Hymn of the Pearl

The story

The Hymn of the Pearl, also called the Hymn of the Soul, the Hymn of the Robe of Glory or the Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostle, is a passage of the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, a work originally written in Syriac, in which the Apostle Thomas sings the hymn while praying for himself and his fellow prisoners. Some scholars believe the hymn is older than the Acts, since it appears in only one Syriac and one Greek manuscript of them. Its author is unknown; some believe that it was composed by the Syriac Gnostic Bardaisan of Edessa, because of parallels between his life and the story the hymn tells. It is thought to have been written in the 2nd century, or possibly the 1st, and it shows the influence of the heroic folk epics of its region.

The hymn tells the story of a boy, "the son of the king of kings", who is sent to Egypt to bring back a pearl guarded by a serpent; that the boy stands for Thomas rather than Jesus is suggested by his being named next in line after an elder brother. It is commonly read as a Gnostic picture of the human condition: people are spirits lost in a world of matter and forgetful of where they came from, until a message brought by a messenger, a part generally given to Jesus, wakes them, so that the letter of the story stands for gnosis, saving knowledge. The hymn was preserved and especially treasured in Manichaeism, where a version of it forms part of a Coptic Manichaean psalm book under the name Psalms of Thomas. It has also been admired by Orthodox Christian thinkers and by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and in recent times Kevin Anthony set it as a choral work, performed by the BYU Singers, and David Bentley Hart drew on it for his book Kenogaia: a Gnostic tale.

What it says

A story told in the first person: a young prince is sent from his father's kingdom in the East to Egypt to win a pearl from a serpent, puts on the dress of the Egyptians, eats their food and forgets his birth and his task, until a letter from his parents reaches him and wakes his memory. He charms the serpent, takes the pearl and travels home, where his robe of glory comes to meet him and he is received by the king. Read as an allegory, it is the soul's exile in the world and its return through knowledge; the mood moves from loss and forgetting to awakening and joy.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.