1 Clement — The Letter from Rome That Almost Entered the New Testament

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

What is 1 Clement?

Sometime in the fifth century, a scribe copying out one of the great Bibles of the ancient world reached the end of the New Testament, finished the Revelation of John, and kept writing. What he added was not a twenty-eighth book of Scripture in any list the Church would later ratify. It was a letter—long, closely argued, written around the year 96 by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth over a quarrel about who had the right to lead a congregation. We call it the First Epistle of Clement, or simply 1 Clement, and for a few centuries it came remarkably close to being read as the Word of God.⁠¹

The near-miss is not a matter of pious exaggeration. The letter was read from the pulpit in Corinth on the Lord’s day for at least three generations after it arrived. Eusebius, the first great historian of the Church, reports that it was “publicly used in a great many churches both in former times and in our own.” Clement of Alexandria, the most learned Christian teacher of his age, quoted it as the genuine work of “the Apostle Clement.” An ancient Eastern canon list enrolled it among the sacred books. And the men who bound Codex Alexandrinus placed it, with its companion homily, immediately after the twenty-seven books, in the physical position a twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth book would occupy.⁠²

And yet, when three centuries of debate finally settled the borders of the New Testament, 1 Clement was not inside them. This is the story of how a letter got that close to the canon and was still, rightly, left out—and of what the reasons for leaving it out reveal about the difference between a book that witnesses to the apostolic faith and a book that norms it.

The letter and the man who did not sign it

Almost everything we know with confidence about Clement of Rome comes from this one letter, and the letter does not name him. It opens not with a personal signature but with a corporate one: “The Church of God which sojourns at Rome, to the Church of God which sojourns at Corinth.” Throughout its sixty-five chapters the author speaks in the first-person plural, the voice of a community, never the first-person singular of a bishop asserting his own name. The attribution to Clement rests entirely on external tradition—a tradition that is early, broad, and unanimous, but external all the same.⁠³

That tradition is worth stating briefly, because it bears directly on the canon question. Irenaeus, writing around 180, lists Clement third in the line of Roman bishops after the apostles—after Linus and Anacletus—and says of him that “he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them,” so that he “might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing in his ears.” It is Irenaeus, too, who supplies the earliest external account of the letter: “In the time of this Clement, no small dissension having occurred among the brethren at Corinth, the Church in Rome dispatched a most powerful letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace, renewing their faith.”⁠⁴ Who exactly Clement was—whether the Clement whom Paul names in Philippians 4:3, whether a freedman of the imperial household, certainly not the executed consul Titus Flavius Clemens, with whom a later age confused him—is a separate question, one I have taken up at length in the companion essay on Pope Saint Clement I. For the canon, the decisive fact is the one Irenaeus states plainly and the letter itself confirms by its silence: Clement had known the apostles. He was not one of them.

When it was written

The letter is almost universally dated to about AD 96, near the end of the reign of Domitian. The date is an inference, but a well-founded one. The opening apologizes for Rome’s delay in answering Corinth on account of “the sudden and successive calamitous events which have happened to ourselves”—usually read as a reference to the troubles of Domitian’s last years. The letter treats the Corinthian church founded by Paul as long established, and it speaks of presbyters appointed by the apostles who have since “fallen asleep” and been succeeded by others, which requires the passage of a generation or two.⁠⁵

A minority of scholars has argued for a date as early as the late 60s, before the destruction of the Temple in 70. Their strongest evidence is that Clement describes the Temple sacrifices in the present tense, as though the cult were still standing (chapters 40–41). The argument is not frivolous, but the present tense does not prove a standing Temple: Clement is drawing on the Septuagint, which describes the cult as a perpetual ordinance, and other demonstrably post-70 writers describe the sacrificial system the same way. The majority date of c. 96 remains the safe one, and nothing in the canon story turns on the difference.⁠⁶

The crisis at Corinth

The occasion was an ecclesiastical mutiny. At Corinth—the same fractious congregation Paul had struggled to hold together forty years earlier—a faction of younger men had deposed the presbyters who lawfully led the church, not for any moral failure but out of jealousy. Clement calls it a “shameful and detestable sedition,” a stasis, and he grieves that “the venerable and illustrious name” of the Corinthian church has “suffered grievous injury” because “one or two persons” have set the whole community against its elders.⁠⁷

