Músicos en el nacimiento

The music that Jesus and his contemporaries heard more closely resembled what you hear in the background at a Lebanese restaurant than the lavish film scores of Hollywood's religious epics.

In reaching back to ancient times, musicians and scholars don't have much to work with -- there are no written scores and no detailed descriptions of instruments. References in the Bible give only vague clues -- we may read about a harp and see a harpist playing in an Assyrian relief, but the sound of the music and descriptions of it are long gone.

Early 20th-century musicologist Abraham Idelsohn's pioneering work in Jewish ethnomusicology revealed amazing similarities in traditional Hebrew chants used in widely separated parts of the world. Since these melodies were the same in regions that had not been in contact for centuries, it was reasonable to conclude the melodies had been maintained intact from their origin at the temple of Jerusalem, which was destroyed by Roman soldiers in A.D. 70, about 40 years after the time of Jesus.