342. Jesus, Priceless Treasure

The Story Behind the Hymn

Johann Franck wrote the German text "Jesu, meine Freude" (literally "Jesus, my joy") in 1653, and it was published that same year set to a tune by Johann Crüger in his collection Praxis Pietatis Melica. Franck, born in 1618 in Guben, in the German region of Brandenburg, in the very first year of the devastating Thirty Years' War, worked as an advocate by profession and wrote sacred and secular poetry alongside his legal career. His text drew in part on the pattern of a secular love song, "Flora, meine Freude," found in an earlier collection by the composer Heinrich Albert.

The hymn remained a German-language text for over two centuries before Catherine Winkworth, the most significant translator of German hymnody into English in the nineteenth century, rendered it as "Jesu, Priceless Treasure" for her 1863 collection The Chorale Book for England. Winkworth's translations are widely regarded as unusually successful at preserving both the meaning and the poetic character of their German originals, and this hymn is often cited as one of her finest.

The hymn's five stanzas move through a sequence of renunciations — of fear, of wealth, of honor, of sin itself — each one addressed directly, almost as if being spoken to and dismissed in turn, before the final stanza turns from renunciation back to the same declaration that opened the hymn: Christ as the one treasure that remains after everything else has been set aside.

Johann Sebastian Bach later took Crüger's tune and built an entire motet around it, BWV 227, one of his most celebrated choral works — a testament to how deeply the melody had embedded itself in German sacred music by the early eighteenth century, nearly a hundred years after Franck first wrote the words it carries.