244. I Know Whom I Have Believed

The Story Behind the Hymn

Daniel Webster Whittle, a Civil War veteran, wrote this hymn in 1883, publishing it, as he did much of his gospel song output, under the pen name "El Nathan" rather than his own. By this point he had spent years as a traveling evangelist, and his usual songwriting partner was James McGranahan — a composer who had, in effect, inherited the role by tragedy: McGranahan took over as Whittle's music director after Philip P. Bliss, the previous holder of that role, died in the Ashtabula train disaster of December 1876.

McGranahan set Whittle's words to the tune he titled EL NATHAN, matching the pseudonym under which the words had been written. The hymn was copyrighted in 1883 and first appeared that year in a revised edition of Gospel Hymns, No. 4. According to hymn historian Mel Wilhoit, the song was likely composed during Whittle and McGranahan's extended British Isles revival campaign alongside D. L. Moody, which ran from late 1883 into the summer of 1884.

The hymn's structure is unusual for its honesty: each verse opens with a frank admission of ignorance — "I know not why," "I know not how," "I know not when" — before pivoting, every time, to the one thing the singer does claim to know with certainty, drawn directly from Paul's words to Timothy: "I know whom I have believed."

That structure has kept the hymn in steady use for well over a century as a hymn of quiet confidence rather than triumphant certainty — less a claim to have all the answers than a claim to trust the One who does.