An ancient Trinitarian worship song written around 200AD, has been repackaged and released today.

‘The First Hymn’ is based on a fragment of papyrus found 100 years ago in ancient Egyptian ruins and kept in a climate-controlled vault at Oxford University. On examining the piece, John Dickson, Professor of Biblical Studies and Public Christianity, decided: “We need to give this back to the Church”.

Dickson brought in Christian songwriters Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding to bring the song “back to life” in a way that it could be used and sung in churches today. The modernised version, which takes inspiration from the original documented music, was released today, with an accompanying documentary being released on 14 April.

While the song is dubbed ‘The First Hymn’, the New Testament itself is thought to contain fragments of hymns sung by the earliest Christian congregations.

Dickson explained that “this is a song from before there were denominations” and “it’s thoroughly orthodox Christian theology”.

The professor described its significance: “It’s clear evidence that Christians were singing their Trinitarian beliefs from an early period,” adding, it is “all about the Trinity. That’s just remarkable.”

He described the vision of the project; to “get some of the greatest songwriters to create a new version of it that uses my translation, all of the original words, and tries to use as much of that original melody as possible… but creates a new song so that everyone can sing it”.

Fielding said: “I had no idea that such a significant discovery lay quietly in England, fairly certain that most modern-day Christians would, like me, have no awareness of its existence”.

He continued: “Now we were being tasked with bringing it back to life, that the Church today might be able to sing with (the) very same words our brothers and sisters in Christ were singing 1,800 years ago.”

The hymn was written in Greek and has been translated as: