Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Did Pope Clement write First Clement Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch I continue here with my discussion of the Book of First Clement. Probably unknown to many people on the blog, but an important work written at about the time of some of the writings of the New Testament or so I'll be arguing in the post after this.
[00:00:26] First, I need to say something about the author.
[00:00:28] Why is it attributed to someone named Clement? Could this really have been written by a first century pope, that is The Bishop of the Church of Rome?
[00:00:38] Again, I am taking this information from the introduction to the letter which I give in a new English translation with the Greek text on the facing page in the first volume of my Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2003.
[00:00:55] The author of the Book Even though the letter claims to be written by the Church residing in Rome, it has from early times been attributed to Clement, a leader of the Roman Church near the end of the first century. In his celebrated church history, Eusebius sets forth the tradition earlier found in the writings of the 3rd century church Father Origen, that this Clement was the companion of the apostle Paul, mentioned in Philippians 4. 3.
[00:01:24] Some of the early traditions claim that clement was the second Bishop of Rome ordained by Peter himself, Tertullian 32. More commonly it was thought that he was the third, following Linus and Anacletus, thus Irenaeus in Augustinian heresies 331 and Eusebius, ecclesiastical histories 3, 4, 21.
[00:01:47] The first reference to any Roman Christian named Clement is by a near contemporary Hermas, author of the shepherd, who is instructed to send two copies of a book to Rome, one of them for Clement, who was then to distribute it to churches in other locations, for that is his commission.
[00:02:06] This Clement then appears to have had an official role in the Church, at least in Hermas time, first part of the second century, as some kind of secretary in charge of foreign correspondence.
[00:02:18] As early as the middle of the second century it was claimed by Dionysius of Corinth that Clement had written this epistles to the Corinthians, which he indicated continued to be read in his own day during regular church gatherings circa 170 CE, also claimed about the same time by Hegesippus.
[00:02:39] This tradition is followed then by Eusebius, and down through the ages of it is evidenced in the surviving manuscripts of the letter as well. The only complete text of the Epistle in Greek gives its title in a subscription as the First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians. It is also ascribed to Clement in the other Greek, Latin and Syriac manuscripts. Some scholars have argued that this Clement was a freedman of the Roman consul T. Flavius Clemens, a Roman aristocrat of the Flavian family, who who was executed by his cousin Domitian for atheism, possibly referring to an association with Judaism. There are reasons, however, to doubt the traditional ascription. Nowhere is Clement mentioned in the letter, let alone named as its author. If the Bishop of Rome himself had written the letter, one might expect him to assert his authority by mentioning his position.
[00:03:33] More to the point, even the tradition that there was a single bishop over the Church in Rome at this time appears to be a later idea advanced by later Orthodox Christians concerned to show that their own lines of authority could be extended back through a succession of bishops to the apostles themselves, the so called apostolic succession.
[00:03:55] As noted, Hermas, who is also from Rome, nowhere calls Clement or anyone else in his day the Bishop of Rome. Moreover, first Clement itself uses the term presbyter and bishop interchangeably, chapter 44, making it appear that a distinct office of bishop as the leader of the Church presbyters had not yet appeared. It is striking that some years later the bishop of Antioch, Ignatius, see Introduction to the Letters of Ignatius, could write the Church in Rome and give no indication that there was a single bishop in charge.
[00:04:31] Some scholars have gone even further, asserting that the letter was not only not written by the head of the Roman Church, but but that it was not expressive of the views of the entire Church.
[00:04:42] According to this view, the letter instead represents a perspective advanced by just one of the many house churches in the city in an age when a variety of forms of Christianity were present in Rome.
[00:04:55] The shepherd of Hermas, for example, presents a different understanding of Christian existence in which the friendly attitude toward the Roman empire evidenced in First Clement, for example, Chapter 60, is replaced by a sense of opposition. This is not to mention the wide theological variation within Roman Christianity evidenced still some decades later by the followers of Justin Martyr, Marcion and Valentinus, prominent leaders of Christian groups scattered throughout the city.
[00:05:26] And so it is difficult to draw conclusions about the authorship of the letter. Its later attribution to the sole bishop of the city, Clement, may represent a best guess by later Christians, or may even have been an orthodox claim used to bolster their own positions vis a vis other groups contending for power in the Church.
[00:05:46] On the other hand, it is clear that even though the letter claims to have been written by the Church of Rome, it must have been composed by a single author rather than a group, and that one of the plausible persons for the task may well have been the otherwise unknown Clement, secretary for Foreign Correspondence, mentioned by Hermas.
