This hymn is an evolved variation of "O Jesus, my Savior, I know thou art mine" by Caleb Jarvis Taylor, the eight-verse original published in 1804, and again in 1815. In 1862, the hymn emerged without attribution in the periodical The Christian Pioneer (1862), for the first time with the revised incipit "My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine" with six verses and bearing significant editorial refinement; it surfaced two years later in The London Hymn Book in today's canonical version of four stanzas. The first two stanzas hew closely Taylor's original, and key turns of phrase are retained throughout, such as "If ever I loved thee" and "mansions on high" as "mansions of glory". His creative stamp is evident in every verse.

Taylor's original appeared in his own collection, a songster (pamphlet) entitled Spiritual Songs (Lexington, KY: Joseph Charles, 1804). Born 1763 into a Roman Catholic family in Maryland, he converted at age 20, and a few years later founded Mount Gilead Methodist Church in what was then a frontier state, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, in Bourbon County, now famed for its whiskey. He is the author of several hymns (Hymnary.org lists 26), many still sung today, including the original.

When the hymn surfaced in London, the work lost not only several verses, but with copyrights expired (if he had any) Taylor's name. Theological and poetic re-tooling resulted in a fascinating new progression based on 'my brow', thorns resting in this life not on our own but on Christ's redeeming head, the sweat of death at life's earthly end, finally the crown of heavenly glory. Though some mythology has been created to ascribe this sophistication to a schoolboy or an ironworker, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on, there is not a single shred of evidence for either. Substantiated documentation of authorship points only to Caleb Jarvis Taylor as the hymnographer. The hymn's route to England from the back woods of Kentucky was via the campmeeting, the province of England's Primitive Methodists and rural American Methodists alike. Taylor's works, and of the many songsters of the era, were written expressly for the campmeeting, whose liturgical foucus is the altar call, something common to Baptists and Primitive Methodists alike. The hymn is known to have been circulating among England's Primitive Methodists by 1838. The final insult to Taylor's legacy is that in 1902, before any sotto voce mention of a schoolboy author by his mother, The Dictionary of Hymnology listed My Jesus I love thee as anonymous. Insert name here.

With the hymn's theology machined to a keen evangelical edge, the hymn only needed a tune sufficient to make its message compelling. Several tunes were tried along the way, but the one that landed was composed by Adoniram Judson Gordon, pastor of Clarendon Street Baptist Church and founder of the college now named, like the tune, after him. GORDON first appeared in The Vestry Hymn and Tune Book (Boston, 1872) - a volume he edited with the same versification found in the London publication.

For John Churchwell and the choir of St. John's Church, Gloucester, Mass.

Further reading