The strangest thing about the Odes of Solomon is not their imagery, strange though that is. It is the pronoun.

These forty-two hymns keep sliding between two speakers without ever marking the change. A verse begins in the voice of a worshipper giving thanks. By the next line the same “I” is opening the gates of death and leading out the dead. No introduction separates them, and no manuscript inserts so much as a heading.

Nobody has satisfactorily explained what that means, and it is the central puzzle of the collection. Most descriptions of the Odes of Solomon skip past it to talk about light and water instead.

The Odes of Solomon Before 1909

For most of Christian history this collection existed only as quotations inside other people’s books.

A Coptic work called the Pistis Sophia quotes five of the odes and attributes them to Solomon. Lactantius, writing in Latin around the year 310, quotes a passage about a virgin giving birth without pain. He too calls the author Solomon, and both writers clearly expected their readers to know the source.

Nobody in the modern period had seen the book itself. Scholars knew it had existed and knew roughly what a handful of lines said, and there the matter rested.

That changed in 1909, when Rendel Harris looked properly at a Syriac manuscript sitting among his own books.

What Survives of the Odes of Solomon

The textual situation is unusually thin, and it shapes everything we can say.

Harris’s codex gives forty-one of the forty-two odes, lacking the first two and part of the third. A second Syriac manuscript surfaced in the British Library soon afterwards. It supplies the odes from the middle of the seventeenth onwards.

Ode 1 survives only in the Coptic quotation, and Ode 2 survives nowhere at all in any language. Nobody has any idea what it said.

A Greek text of Ode 11 turned up in a papyrus published in 1959, carrying lines the Syriac does not have. That single papyrus is why the original language of the Odes of Solomon still divides scholars.

Where and When They Were Written

No source records the date or the place, so both come out of the language.

Syria is the likeliest home, and most scholars place the collection in Syria or northern Mesopotamia. Edessa and Antioch are the two cities named most often, though neither has much to recommend it beyond plausibility.

The date holds rather more firmly than the geography. Lactantius quotes the odes around the year 310, and the Pistis Sophia quotes them earlier still, so the collection cannot be later than the third century. Most scholars now settle on the first half of the second.

That places the odes very close to John’s gospel, and the resemblance is not slight. Living water, light against darkness, truth, the vine and a repeated first-person declaration all appear in both.

Which way the influence ran, or whether it ran at all, is another question nobody has closed.

The Voice That Changes Without Warning

Reading the collection straight through, the shifts are impossible to miss and hard to describe.

Most odes open where a psalm opens, with a singer thanking God for rescue, light or joy. Then, somewhere in the middle, the grammar stops fitting a human speaker. The “I” claims to have opened doors that were shut and to have broken the bars of iron. It says that God crowned it, and that the crown it wears is alive.

The final ode of the collection goes furthest of all. There the speaker descends to the dead, who see him and cry out for release, and he gathers them and leads them up.

Nothing in the text announces that the voice has changed, and the reader is simply supposed to know.

Three Explanations, None Decisive

Scholars have proposed three readings, and each accounts for part of the evidence.

The first treats the shifts as a literary device, since ancient writers regularly composed speeches for figures they admired. A hymn writer putting words into the mouth of Christ would surprise nobody.

The second reading takes the shifts as a feature of performance. If the odes were sung in worship, a leader may have voiced the divine lines while the congregation answered. That would make the shift audible even where the manuscript leaves it unmarked.

The third explanation is the uncomfortable one, and nobody can rule it out. Some communities of the period believed the risen Christ spoke through prophets in the first person, and these hymns may record exactly that.

No manuscript, quotation or external witness settles which is right.

The Milk of the Father

One passage has caused more discomfort than the rest of the collection combined.

Ode 19 describes a cup of milk offered to the speaker. The Son, it says, is the cup, the Father is the one she milked, and the Holy Spirit is she who milked him. Grammatically the Spirit is feminine in Syriac, and the ode makes full use of that fact.

The same ode then describes the Virgin conceiving, giving birth without a midwife, and feeling no pain at all. Lactantius quoted those lines approvingly, which shows the passage was not thought scandalous everywhere.

