Clement of Rome.

Toward the end of the first century, perhaps about A.D. 95, something like a revolt broke out among the Christians at Corinth against the officers of the Church, the presbyters or elders as they were called. This disturbance became so notorious that news of it reached Rome and distressed the Church there. The Roman Church accordingly sent a long letter to the Corinthians, urging them to harmonize their differences and to show their church officers the respect due them. The letter does not name its writer. It is written simply in the name of “the Church of God that sojourns in Rome to the Church of God that sojourns in Corinth,” but it was recognized very early as the work of Clement, the head of the Roman Church from about A.D. 88 to 97. Ancient writers, from Dionysius of Corinth (ca. A.D. 170) down, agree in ascribing the letter to Clement; Eusebius himself does so in his Church History (iii. 16; iv. 23. II). Dionysius wrote to Soter, bishop of Rome between 166 and 174, that it was the custom of the Corinthian Church to read Clement's letter from time to time in its meetings. So religiously useful did the letter prove that it passed into some early New Testaments, such as the Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth century, and into a Syriac manuscript of the New Testament in the Harclean version written in the twelfth century, in which the Letter of Clement immediately followed the general, or Catholic letters, to which it was evidently believed to belong.

The position of presbyter or elder first comes into prominence in Acts, written about A.D. 60 or soon after. The Corinthians had from the beginning made much of spiritual endowments (I Cor. 12-14), and it is easy to see how the new regard for church officers might have encountered difficulty in gaining support in that Church. Clement, however, speaks as though the office was of long standing and the Corinthian disloyalty to it an innovation. He rebukes them sharply for their attitude and dwells upon the bad effects discord always produces. He urges them to follow the example of the great figures of Scripture; he is remarkably familiar with the Greek version of the Jewish Bible and quotes it copiously. He reminds them of the humility of Christ and points to the harmony of the natural world. He tells the story of the phoenix, described by Herodotus (II. 73) and Pliny the Elder (Natural History 10. 2), among others. After a long admonition to lead a godly life, Clement returns to the Corinthian situation (chap. 44), points out that the officers of the Church derive their leadership in succession from the apostles, and urges upon them love, forgiveness, humility, and reconciliation. After a prayer (59:3 - 61:3) he closes with a summary of the letter.

It may seem strange that the Roman Church should take upon itself the direction of the Church at Corinth, but a number of events in Christian history had prepared the way for such a step. The Roman Church saw that the churches of Asia needed to be reminded to love their enemies and to respect the emperor, and thus transmitted I Peter to convey this corrective. As Revelation had claimed the authority of a Christian prophet writing in the name of Jesus himself, the Roman Church wrote in the name of the chief of the apostles. This it could do, the ancients thought, since it was the custodian of his tomb and so of his memory and his teaching.

In writing to the Corinthians, however, it needed no such aids for its message and wrote simply as the Church of God that sojourned in Rome. The apology with which it begins is explained by the probable persecution of the Church. “Because of the sudden and successive misfortunes and disasters that have overtaken us,” Clement begins, “we think that we have been too slow to pay attention to the matters under dispute among you, beloved.”

The influence of Hebrews on the Letter of Clement is very marked. It is here that we first find Hebrews reflected in Christian literature, for Clement is largely interspersed with thoughts and expressions from it.

The acquaintance of Clement with the collected letters of Paul is also clear; he is the first Christian writer to quote one of Paul's letters expressly: “Take up the letter of the blessed Paul, the apostle; what did he first write you, at the beginning of the gospel preaching?” Chapter 47 begins, and then continues with an unmistakable reference to I Cor. 1: 10-12. Not only I Corinthians but Romans and Ephesians are clearly reflected in Clement.

This knowledge of the collected letters of Paul on the part of Clement suggests that we should push the earliest possible date of Clement's letter down ten or fifteen years later than A.D. 75, suggested by Lake as the terminus a quo, although it is not certain exactly when the Pauline letters were collected. More important is Clement's reference to the envoys of the Roman Church as having “lived among us... from youth to old age” (64). Since the Roman Church was probably not established until about A.D. 60, this remark may well point to the date of the letter as A.D. 85, or later.

The resemblances of the Letter of Clement to I Peter are generally, and rightly, taken to show Clement's use of that letter. Their similarities may conceivably be the result of the parallels in the situations involved, for both are Roman letters to the Christians of the East, I Clement to those of Greece and I Peter to those of Asia Minor. But Peter's reference to himself as a “fellow elder” (5:1) has nothing to do with Clement's insistence upon the authority of elders at Corinth. The fact that in both letters those who oversee the Churches are called elders, and the Churches called “sheepfolds,” points toward the continuity of doctrine and discipline at Rome, not primarily to literary relationships.

Clement cannot be said to show acquaintance with any written gospel; his quotations of Jesus' words in chapters 13 and 46 are highly stylized and seem more naturally explained as being derived from catechetical teaching. In both chapters they are introduced with the words “remembering” or “remember the words of the Lord Jesus” — the way of introducing a quotation from oral tradition, as in Acts 20:35 (see p. 2).

Lightfoot in his great commentary on the Epistles of Clement, which Harnack called the finest commentary we have on any Church Father, says that Clement's characteristics are comprehensiveness, order, and moderation. The Letter is certainly a fine example of first-century Christian teaching, and it almost won a place in the New Testament. It was accepted as scripture by Clement of Alexandria. The so-called II Clement became attached to it, and the two stand after Revelation in the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek Bible. They are mentioned as part of the New Testament in the Apostolic Canons, a Syrian work of about A.D. 400, and stand between the catholic letters [of James] and those of Paul in the Harclean Syriac New Testament manuscript already noted. Abu'1 Barakat (1363), in his account of Christian Arabic literature, speaks of the two letters of Clement as belonging to the New Testament. But on the Greek side, the Stichometry of Nicephorus, a list of books of scripture giving the size of each in lines of Homeric length (ca. A.D. 850), lists them among the rejected books, its “apocrypha.” But, in or out the New Testament, I Clement is a noble monument of Christian attitudes in Rome toward the end of the first century.