Rediscovering Ancient Hymns: My Upcoming Talks at Cambridge, Oxford, and LST

As my research and writing on ancient hymns among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians has slowly made its way through the wider world of scholarship over the last two decades, I have now been invited to Cambridge, Oxford, and London School of Theology in Feb 2026 to deliver three lectures on my work. It has been an enjoyable process of rediscovering the research and ideas that went into my three books on hymns that I wrote between 2005 and 2018. It is also personally very exciting as this will be my first trip to these renowned centers of research and learning. Below are the three talks. I begin with the last chronologically, as this is the first invitation I received and is the one that started the ball rolling on this “lecture tour” of the UK.

1) “Song in the Ancient World: Echoes of Religion and Resistance.” Cambridge University, Darwin College Lectures Series, Feb 13.

The Darwin College Lecture Series takes one topic each year and, in a series of eight lectures, explores it from a wide range of lenses from across the arts, humanities, and sciences. This year’s topic is “song” and my talk will look at how hymns and religious songs functioned in the ancient world not only as ways of praising the divine but also of communicating with the human audiences that treasured them. This talk is to an educated audience of non-specialists and has been so much fun to prepare. I am happy to share that this talk will be available on YouTube following the lecture and will also be published in a forthcoming volume from Cambridge University Press. I'll share the link once it is available but here is the information on the series and my talk: https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lecture-series/

2) “Hymns in the New Testament? A Conversation.” Oxford University, Keble College, Feb 6.

I am grateful to Professor Markus Bockmuehl’s invitation to present my research at the Oxford New Testament Seminar and to have what he calls a conversazione with another scholar, Andrew Cowan. Andrew’s recent doctoral dissertation reaches some decidedly different conclusions than I do about the possibility and value of identifying hymnic passages in the New Testament. So we will have the opportunity to share our research and have some dialogue about pathways forward based on our findings.

3) “Seeing Jesus through the Lens of New Testament Hymns: Exegetical Challenges and Interpretive Possibilities.” London School of Theology, Feb 11.

In this talk I review some of the challenges raised by scholars (like Andrew Cowan) related to engaging with New Testament hymnic texts and suggest some ways forward that engage the challenges and also open up new areas to explore. I am grateful to Professor Graham Twelftree and Professor Cornelis Bennema for extending this kind invitation to speak to the LST Research Seminar.

Though the talks will draw on material from each of my earlier books, the one that is most accessible and still widely available (and the most affordable!) is my 2018 New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance (IVP Academic).

Three things have stood out to me in digging back into this material and preparing these talks.

• First, I am happy to see that I was asking good questions even in the research I was doing twenty years ago. And it seems to me that much of my work holds up pretty well so far.
• Second, more recent research (mine and others) has helped to bring to light additional questions, perhaps more important than those of a decade or two ago. This is exciting to see the ways in which knowledge and creative inquiry are continuing to develop in new directions.
• Third, I am excited to see that there is still much more that can be explored in these hymnic and poetically-styled passages in the New Testament. As poetry and elevated prose with allusive language, references, and metaphors, there are many more ways to gain new insights into these texts and their significance.

Probably one of the most fun parts for me in a university environment is to see how these ways of exploring ancient religious texts and their themes do not live simply in the ancient world. These approaches invite a new appreciation for the kinds of creative ways we as members of a university community (faculty, students, staff, alumni, community partners) can engage our contemporary world with its unique challenges and use these same approaches to find opportunities for nourishing our spirits as we grow and learn together.

Greek Religion in the Iliad

In working on course content and lecture material for my upcoming graduate seminar "Worship in the New Testament," I have been focusing on the cultural matrix of early Christian worship practices. After cataloguing important aspects of Greek and Roman religious practices (with due acknowledgment of the problems inherent in the differences between contemporary meanings of the term "religion" as opposed to ancient conceptions), I have been looking for primary texts that illustrate the phenomena I am discussing.

At the same time (but for unrelated reasons) I have begun reading the Iliad. Reading it with eyes and ears attuned to the people, practices, prayers, and perspectives of Greek religion, I was quite pleased to find displayed before my eyes a fine sampling of the staples of Greek and (later) Roman religion. Within just the first three hundred lines of the Iliad, are references to prayers, sacrifices, vows, and offerings to the gods. We meet a priest (Chryses) as well as an augur (Calchas), with references to the flights of birds, knowledge of the past, present, future, and other tools of divination. In addition, there is the narration of the gods answering prayers, the belief that honoring the will of the gods may lead to their responding favorably to human wishes, the recognition that Zeus grants authority to rulers, and the understanding that the gods assign humans their place in life (they gifted Achilles and made a spearman of him). There is the clear belief that calamity comes from the gods for a variety of reasons including human negligence in fulfilling vows to the gods. In addition, there is the confidence that a diviner can discern the reason for the gods’ wrath and identify the appropriate way to appease them. There is direct communication to humans by the gods who come to humans directly (e.g. the visit of Athena to Achilles) or by means of dreams (which are understood to come from Zeus). The human-like personalities of the gods is in full play as Apollo becomes furious at Agamemnon’s disregard of Chryses the priest. The affairs of humans and gods are thus fully intertwined through a network of connections and relationships.

In these first few pages alone I found quick confirmation of N. T. Wright's claim in Paul and the Faithfulness of God that the people of Greco-Roman antiquity lived in a "myth-soaked culture" (255) in which "the gods were everywhere" (274). Like Wright, I'm convinced that a richer understanding of the practices by which the ancients interacted with their gods can lead to a fuller appreciation of the cultural matrix in which early Christian worship took its shape. And this can lead to a better grasp of the significance of the earliest Christian worship practices. Looking forward to exploring these ancient texts with my students next spring.