A clear, scholarly introduction to 1 Clement — the sixty-five-chapter letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, written around AD 95–96 in the name of the Roman congregation and traditionally attributed to Clement, the bishop of Rome who knew the apostles. It is the earliest surviving Christian writing outside the New Testament and the most respected of the Apostolic Fathers.
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Bible Sundays study guide
1 Clement is a sixty-five-chapter letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, written around AD 95–96 in the name of the Roman congregation but traditionally attributed to Clement, the bishop of Rome who knew the apostles. It addresses a crisis in Corinth — a younger faction has deposed the older presbyters — and calls the church back to order, humility, repentance, love, and unity. It is the earliest surviving Christian writing outside the New Testament.
1 Clement is the most respected of the Apostolic Fathers. It was read aloud in the worship of the Corinthian church for centuries (Eusebius records it as still being read there in his day) and is bound into the New Testament section of the great fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, alongside 2 Clement. Most early Christians regarded it as authoritative pastoral writing but not as Scripture in the same sense as the apostolic letters.
1 Clement gives us our oldest extra-biblical account of the apostles Peter and Paul (chapter 5, including the only first-century reference to Paul's missionary travels 'to the limit of the West'), the earliest non-biblical statement of justification by faith (chapter 32), one of the earliest pastoral defenses of orderly succession in the Christian ministry (chapters 42–44), and a magnificent prayer for the church and the civil rulers (chapters 59–61) that is the earliest extended Christian liturgical text outside the New Testament.
The letter is written in the name of the Roman church and is not signed by Clement personally, but every early source attributes it to him, and there is no good reason to doubt the tradition. Clement is identified by Irenaeus and Eusebius as the third bishop of Rome after the apostles.
Almost certainly AD 95–96, during or just after the persecution under the emperor Domitian. That makes it roughly contemporary with the Book of Revelation and earlier than several New Testament books.
Despite being read in worship for centuries and bound into Codex Alexandrinus, 1 Clement is a derivative pastoral writing by a non-apostle. The fourth-century canonical decisions consistently distinguished such writings from the apostles' own letters.
No. 1 Clement is the genuine first-century letter. The much later 'Clementine Recognitions' and 'Clementine Homilies' are second- to fourth-century novelistic works falsely attributed to Clement.
Chapter 5 records both apostles as martyred witnesses of the faith. It is the only first-century source for Paul's travels 'to the limit of the West' — a hint that Paul may have reached Spain after his Roman imprisonment, fulfilling his stated intention in Romans 15.
Chapter 32 says: 'And we, too, 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.'
The full text in the Roberts–Donaldson nineteenth-century English translation is in the public domain and freely available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org) and Early Christian Writings (earlychristianwritings.com).
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