It is a startling image by any standard, and also a thoroughly orthodox arrangement of Father, Son and Spirit. That combination is exactly why the passage resists the obvious explanation.

The Small Vocabulary of Images

Set beside other mystical writing, these hymns work with remarkably few images.

Water, light, a crown, a harbour, milk, a door and a beloved account for most of the collection. The same handful returns ode after ode in different arrangements, rather than accumulating into a system of symbols.

More striking still is what the poet does with those images. A later mystic writes that the soul is like a harbour, and the simile announces itself as a comparison. These hymns simply say the singer entered the harbour, leaving the reader to decide how literally to take it.

That refusal to mark the border between statement and figure is the same habit as the pronoun. The odes decline, over and over, to say which register they are speaking in.

Are the Odes of Solomon Gnostic?

The question dominated discussion for half a century, and the answer is mostly no.

Rudolf Bultmann treated the odes as evidence for a pre-Christian redeemer myth, and built from them a background for John’s gospel. That reading was enormously influential, and it has not aged well.

What the Odes of Solomon lack is what decides the question. They have no demiurge, no hierarchy of aeons, no knowledge withheld from the many, and no contempt for the created world. Compare them with anything in the Nag Hammadi library and the difference is immediate.

That a Gnostic work quotes them proves nothing about the odes themselves. People quote texts they did not write, and the Pistis Sophia treats these hymns as scripture rather than as its own composition.

Jewish, Christian, or Both

The other long argument concerns which religion produced the collection.

Adolf von Harnack proposed a Jewish hymn book later interpolated by a Christian editor. It is the same solution once offered for the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Harris disagreed, and most scholars now read the odes as the work of Jewish Christians in Syria.

The Jewish element in the collection is not a veneer over something else. The thanksgiving hymns found among the Dead Sea Scrolls open in the same way. A first-person singer thanks God for deliverance, in formulas that are almost identical.

The Christian element is equally plain, and it concentrates in the passages where the voice changes. That correlation is the single most useful observation anyone has made about the text.

The Descent Into Sheol

The last ode deserves separate attention, as the earliest full treatment of a scene the churches later loved.

In it the speaker goes down among the dead themselves. They see him, recognise him and call out, asking him to bring them out of the bonds of darkness. He answers, gathers them, and leads them up with him.

Later Christian writing developed the episode at length, most elaborately in the Gospel of Nicodemus. There the descent becomes a full narrative, with dialogue, named characters and a formal argument at the gate.

The ode itself carries none of that machinery at all. One voice, a crowd that answers and a door prove a great deal more effective than the later versions manage.

How to Read the Odes of Solomon Now

The practical situation is better than the textual situation, and the whole book takes an evening.

Charlesworth’s English translation is the standard one, and the text with scholarly notes is freely readable online. Harris’s original 1909 edition is out of copyright, for anyone curious how the collection first appeared.

Two things are worth doing while working through the collection. Mark each point where the “I” stops sounding human, then watch whether the ode comes back to the human voice or simply ends.

The order of reading matters less here than in most collections. There is no argument running from the first ode to the last, and a reader can take the forty-two pieces in any sequence without loss.

One caution applies to the name on the cover. These are not the Psalms of Solomon, which are a different collection altogether. Those are eighteen poems from a century or more earlier, with no connection beyond the borrowed attribution.

Why the Pronoun Is the Point

The usual account of the Odes of Solomon praises their beauty and then stops there.

Nobody disputes the beauty of the collection, here or elsewhere. The images of light, living water, harbours and crowns are as good as anything in early Christian poetry. They are also the reason anyone quotes the odes at all.

The pronoun is what makes them evidence rather than decoration. A community that sang these hymns was doing something with the boundary between the worshipper and the one worshipped. The manuscripts preserve that act without ever explaining it.

No other early Christian text does it so persistently or so unselfconsciously. Whatever else the Odes of Solomon record, they record a habit of speech that later worship abandoned and later doctrine could not have permitted.

Whichever explanation turns out to be right, it is a better question than the one usually asked. The text will not answer it on demand.

Check out the author’s book here: The Complete Apocrypha.