Phillips Brooks made a visit to the Holy Land in 1865 and was in Bethlehem on Sunday, December 24. In the evening he went to the spot where, according to tradition, the angel appeared to the shepherds. Then from 10:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve until 3:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, he attended the service in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. The music and the scenes so impressed him that a new carol was faintly formed in his mind. He did not commit it to paper, however, until several years later when he wrote five stanzas especially for his Sunday school. 

Brooks was born in Boston on December 13, 1835. He graduated from Harvard in 1855, returning for a brief, unsuccessful period to the Boston Latin School where he had been a pupil. He then studied at the Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, and was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1859. He became rector of the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia, where his preaching was so effective that he was called to Trinity Church in the same city. He remained there until 1869. He then accepted a call to Holy Trinity Church in Boston, where he ministered until 1891, when he became bishop of Massachusetts. He died on January 23, 1893, at Boston. Brooks was a powerful preacher; his lectures on preaching were widely circulated both in the United States and Great Britain, as were also his published sermons. The University of Oxford granted him an honorary D.D. degree in 1885. 

Brooks gave his poem to Lewis Henry Redner, his church organist at Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. Redner had previously asked his pastor to write a text, to which he would provide a tune. On Christmas Eve he fell asleep, and woke after a few hours with the present tune ringing in his ears. He jotted it down quickly on paper at his bedside, and harmonized it in the morning, ready to be sung in his Sunday school on December 27, 1868. The hymn was first printed in 1874 in The Church Porch, a hymnal for the Sunday school prepared by William R. Huntington, who named the tune ST. LOUIS, using a different spelling of the composer’s name to avoid embarrassment. 

Redner was born on December 14, 1831, in Philadelphia. In his teens he entered the real estate business, succeeding so well that soon he owned his own business and became a wealthy man. He always kept his interest in spiritual things and was organist in several churches before serving at Holy Trinity from 1861 to 1864, after which he was superintendent of the Sunday school chapel attached to the church. He died on August 29, 1908, in Atlantic City, where he had gone to recuperate from an illness.