Odes of Solomon

Anonymous · c. AD 100-200 (composition date and original language debated) · Edessa (traditional) (Turkey) · poetry

composition: range-uncertain

witness: earliest textual witnesses are indirect and partial (Odes quoted in the Coptic Pistis Sophia and one preserved in Greek in the Bodmer Papyrus); the only substantially complete text survives in later Syriac manuscripts

Cautiously dated: a collection of 42 lyrical hymns voicing intense personal union with the divine, the Odes of Solomon are placed by most specialists somewhere in the 2nd century AD, though proposals range from the late 1st to the early 3rd, and even the original language is disputed, with a Greek original once favored but a growing majority of scholars now arguing the Odes were composed in Syriac, which would make them among the earliest substantial Syriac Christian texts and an early witness to Christianity's presence in the Syriac-speaking world beyond the Mediterranean basin.