Matthew 28:5-6 vs. “Christ Arose (Low in the Grave He Lay)”

Why it matters

This is a narration hymn, and narration hymns are graded differently from quotation songs. Nobody is being told these are the Bible's words, so the question is not whether the wording matches but whether the events are the events. Here they mostly are, with one picture supplied that the gospels do not give: no account describes how Jesus left the tomb, and the stone in Matthew is rolled back to show the grave is empty, not to let anyone out. That gap is small, and it is the kind a sung picture fills without anyone noticing it was a gap.

Helpful comparison

The tune is doing more of the argument than the words are, and both the hymnological literature and the score agree on how. Hymnary's editorial note describes the stanzas as meditative against a dramatic refrain, and observes that the refrain recalls the angel's announcement in Luke 24:6. Hymnology Archive's Chris Fenner puts it in musical terms: the stanza melody is static, hovering around the fifth of the scale in plain rhythm, while the refrain moves in martial rhythms with a soaring line and echoing figures. Hymnary's worship note adds the detail that the lower voices answer back through the refrain in antiphon. Read the stanzas without the music and they never actually announce the resurrection. They describe a grave, a failed guard, and a death that could not hold. The announcement is the refrain's job, and Lowry built a tune that could only be sung as an announcement.

That is why the passage assignment is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Lowry, by every account, was working from Luke: the Discipleship Ministries history says he was meditating on Luke 24, and reports that the hymn first appeared under a heading quoting the angel with Luke 24:5 attached. Hymnology Archive dates the first printing a year earlier, in Biglow and Main's Easter Annual of 1874, with the wider 1875 appearance in Brightest and Best that the other sources name. But the sealed tomb and the posted watch that the second stanza turns on are found in Matthew and nowhere else, which is presumably why the British Methodist hymnal Singing the Faith lists Matthew 27:57-66 among its references for this text. The hymn is a composite of the resurrection accounts, and its own author's citation covers only part of what he wrote.

Sources

• Christ Arose, live at First Baptist Atlanta · (the recording checked for this proof; oEmbed returns author_name "Hymncharts", the arrangement publisher's own channel; the upload description credits words and music to Robert Lowry, lists the three stanzas and refrain sung, gives CCLI 5432338, and cites no scripture reference)
• UMC Discipleship Ministries, History of Hymns: nineteenth-century hymn celebrates the resurrection · (Lowry wrote words and music in 1874 while pastor of First Baptist Church, Lewisburg, PA; he was meditating on the resurrection account in Luke 24; first appeared in Brightest and Best, 1875, under the heading "He is not here, but risen, Luke 24:5"; the stanza and refrain contrast; popularised through Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos)
• Hymnary.org, Christ Arose (text authority) · (Robert Lowry author and composer, 1874; tune CHRIST AROSE; Brightest and Best, 1875, edited by Lowry and Doane; 534 hymnals; the scripture reference list including Matthew 27:57-28:10; the Psalter Hymnal Handbook note on meditative stanzas against a dramatic refrain and the refrain recalling Luke 24:6a; the worship note on the subdued stanza melody, the refrain's dotted rhythms and leaps, and the antiphonal echo; the per-hymnal citations of Mark 16:6, Matthew 28:2, Acts 2:24, Matthew 28:1-6 and, in Singing the Faith no. 305, Matthew 27:57-66)
• Hymnology Archive, Low in the grave he lay · (Chris Fenner, 2020; first published in Biglow and Main's Easter Annual No. 1, Chicago, 1874, in three stanzas with refrain, wider publication in Brightest and Best the following year; little known of the circumstances of composition; the static stanza melody against the exuberant chorus and how the text serves that distinction; the third stanza's broken bars traced to Psalm 107:10-16 or Isaiah 45:2, and the refrain's picture of the realm He came out of possibly to Colossians 1:13-14)