Rome’s answer is not a decree so much as a sustained work of persuasion. Over sixty-five chapters Clement builds a case for humility, order, and peace, and he builds it the way a man steeped in the Greek Old Testament would. He marshals the ancient examples of the havoc that jealousy works—Cain against Abel, Joseph sold by his brothers, Moses driven into flight, David hunted by Saul (chapter 4). He turns from these to the “most recent spiritual heroes,” the martyrs of his own generation, and gives us what is very nearly the earliest external testimony to the deaths of the two chief apostles: Peter, who “by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one nor two but many labours, and thus having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory,” and Paul, who, “having taught righteousness unto the whole world and having reached the farthest bounds of the West,” at last, when he “had borne his testimony before the rulers,” departed the world (chapter 5).⁠⁸

From the moral he moves to the cosmic, and here the letter shows its Hellenistic-Jewish cast of mind. Chapter 20 surveys the harmony of creation—the ordered procession of day and night, the seasons yielding to one another “in peace,” the sea kept within its bounds—as one long argument that a church, like a cosmos, must keep the order God assigned it. In chapter 25 Clement reaches for one of the strangest proofs in early Christian literature, the legend of the phoenix, “the only one of its kind,” which dies in a nest of spices and rises from its own corruption, offered without embarrassment as a natural emblem of the resurrection God will work in us.⁠⁹

It is also in this letter, and not in any book of the New Testament, that we find one of the earliest post-apostolic statements of justification by faith. “We, too,” Clement writes, “being called by His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men.” Yet he no sooner says it than he refuses the antinomian inference: “What shall we do, then, brethren? Shall we become slothful in well-doing, and cease from the practice of love? God forbid …” Faith justifies, and the justified man works—a both/and that Catholic readers have long noticed sits more easily with the Epistle of James than with any later slogan of faith alone.⁠¹⁰

The heart of the letter: order and succession

All of this is prelude to the argument that made 1 Clement famous, and that would matter most to its afterlife. In chapters 40 through 44 Clement turns from example to institution. God, he argues, appointed an order for worship—in the old covenant a high priest, priests, and Levites, each with his own office and none trespassing on another’s—and that principle of appointed order did not lapse with the coming of Christ but was carried forward by the apostles. The key sentences deserve to be read whole:

The Apostles received the Gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was sent forth from God. So then Christ is from God, and the Apostles are from Christ… . So preaching everywhere in country and town, they appointed their firstfruits, when they had proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons unto them that should believe.⁠¹¹

The chain is deliberate: God sends Christ, Christ sends the apostles, the apostles appoint bishops and deacons. And this arrangement, Clement insists, was no innovation, for “it had been written concerning bishops and deacons from very ancient times”—here he quotes a version of Isaiah 60:17, adapted so that the prophet seems to foretell the very offices in dispute: “I will appoint their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith.”⁠¹²

Then comes chapter 44, the sentence on which a great deal of later ecclesiology would be built:

And our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the name of the bishop’s office. For this cause therefore, having received complete foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid persons, and afterwards they provided a continuance, that if these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed to their ministration.⁠¹³

The rebels at Corinth, in deposing presbyters who had “ministered unblamably to the flock of Christ,” have therefore not merely offended against good order; they have torn a thread that runs back through the apostles to Christ himself. “It will be no light sin for us,” Clement warns, “if we thrust out those who have offered the gifts of the bishop’s office unblamably and holily.” This is the first time in surviving Christian literature that the succession of ministers is set out as an argument—and we will return to what it does and does not establish.⁠¹⁴

The letter closes on its knees. Chapters 59 through 61 preserve what is very probably the oldest Christian liturgical prayer outside the New Testament—a long, Septuagint-soaked intercession that begins by asking God to “guard intact unto the end the number that hath been numbered of His elect” and ends, remarkably, with a prayer for the pagan emperor and his officers: “Thou, Lord and Master, hast given them the power of sovereignty … Grant unto them therefore, O Lord, health, peace, concord, stability, that they may administer the government which Thou hast given them without failure.” Written very likely under the shadow of Domitian, by a church that had just buried its own martyrs, it is the earliest Christian prayer for the state we possess.⁠¹⁵

The book that was almost Scripture

Few early Christian writings outside the New Testament were treated as Scripture as widely, or for as long, as 1 Clement. The evidence deserves to be set out in full, because it shows how genuinely open the question once was.

