This hymn traces to the fifth-century Roman poet Coelius Sedulius, whom Luther called Christianissimus poeta, “a most Christian poet,” and his twenty-three-stanza abecedarian poem on the life of Christ, A solis ortus cardine, each stanza beginning with a successive letter of the Latin alphabet. Medieval breviaries drew the poem’s first seven stanzas, on the Nativity, into the office of Lauds for Christmas Day, and Luther translated those seven stanzas into German in 1524 as Christum wir sollen loben schon, adapting the melody directly from the old Gregorian chant. Luther defended this method of translation in his 1525 tract Against the Heavenly Prophets, insisting that text and tune alike ought to grow out of the translator’s own mother tongue rather than become, in his words, “an imitation, in the manner of the apes.” Richard Massie rendered Luther’s German into English in 1854 under this title, and The Lutheran Hymnal carried it as hymn 104. Lutheran Service Book represents the same underlying Latin original under a different English title, “From East to West, from Shore to Shore” (LSB 385); a bulletin using the older Massie title and one using the LSB title are the same hymn family, not two different hymns.