Hymns based on Mark 1

Mark 1 has given hymn writers words for 5 hymns in this library, by writers including Isaac Watts, J. H. Gilmore and Charles Coffin; John Chandler. 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 Mark 1:7: “He preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and loosen.”

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.