Anonymous German Author

The author of the German source hymn has not been identified. Its earliest securely located printing is in Sebastian Pörtner’s Katholisches Gesangbuch für den öffentlichen Gottesdienst im Bisthume Würzburg, issued at Würzburg by J. Dorbath in 1828. The hymn appears there as no. 88, on page 183, under a heading meaning “The Christian Greeting.” It comprises fourteen four-line stanzas, each with a repeated acclamation. Because the book was prepared for public worship in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Würzburg, the text’s earliest documented setting is Catholic; that does not establish the unknown writer’s personal denomination.

John Julian’s hymnological account judged the text probably Franconian and not demonstrably older than the nineteenth century. A related but differing form appeared in F. W. von Ditfurth’s Fränkische Volkslieder in 1855. The two German witnesses also differ from the source apparently used by Edward Caswall, showing that the hymn circulated in a fluid oral or popular-text tradition. A date near 1800 is therefore a conventional approximation, not a known year of composition. No reliable manuscript, named author, or documented personal composition story has been located, and claims for a specific eighteenth-century edition should not be treated as established without primary evidence.