THE FIRST HYMN

John Dickson is quite an engaging host here, but I was still pretty disappointed with this documentary. It centres around a scrap of papyrus discovered by a couple of British Egyptologists just over a century ago that depicts not only a Greek lyric to a Christian song, but also an early form of musical notation. The task? Well that is to try and recreate the hymn so we can listen to it again after almost two millennia. What we get, though, isn’t quite that. After a fairly perfunctory history lesson via Egypt and the University of Oxford, we are introduced to acclaimed songwriters Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding who then proceed to craft a piece of music that is certainly celebratory, but any connection with the original Oxyrhynchus document seems tangential at best. I would have liked to have had some linguistics experts explain just what the writings actually said and then, more interestingly for me, an explanation of just how these latter day equivalents of crotchets and minims were decoded to give us some sort of idea as to how they provided a soundtrack to the words. Instead, we head to Nashville for an admittedly celebratory song, but one that had nothing of the sounds of the original upon which is was supposedly based. There is an effort to draft in an American-Egyptian singer to give it some semblance of authenticity, but we never get to hear the completed work with her contributions included so are really only presented at the end with a rousing anthem for ten thousand committed Christians in Fort Worth who could be singing along to just about any of Tomlin’s compositions. From what I know of the complete original text, it also looks like they have been fairly selective about the phrases they have chosen to interpret and so have essentially ensured that these are used to illustrate the message Dickson et al had determined to convey right from the start. It’s far too long and had it lost half an hour, perhaps even more as there is a fair degree of repetition amidst the increasingly evangelical commentary, then it might have worked better as a short-form film. As it is, I felt the story of P. Oxy 1786 rather neglected. Was it restored to something akin to it’s third century self here or was it simply hijacked? Hmmm…!