It was read in church

Start with the plainest fact. Around the year 170—some seventy years after the letter arrived—Dionysius, the bishop of Corinth, wrote to the church of Rome, and Eusebius preserves his words. Dionysius mentions that the Corinthians had just kept the Sunday liturgy, and what they had read at it:

Today we have passed the Lord’s holy day, in which we have read your epistle. From it, whenever we read it, we shall always be able to draw advice, as also from the former epistle, which was written to us through Clement.⁠¹⁶

The phrase “whenever we read it” is not idle. Three generations after Clement’s letter reached Corinth, the church that received it was still reading it aloud in worship, on the Lord’s day, in the same breath as a fresh letter from Rome. That is not how a congregation treats a piece of correspondence. It is how it treats a text with standing.

Nor was Corinth alone. Eusebius, surveying the writings of the sub-apostolic age, calls 1 Clement an epistle “acknowledged to be genuine” and “of considerable length and of remarkable merit,” and adds that “we know that this epistle also has been publicly used in a great many churches both in former times and in our own.”⁠¹⁷ Public reading in the assembly was the practical threshold of canonicity in the ancient Church; a book read at the liturgy was, for most purposes, a book functioning as Scripture. By that test, 1 Clement had crossed over.

It was quoted as the work of “the Apostle Clement”

The learned took it as seriously as the congregations did. Around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria—a man who knew the difference between an apostle and an imitator—introduced a long quotation from the letter with a striking phrase: “in the Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle Clement also, drawing a picture of the Gnostic, says …”⁠¹⁸ “The Apostle Clement.” Whatever precisely he meant by it, a teacher of Clement of Alexandria’s stature was prepared to attach the word apostle to the author of this letter and to quote him the way he quoted Paul. Earlier still, Polycarp of Smyrna had woven the letter’s language into his own letter to the Philippians without naming it, the ordinary tribute of one generation’s prose to a text it has half memorized.⁠¹⁹

It was enrolled in a canon list, and bound into a Bible

In the Christian East the letter went further still. The eighty-fifth of the Canons of the Apostles—a late-fourth-century list of the books the clergy were to hold “venerable and holy”—runs through the New Testament and then keeps going: “two Epistles of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude; two Epistles of Clement; and the Constitutions dedicated to you the bishops by me Clement.”⁠²⁰ There, in a formal enumeration of sacred books, the two letters of Clement stand immediately after Jude—exactly where a reader would expect the catholic epistles to end.

And then there is the physical evidence, which is the most eloquent of all. Codex Alexandrinus, one of the three or four great uncial Bibles of Christian antiquity, contains the whole of the Old and New Testaments in Greek—and after the Revelation of John, without a break in the manuscript’s own reckoning of its contents, it copies out 1 Clement and (imperfectly) 2 Clement. The letter is not in an appendix or a separate quire. Its title appears in the codex’s own table of books. Whoever assembled that Bible regarded Clement’s letter as belonging, physically and canonically, with the Scriptures.⁠²¹ A Syriac New Testament of 1170 likewise inserts the two Clementine epistles among the catholic epistles, between the letters of the apostles. Wherever the borders of the canon were still soft—in the Corinthian liturgy, in Alexandrian scholarship, in the Syrian and the great Greek Bibles—1 Clement kept turning up on the inside.⁠²²

The book that was left out

Set against all that, the outcome is genuinely surprising. When the Church’s judgment finally hardened, in the fourth century, into the list of twenty-seven books we now call the New Testament, 1 Clement was not among them. It appears in no version of the definitive canon—not in Athanasius’s decisive Festal Letter of 367, not at the councils of the 390s, not in the settled usage of Rome or Carthage. Even the oldest Latin canon list we possess, the Muratorian Fragment, which is willing to name and weigh disputed candidates, does not so much as mention it.⁠²³ A book that had been read in church for three centuries simply did not make the final cut.

Why not? The reason is not that the letter was thought heretical, or dull, or spurious. Eusebius, who reports its wide liturgical use, never places it among the Scriptures in his own careful sorting of the books; he treats it, rather, as a genuine and honored writing of a sub-apostolic man. And there is the operative word. Sub-apostolic.

