by generation—how the worship and prayer of the New Testament church developed into the Psalm-infused Christian culture we encounter later. There simply is not enough surviving evidence. Most of the evidence has disappeared.

That does not mean the Psalms disappeared from Christian life. Absence of surviving evidence is not evidence of absence. But neither should we fill the silence with a story the sources cannot establish.

The scattered witnesses of these early centuries do not need to provide a missing link between the New Testament and the fourth-century church. They are valuable precisely for what they are: rare surviving glimpses into a largely lost period.

And Then the Lights Come On

By the fourth century, our visibility changes dramatically.

With Athanasius, Basil, and Egeria, we are no longer trying to infer an entire culture from an occasional sentence. We can see a mature, thriving, Psalm-infused Christian world much more vividly.

Athanasius shows us Christians receiving the Psalter as words for prayer, the movements of the soul, life in Christ, and spiritual struggle. Basil describes Psalmody forming Christians, creating unity, entering homes and marketplaces, and accompanying the rhythms of day and night. Egeria takes us into Jerusalem and lets us watch Psalms shaping hours, vigils, processions, feasts, Holy Week, and the Christian year.

We still cannot reconstruct exactly how the church got from the New Testament to that fourth-century world. But by the time we reach these witnesses, the surviving evidence no longer leaves us wondering whether the Psalms occupied an important place in Christian worship and prayer. We can see a whole Psalm-infused way of life.

That may be the most important historical conclusion from these earliest witnesses. They give us precious glimpses, not a continuous story. And recognizing the difference allows us to listen carefully to what each source actually says without asking it to fill two centuries of silence.

The accompanying Reader’s Edition gathers these primary sources so that Pliny, Ignatius, Justin, the Odes of Solomon, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, 1 Clement, and the Martyrdom of Polycarp can be heard in their own words.