The First Epistle of Clement (Ancient Greek: Κλήμεντος πρὸς ΚορινθίουςKlēmentos pros Korinthious "Clement to Corinthians") is a letter addressed to the Christians in the city of Corinth. The letter dates from 80 A.D. to the mid 2nd century, and ranks with Didache as one of the earliest—if not the earliest—of extant Christian documents outside the canonical New Testament. As the name suggests, a Second Epistle of Clement is known, but this is a later work by a different author. Neither 1 nor 2 Clement are part of the canonical New Testament, but they are part of the Apostolic Fathers collection.
Although traditionally attributed to Clement of Rome,[1] the letter does not include Clement's name, and is anonymous; it is addressed as "the Church of God which sojourneth in Rome to the Church of God which sojourneth in Corinth." Its stylistic coherence suggests a single author.[2]
Scholars have proposed a wider range of dates, but most limit the possibilities to the last two decades of the 1st century,[3] and no later than AD140.[4] The traditional date for Clement's epistle is at the end of the reign of Domitian (c. AD96): the phrase "sudden and repeated misfortunes and hindrances which have befallen us" (1:1) is taken as a reference to persecutions under Domitian. The Epistle to the Hebrews's call for leadership from the church in Rome has been thought to have been influential.[5] Some scholars believe 1 Clement was written around the same time as the Book of Revelation (c. AD95 – 97).[6] A writing is mentioned in 1 Clement 23:3 in which the challenge is quoted, "These things we did hear in the days of our fathers also, and behold we have grown old, and none of these things hath befallen us." Because this source document must have been written when the hope of the imminent parousia was waning, and because 1 Clement itself must have dealt with the same issue, 1 Clement can scarcely be dated to the time of the first Christian generation. Other indications of the date come from the fact that the church at Rome is called "ancient" and that the presbyters installed by the apostles have died (44:2), and a second ecclesiastical generation has also passed on (44:3): these suggest a later date for 1 Clement.
The letter was occasioned by a dispute in Corinth, which had led to the removal from office of several presbyters. Since none of the presbyters were charged with moral offences, Clement charged that their removal was high-handed and unjustifiable. The letter was extremely lengthy — it was twice as long as the Epistle to the Hebrews — and includes many references to the Old Testament, of which he demonstrates a knowledge. Clement repeatedly refers to the Old Testament as Scripture.[7]
New Testament references include Clement’s admonition to “Take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle” (xlvii. 1) which was written to this Corinthian audience; a reference which seems to imply written documents available at both Rome and Corinth. Clement also alludes to the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians and may allude to Paul's epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians, numerous phrases from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and possible material from Acts, James, and I Peter. In several instances, he asks his readers to “remember” the words of Jesus, although Clement does not attribute these sayings to a specific written account. These New Testament allusions are employed as authoritative sources which strengthen Clement’s arguments to the Corinthian church, but Clement never explicitly refers to them as “Scripture”.[7]
The epistle was publicly read from time to time at Corinth, and by the 4th century this usage had spread to other churches. It was included in the 5th century Codex Alexandrinus, which contained the entire Old and New Testaments.[8] It was included with the Gospel of John in the fragmentary early Greek and Akhmimic Coptic papyrus designated Papyrus 6. First Clement is listed as canonical in "Canon 85" of the Canons of the Apostles, suggesting that First Clement had canonical rank in at least some regions of early Christendom.[citation needed]
Though known from antiquity, the first document to contain the Epistle of Clement and to be studied by Western scholars was found in 1628, having been included with an ancient Greek Bible given by the Patriarch Cyril of Jerusalem to King Charles I of England.[9] The first complete copy of 1 Clement was rediscovered in 1873, some four hundred years after the Fall of Constantinople, when Philotheos Bryennios found it in the Greek Codex Hierosolymitanus, written in 1056. This work, written in Greek, was translated into at least three languages in ancient times: a Latin translation from the 2nd or 3rd century was found in an 11th-century manuscript in the seminary library of Namur, Belgium, and published by Germain Morin in 1894; a Syriac manuscript, now at Cambridge University, was found by Robert Lubbock Bensly in 1876, and translated by him into English in 1899; and a Coptic translation has survived in two papyrus copies, one published by C. Schmidt in 1908 and the other by F. Rösch in 1910. [10]
The Namur Latin translation reveals its early date in several ways. Its early date is attested to by not being combined with the pseudepigraphic later Second Epistle of Clement, as all the other translations are found, and by showing no knowledge of the church terminology that became current later — for example, translating Greek presbyteroi as seniores rather than transliterating to presbyteri.[citation needed]
^L.L. Welborn, "The preface to 1 Clement: the rhetorical situation and the traditional date," in Breytenbach and Welborn, p.201
^Edgar J. Goodspeed, "First Clement Called Forth by Hebrew" Journal of Biblical Literature30.2 (1911:157-160).
^W.C. van Unnik, "Studies on the so-called First Epistle of Clement. The literary genre," in Cilliers Breytenbach and Laurence L. Welborn, Encounters with Hellenism: Studies on the First Letter of Clement, Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2004, p. 118. ISBN 9004125264.
The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians public domain audiobook at LibriVox