The criterion of apostolicity

The deepest principle governing the canon was apostolicity: a book of the New Testament had to carry the authority of the apostolic generation, either from an apostle or from an apostolic companion writing within that first circle. It is the principle the Muratorian Fragment states in so many words—not about 1 Clement, but about its great companion in these debates, the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd, the Fragment says, was written “very recently, in our times,” and therefore “cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among the Apostles, for it is after their time.”⁠²⁴

There is the wall, stated with perfect clarity, and 1 Clement ran straight into it. The Shepherd of Hermas failed the test because everyone knew it was recent. 1 Clement failed it in a subtler and more poignant way, because it comes so close. Clement had heard the apostles preach; his letter breathes their world; it may even have been written while the apostle John was still alive. But close to the apostles is not of the apostles. The letter never claims otherwise. It speaks for a church, not for an apostle; it never asserts that it writes with apostolic authority in the way that Paul does when he says “I, Paul, an apostle.” The early Church, sharpening its sense of exactly where the apostolic deposit ended, recognized 1 Clement for what it honestly was: the first great voice of the generation after the apostles. Authoritative, venerable, worth reading aloud—but on the far side of the line that Scripture could not cross.⁠²⁵

And a companion it could not carry

The exclusion was reinforced by an awkward traveling companion. The same manuscripts that preserve 1 Clement—Alexandrinus and the eleventh-century Greek codex that gives us the complete text—also preserve a 2 Clement, which is neither by Clement nor, strictly, a letter. It is in fact the oldest surviving Christian sermon outside the New Testament, an anonymous homily of the mid-second century that came to be attached to Clement’s name only because it was copied alongside his letter. Eusebius already knew something was wrong: “there is said to be a second epistle of Clement,” he writes, “but we do not know that this is recognized like the former, for we do not find that the ancients have made any use of it.”⁠²⁶ The doubtful sermon did the genuine letter no favors. A “Clementine” corpus that plainly contained a misattributed homily was easier to keep outside the canon than a single, unimpeachable apostolic book would have been.

What the letter shows about the early Church

If 1 Clement is not Scripture, it is something a historian prizes almost as much: a photograph of the Church’s life taken a single generation after the apostles, before the developments that later centuries would sometimes read back into the beginning. Two features of that photograph have been argued over ever since.

Succession

The first is the succession argument of chapters 42 and 44. This is not a modern discovery; the Church has always known where it sits. When the Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium, taught that the apostles “appointed such men, and gave them the order that, when they should have died, other approved men would take up their ministry,” it footnoted the sentence to 1 Clement 42 and 44. When the Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 861, says the apostles “made the ruling that likewise on their death other proven men should take over their ministry,” its footnote cites the same two chapters. The oldest continuous articulation of apostolic succession in Christian literature is not a conciliar canon or a papal decree. It is this letter.⁠²⁷

Honesty requires a qualification, and it is one Catholic scholars make without embarrassment. 1 Clement does not yet describe the later, three-tiered structure of a single bishop presiding over a college of presbyters and deacons. In these very chapters Clement uses episkopos (overseer, bishop) and presbyteros (elder, presbyter) interchangeably: the men “appointed to be bishops and deacons” in chapter 42 are the same men he calls “presbyters” when he rebukes their deposition in chapter 44. The monarchical episcopate that Ignatius of Antioch would insist upon a decade or two later is not yet visible at Rome. What chapter 44 attests is the principle of succession—that ministry is handed on by appointment from the apostles and cannot be seized or discarded at will—not the developed hierarchy the principle would later organize. That is a real and important datum; it is not the whole of later Catholic order read back into the year 96, and the case is stronger for not pretending otherwise.⁠²⁸

The question of Rome

The second contested feature is simpler to state and harder to settle: the church of Rome wrote this letter to the church of Corinth. Rome intervened, uninvited so far as we can tell, in the internal affairs of a distant congregation that Paul, not Peter, had founded—and it wrote not with a suggestion but with something close to a summons, warning that those who disregard “the words spoken by Him through us” will “entangle themselves in no slight transgression and danger.” Catholics have long read this as the earliest exercise of Roman primacy after the apostolic age. Pope Benedict XVI, preaching on Clement in 2007, put it directly: “this Letter was a first exercise of the Roman primacy after St Peter’s death.”⁠²⁹

