32. Joy to the World

The Story Behind the Hymn

Isaac Watts wrote this hymn as a deliberate paraphrase of Psalm 98. It was part of his larger, and for its time genuinely controversial, project of systematically rewriting the entire book of Psalms in explicitly Christian, New Testament language, rather than leaving them as direct Old Testament translations.

That undertaking met real theological resistance in his day. Many English congregations, particularly within stricter Calvinist and Puritan traditions, insisted as a matter of settled principle that only unaltered, literal translations of the Psalms were appropriate for congregational worship, viewing any human-composed hymn as an unacceptable addition to inspired Scripture.

Watts originally intended this specific hymn to celebrate Christ’s promised second coming, and His eventual eternal reign as king over the whole of creation at the end of history. He drew directly on the psalm’s own language describing the Lord coming in triumph to judge and rule the earth with justice.

That is not, as it is used almost universally today, a hymn specifically about the nativity, or the events of Christ’s first, humble birth in a manger. Watts’s own eighteenth-century congregation would have understood the hymn’s ‘joy to the world’ as a forward-looking anticipation of final judgment and cosmic renewal, not a backward-looking celebration of a birth that had already happened centuries earlier.

It was only considerably later that the hymn became strongly, and almost exclusively, associated with Christmas in the popular American imagination. That happened once the text was paired with a tune arranged by the American composer and music educator Lowell Mason, in 1848 — more than a century after Watts wrote the words.

Mason’s tune draws loosely on melodic themes found in Handel’s oratorio ‘Messiah,’ though it is now generally understood to be substantially Mason’s own composition, rather than a direct Handel quotation.

That later, essentially accidental pairing with a joyful, bell-like tune reshaped how generations of subsequent worshippers have understood a hymn its own author never actually wrote with Christmas specifically in mind.

It is something of a genuine accident of musical history: one of the most widely sung and beloved Christmas hymns anywhere in the world today was, in its original eighteenth-century context, not a Christmas hymn at all.