Hymns based on Luke 24

Luke 24 has given hymn writers words for 4 hymns in this library, by writers including Henry Francis Lyte, James Montgomery and Aurelius Clemens Prudentius; J. M. Neale; H. W. Baker. Each is listed below with the lines that echo the chapter and the verses they draw on, quoted from the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation.

The verse these hymns return to most is Luke 24:5: “Becoming terrified, they bowed their faces down to the earth. The men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

Hymn writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew their Bibles almost by heart, and they wove its phrases into their lines — sometimes as a close paraphrase, as in the metrical psalms, and sometimes as a single image carried into a new setting. Reading the verse beside the line shows what the writer had in mind, and often why a hymn was chosen to be sung alongside a particular reading.