The reading is serious, and so are its critics. The letter speaks throughout in the name of the whole Roman community, not in the personal authority of a monarchical bishop; its tone, for all its firmness, is fraternal; and it directs the Corinthian rebels to submit to Corinth’s own presbyters, not to Rome’s. It is quite possible that Corinth had asked Rome to intervene. Even the Catholic historian Klaus Schatz cautions that “it would be wrong to read this letter … as statements of the developed Catholic teaching on papal primacy,” and Orthodox writers have read it, more modestly, as evidence of Rome’s priority—its prestige as the apostolic capital—rather than of any jurisdiction over other churches.⁠³⁰ The honest verdict is that 1 Clement shows the Roman church already exercising a real and widely respected moral authority at the end of the first century, and that whether this amounts to primacy in the later, defined sense is precisely the question the letter cannot settle by itself. I have weighed that debate more fully in the companion essay on Clement the pope; here it is enough to say that the letter is genuinely compatible with more than one reading, which is why it has been argued over for so long.⁠³¹

Why the Church was right to leave it out

None of this diminishes the letter. It sharpens the point. 1 Clement is orthodox, ancient, edifying, and historically precious—and the Church was still right not to make it Scripture.

The reason is the one the whole story keeps returning to. Catholics do not believe the canon was assembled by a committee ranking books for literary merit or antiquity. They believe the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, gradually recognized which writings carried the apostolic faith with the authority of the apostles themselves—and that recognition ran along the line of apostolicity. A book could be old, useful, even inspired-sounding, and still fall on the near side of that line. 1 Clement does. It is the work of a man who had heard the apostles, writing in the name of a church the apostles founded, faithfully handing on what he had received—which is a description of a witness to the apostolic faith, not a source of it. To have canonized it would have been to blur the very distinction the canon exists to protect: the difference between the apostolic deposit and the Church’s own later reflection on that deposit, however early and however faithful.⁠³²

That distinction is not a demotion. The same Church that declined to make 1 Clement Scripture has never stopped honoring it. It reads Clement in the Liturgy of the Hours; it keeps his memory on 23 November; it names him in the Roman Canon of the Mass. It simply does not confuse him with the apostles whose preaching still echoed in his ears—which is exactly the discernment 1 Clement itself would have wanted, since the whole burden of the letter is that everyone should keep the place assigned to him and reach for no higher one.⁠³³

Why it is still worth reading

To be left out of the canon is not to be lost. 1 Clement survived—in a great Bible, in a Syriac and a Latin and a Coptic dress, and finally, complete, in a single Greek codex written in 1056 and rediscovered in a Constantinople library in 1873, which at last gave the modern world the long prayer that the mutilated Alexandrinus had lost.⁠³⁴ It survived because Christians kept wanting to hear it, and the wanting was sound. There is no earlier place, outside the New Testament itself, to overhear the Church thinking aloud about the things that would occupy it for the next two thousand years—how ministry is handed on, how a divided congregation is healed, how a persecuted people should pray for the government persecuting it, how faith and works belong together.

Read it, and you are as close as a reader can come to the voice of a man who had stood within earshot of Peter and Paul. The Church was right not to bind that voice into the Scriptures. It was also right never to let it go. 1 Clement is not the Word of God. It is the next best thing: the first clear word of the Church that received it.⁠³⁵

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was 1 Clement not included in the Bible?

Chiefly because it failed the test of apostolicity. 1 Clement was written around AD 96 by Clement of Rome, a leader of the Roman church who had known the apostles but was not himself one of them. The early Church held that a book of the New Testament had to carry the authority of the apostolic generation, and a sub-apostolic writing—however ancient, orthodox, and edifying—could not meet that standard. The same reasoning excluded the Shepherd of Hermas. The letter itself never claims apostolic authorship; it speaks in the corporate voice of the Roman church, not with the “I, Paul, an apostle” of a canonical epistle.

Who wrote 1 Clement, and when?

By ancient and unanimous tradition, Clement of Rome—reckoned the third bishop of Rome after the apostles—though the letter never names him and speaks throughout for the church of Rome as a body. It is almost universally dated to about AD 96, near the end of the reign of Domitian, on the strength of its opening reference to recent “calamitous events” and its assumption that a generation of apostle-appointed presbyters has already passed away. A minority of scholars argues for a date as early as the late 60s, but c. 96 remains the consensus.

Is 1 Clement the same as 2 Clement?

No. 2 Clement is a separate work by a different, anonymous author—in fact the oldest surviving Christian sermon outside the New Testament, composed around the mid-second century. It is not a letter and not by Clement; it came to bear his name only because it was copied alongside 1 Clement in the great manuscripts. Eusebius already doubted it, noting that the ancients had made no use of “a second epistle of Clement.”

Was 1 Clement ever considered Scripture?

