HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Odes of Solomon on the Intermediate State

Dates: c. 125 (date disputed) · Wikipedia
Summary: The Odes of Solomon are an anonymous early Christian hymnbook, surviving chiefly in Syriac, whose forty-two songs sing the redemption from a first-person voice. Ode 42 puts that voice in the mouth of the risen Christ as he descends: Sheol sees him and is shattered, Death lets him go, and he leads out its captive dead — an early poetic witness to the harrowing of the underworld and the holding-place of the departed.

Claims & evidence

Christ descends, shatters Sheol, and leads out its dead

I was not rejected although I was considered to be so, and I did not perish although they thought it of me.
Sheol saw me and was shattered, and Death ejected me and many with me.
I have been vinegar and bitterness to it, and I went down with it as far as its depth.
Then the feet and the head it released, because it was not able to endure my face.
And I made a congregation of living among his dead; and I spoke with them by living lips; in order that my word may not be unprofitable.
And those who had died ran towards me; and they cried out and said, Son of God, have pity on us.
And deal with us according to Your kindness, and bring us out from the bonds of darkness.
And open for us the door by which we may come out to You; for we perceive that our death does not touch You.
May we also be saved with You, because You are our Savior.
Then I heard their voice, and placed their faith in my heart. And I placed my name upon their head, because they are free and they are mine.

— The Odes of Solomon, Ode 42.10–20 (Charlesworth translation), historicalchristian.faith. The Ode speaks in the voice of the risen Christ. Having died and risen ("I did not perish although they thought it of me"), he goes down into Sheol itself, which "saw me and was shattered"; Death is forced to release him "and many with me." Christ descends "as far as its depth," and there forms "a congregation of living among his dead" — the departed are still there, still held, until he speaks to them with "living lips." They run to him crying "Son of God, have pity on us," begging to be brought "out from the bonds of darkness"; he hears them, seals them with his name, and leads them out as his own. The whole drama presupposes a real holding-place of the dead, entered and broken open by Christ.

Notes

• Anonymous and pseudepigraphic. The "Solomon" of the title is a later ascription, not the author: the Odes are an anonymous early Christian hymn-collection (the name links them to the Jewish Psalms of Solomon, but they are a separate, Christian work). Nothing in Ode 42 is the historical Solomon's; the first-person voice is the Church's, and in the descent passage Christ's own.
• The date is genuinely disputed. Charlesworth and others place the Odes very early — c. 100–125 — which would make Ode 42 one of the oldest poetic witnesses to Christ's descent; other scholars argue for a later second- or even third-century date, and some have read them as Gnostic-leaning. We slot the collection at c. 125, but the dispute is real and the early dating is not certain.
• The descent of Ode 42 stands behind the wider tradition weighed on the descent to the dead argument: the dead are held in Sheol until Christ comes down, shatters it, and brings them out — the same geography of a waiting place of the departed that later witnesses such as Irenaeus set out in prose.