The Anonymous and the Ancient: Hymns Whose Authors We'll Never Know

Most of the hymns in this calendar come with a name attached – a lyricist you can look up, a birth year, sometimes a portrait.

But a handful of the oldest and most beloved verses in Hymnbook Treasures carry only the name “Anonymous”. No author line, no birth year, nothing but the words themselves, still standing after centuries of use. I've come to think that's not a gap in the record. It might be the point.

There are really two different kinds of anonymity here, and they're worth telling apart.

The first is simple loss. "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" traces back to Latin antiphons chanted in monastic communities roughly twelve hundred years ago – someone wrote those words, someone with a face and a voice and a life, but no record kept his name. "Good Christian Men, Rejoice" comes to us the same way, a 14th-century German and Latin carol whose author simply wasn't recorded by whoever first wrote it down. Both texts eventually reached English-speaking congregations through the same 19th-century translator, John Mason Neale – a quiet, faithful piece of work on his part, done in service of words that weren't his to claim credit for in the first place. He'd likely have wanted it that way.

The second kind of anonymity is different, and in some ways more remarkable: it isn't loss at all, because there was never a single author to lose. "Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow" and "There Is a Balm in Gilead" are African American spirituals, born among enslaved worshipers who had every reason to lose faith and instead built some of the most enduring theology in the English language – shaped and reshaped voice by voice, generation by generation, through oral tradition long before anyone wrote a word down. Ask who wrote "There Is a Balm in Gilead" and the honest answer isn't "unknown." It's "all of them." The song belongs to a community the way a language belongs to the people who speak it – nobody owns it, and everybody keeps it alive.

What strikes me most, holding both kinds of anonymity side by side, is how at home they feel in the larger story of the Christian faith. We don't know the names of most of the first believers who told the story of the empty tomb to their neighbor, or those in the churches in the Decapolis who baptized generations of believers while Paul was writing his letters. We don't have the names of most of the elders and deacons and pastors who kept the Gospel and the Sacraments moving hand to hand, generation to generation, for two thousand years before they reached us.

The church has never depended on credit lines to keep the truth intact as it was relayed from one generation to the next. It has depended on people faithful enough to pass something on exactly as they received it, and humble enough not to need their name on it when they did.

That's what I love about singing one of these “Anonymous” hymns today. You're not just repeating pretty words. You're taking your place in an unbroken, nameless chain – voices in a Latin monastery, voices in a slave cabin, voices in Sunday pews from every century since – all of them handing the same truths forward without ever asking to be remembered for it. Somehow, not knowing their names makes the hymn feel more like a gift, and less like a performance.

We are humbled to play a small part in this timeless tradition of honoring and paying forward the "anonymous" authors of beloved hymns.  And every time you turn to one of these pages in your calendar, you're joining that chain for a moment. That's no small thing!