For a time, in many places, effectively yes. It was read aloud in the Sunday worship of the Corinthian church for generations, was “publicly used in a great many churches” according to Eusebius, was quoted by Clement of Alexandria as the work of “the Apostle Clement,” was listed among the sacred books in the Apostolic Canons, and was bound into the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus immediately after the Book of Revelation. It functioned as Scripture in the liturgy long before the canon’s borders were formally fixed—and then those borders were fixed without it.

What does 1 Clement say about apostolic succession and the pope?

Chapters 42 and 44 give the earliest explicit argument for apostolic succession in Christian literature: God sent Christ, Christ sent the apostles, the apostles appointed bishops and deacons and provided that “approved men” should succeed them. The Second Vatican Council and the Catechism both cite these chapters for the doctrine. On the papacy, the striking fact is that the church of Rome intervened, with real authority, in the affairs of the church of Corinth; Catholics read this as an early exercise of Roman primacy, while others read it as evidence of Rome’s prestige rather than jurisdiction. The letter uses “bishop” and “presbyter” interchangeably and does not yet describe a monarchical bishop of Rome, so it should not be pressed further than the evidence allows.

Does the Catholic Church accept 1 Clement today?

The Church honors it without treating it as Scripture. It is not “rejected” in the sense of being condemned—Clement is a saint, commemorated on 23 November and named in the Roman Canon of the Mass, and the letter is still read in the Church’s Office of Readings. But it does not belong to the inspired canon. From a Catholic perspective 1 Clement is a witness to the apostolic faith rather than a rule of it: precious as history and edifying as exhortation, but not the Word of God.

Footnotes

1. 1. The standard critical texts and translations are J.B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part 1: S. Clement of Rome, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890); Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). On 1 Clement as very probably the earliest datable Christian writing outside the New Testament, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

2. 2. Dionysius of Corinth in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.23.11; Eusebius, HE 3.16; Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 4.17; Canon 85 of the Apostolic Canons; on Codex Alexandrinus see n. 21 below. Each is cited in full in its place.

3. 3. 1 Clement, salutation (trans. J.B. Lightfoot). The letter is anonymous and corporate throughout; the attribution to Clement rests entirely on external witnesses (nn. 4, 16–18). For an accessible introduction, see Andrew Gregory, “1 Clement: An Introduction,” Expository Times 117, no. 6 (2006): 223–30.

4. 4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3 (trans. ANF 1). Irenaeus lists the Roman succession as Linus, Anacletus, Clement, and gives the earliest external account of the letter.

5. 5. 1 Clement 1 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1); 44.2–3. The c. 96 date is the majority position, classically associated with Lightfoot; see Metzger, Canon; and Gregory, “1 Clement.”

6. 6. For the early date, see Thomas J. Herron, Clement and the Early Church of Rome: On the Dating of Clement's First Epistle to the Corinthians (Steubenville: Emmaus Road, 2010); cf. John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (London: SCM, 1976). The present-tense sacrificial language of chs. 40–41 does not require a standing Temple; comparable present-tense descriptions of the cult occur in demonstrably post-70 writers such as Josephus and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus (ch. 3).

7. 7. 1 Clement 1; 3; 47 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). The Greek term for the revolt is stasis.

8. 8. 1 Clement 4–6; the quotations from ch. 5 are trans. Lightfoot. Chapter 5 is among the earliest external testimonies to the deaths of Peter and Paul; the phrase “the farthest bounds of the West” (to terma tēs dyseōs) has been read as a reference to Spain (cf. Rom 15:24, 28), though the point is disputed. See Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, ad loc.

9. 9. 1 Clement 20; 25 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1); the phoenix is applied to the resurrection in ch. 26.

10. 10. 1 Clement 32–33 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). The both/and of faith and works in these chapters is a standard datum in Catholic treatments; cf. the similar structure in the Epistle of James 2:14–26.

11. 11. 1 Clement 40; 42.1–4 (trans. Lightfoot).

12. 12. 1 Clement 42.5 (trans. Lightfoot). The citation adapts Isaiah 60:17 LXX, which reads “I will give thy rulers in peace and thy overseers (episkopous) in righteousness.” Clement keeps the “overseers” (bishops) but reads them with “deacons” (diakonous), a term absent from the Septuagint, so that the prophet appears to name the two disputed offices.

13. 13. 1 Clement 44.1–2 (trans. Lightfoot).

