Jesus Christ is risen today        for Easter April 20 2025

The history of this hymn is rather complicated.  It began life as a Latin hymn of 16 lines, Surrexit Christus hodie, written before the last quarter of the 14C by an unknown author, perhaps in Bohemia.  That hymn is a narrative of the events of the resurrection, including the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, the announcement of the angel and the women’s report to the other disciples.  The last three couplets are devoted to praising, blessing and rejoicing in the resurrection. Each couplet is followed by an Alleluia.  Three manuscripts of the 14th century contain the earliest version of the hymn; three more couplets were added in the 16th century.

The Latin hymn, translated into German in the 15th century as Erstanden ist der heilige Christ, is the basis for several English translations, including Charles Wesley’s “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”  Wesley’s translation sometimes complicates discussion of “Jesus Christ is Risen today” because of the similarity of their first lines, because both hymns are in the same poetic form, and because both are sometimes sung to the same tune.  Modern hymn books may omit Wesley’s first stanza to avoid confusion.

An anonymous English paraphrase of the Latin hymn first appears in Lyra Davidica, or a Collection of Divine Songs and Hymns . . . partly translated from the High German and Latin Hymns . . .,  printed by John Walsh, musical instrument-maker-in-ordinary to the king, in 1708.  There it is entitled “The Resurrection,” and is in three 4-line stanzas.  The first quatrain is an expansion of the first line of theLatin; the narrative section is collapsed into a single quatrain in the middle and the final quatrain comprises the last three couplets of the Latin.  The second edition of John Arnold’s The Compleat Psalmodist (1749) contains “An HYMN for Easter-Day” with the tune and the first stanza as in Lyra Davidica, but omits the other two stanzas and adds two new stanzas, unrelated to the Latin.  No author is noted.  This, with some slight changes in wording, is the version that becomes the modern hymn.  The trinitarian doxology we sing is by Charles Wesley; it was first published in Hymns & Sacred Poems (1740) and later in Gloria Patri, &c, or Hymns to the Trinity (1746).  It has been used with “Jesus Christ is risen today” in a number of modern hymn books.  

Walsh’s Lyra Davidica prints—without indicating its source—an anonymous tune which is very close to the tune we sing today, although it is more florid; indeed, he says that the music of his collection is “of a little freer Air than the grave Movement of the psalm Tunes.” The current version, named “Easter Hymn,” comes from the later printing of the hymn in John Arnold’s volume.  Charles Wesley paired his “Christ the Lord is risen today” with the same tune in the Foundery collection (1742), naming it “Salisbury.”