14. 14. 1 Clement 44.3–6 (trans. Lightfoot). On this passage as the earliest explicit statement of ministerial succession, see Francis A. Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (New York: Newman, 2001).

15. 15. 1 Clement 59–61 (trans. Lightfoot); the petition for civil rulers is at 61.1–2. This section is absent from the mutilated Codex Alexandrinus and is known in full only from the later witnesses (see n. 34); it is widely regarded as the earliest Christian liturgical prayer, and the earliest Christian prayer for the state, outside the New Testament.

16. 16. Dionysius of Corinth, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.23.11 (trans. A.C. McGiffert, NPNF2 1).

17. 17. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.16 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1).

18. 18. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 4.17 (trans. ANF 2), under the heading “Passages from Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians on Martyrdom.” Clement of Alexandria also draws on the letter elsewhere in the Stromateis.

19. 19. The verbal parallels between Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians and 1 Clement are widely noted; see Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., and Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett, eds., The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

20. 20. Canon 85 of the Apostolic Canons, appended to the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 8 (trans. ANF 7). The enumeration of books to be held “venerable and holy” includes “two Epistles of Clement.”

21. 21. Codex Alexandrinus (London, British Library, Royal MS 1 D VIII, 5th c.) contains 1 Clement and, imperfectly, 2 Clement after the New Testament; the title of 1 Clement appears in the codex's own table of contents, and the text lacks 57.7–63 through the loss of a leaf. See Metzger, Canon; and Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome.

22. 22. A Syriac New Testament of 1170 (Cambridge University Library) places the two Clementine epistles among the catholic epistles; see Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome. On the range of manuscript witnesses see n. 34.

23. 23. 1 Clement appears in no version of the definitive 27-book canon, including Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter (367); see the series pillar, [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/). The Muratorian Fragment does not mention it; text and date (c. 170) in Metzger, Canon, 191–201, 305–7.

24. 24. Muratorian Fragment, lines 73–80 (trans. Metzger, Canon, 307).

25. 25. On apostolicity as the operative criterion, see Metzger, Canon, 251–54; and the parallel treatment of the Shepherd's exclusion in [The Shepherd of Hermas](/shepherd-of-hermas/). That 1 Clement may have been written while the apostle John was still living is an inference from the traditional dates; the letter makes no such claim for itself.

26. 26. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.38.4 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1). On 2 Clement as the earliest surviving Christian homily (c. 140–160), see Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., and Karl P. Donfried, The Setting of Second Clement in Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1974).

27. 27. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 20 (with footnotes citing 1 Clement 42.3–4; 44.2–4; 57.1–2); Catechism of the Catholic Church 861 (footnote citing “St. Clement of Rome, Ad Cor. 42, 44”).

28. 28. 1 Clement 42; 44; 47.6; 57.1. On the interchangeable terminology and the absence of a monarchical episcopate at Rome c. 96, see Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops; J.N.D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), s.v. “Clement I”; and Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).

29. 29. 1 Clement 59.1; 63.2 (trans. Lightfoot); Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience of 7 March 2007 (which quotes Irenaeus, AH 3.3.3).

30. 30. Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto and Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996). For the “priority” reading, see John Meyendorff et al., The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1992).

31. 31. See further the companion essay, [Pope Saint Clement I](/saint-clement-fourth-pope/); and, for a balanced history of the early papacy, Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

32. 32. On the canon as the Church's recognition rather than creation of Scripture, see Catechism of the Catholic Church 120; Metzger, Canon; and the discussion in Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops.

33. 33. Clement is commemorated on 23 November (Martyrologium Romanum) and named in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I); the Church's Office of Readings still draws on 1 Clement. See the companion essay, [Pope Saint Clement I](/saint-clement-fourth-pope/).

34. 34. The complete Greek text survives only in Codex Hierosolymitanus (the Jerusalem or Bryennios Codex), copied by the scribe Leo in 1056 and discovered by Philotheos Bryennios in Constantinople in 1873; Bryennios published the two Clementine epistles in 1875. An ancient Latin version survives in an eleventh-century manuscript (from the abbey of Florennes, later in the seminary library at Namur), published by Germain Morin in 1894; Syriac and Coptic versions also survive. See Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, 1:116–48, and Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed.

35. 35. Modern English translations are readily available in Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., and Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, LCL 24; the older Lightfoot and Roberts-Donaldson (ANF 1) versions are in the public domain.