Clement of Rome — 1 Clement

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians — universally known as 1 Clement — is a letter sent from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth around the end of the first century, urging an end to a bitter leadership dispute. It is one of the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and by many counts the earliest of them that can be dated. For the life of Paul it carries exceptional weight: 1 Clement 5 preserves the earliest external testimony to the deaths of Peter and Paul, written possibly within a generation of the events and from the very city where they are traditionally said to have died.

What it is

1 Clement is a real letter addressed to a real crisis. The Corinthian church — the same community Paul had founded and written to decades earlier — had deposed its established presbyters in a factional revolt, and the Roman church wrote at length to call the congregation back to order, humility, and concord. The letter is long, saturated with Old Testament example and moral exhortation, and speaks throughout in the first person plural, as the voice of a community rather than a single named writer. (Tradition)

Authorship and dating

The letter is written in the name of the church of Rome and is not signed by any individual. The name "Clement" is attached to it by early tradition — attested by the mid-second century — identifying the author as Clement, an early leader or bishop of the Roman church. (Tradition) Modern scholarship generally accepts that a single figure named Clement drafted the letter on the church's behalf, while noting that the text itself makes no such claim and that little can be known securely about him. (Scholarship)

On dating, the most common position places the letter around AD 95–96, late in the reign of Domitian, partly because its opening refers to "sudden and repeated misfortunes" that have delayed the Roman church's attention, often read as a reference to persecution or disruption. Some scholars argue for an earlier date, as early as about AD 70. (Scholarship) On either dating the letter is roughly contemporary with, or only a generation after, the latest New Testament writings, which is what makes its testimony about Paul so valuable.

What it tells us about Paul

The decisive passage is chapter 5, which sets the sufferings of Peter and Paul before the Corinthians as recent examples of endurance. In the public-domain Roberts–Donaldson translation it reads:

> "By reason of envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee, and stoned. After preaching both in the east and west, he gained the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world, and come to the extreme limit of the west, and suffered martyrdom under the prefects. Thus was he removed from the world, and went into the holy place, having proved himself a striking example of patience."

Several points follow, each to be read carefully. The letter states that Paul bore chains seven times, was driven to flee, was stoned, and finally died a martyr "under the prefects" (the rulers). (Tradition) It is the earliest surviving source for the tradition that Paul died a martyr — earlier than the fuller account preserved by Eusebius, who wrote some two and a half centuries later.

Two cautions matter. First, 1 Clement gives no manner and no exact place of Paul's death. The familiar detail that Paul was beheaded at Rome is a *later* tradition; it is not in this text. Second, the striking phrase that Paul reached "the extreme limit of the west" (Greek *to terma tēs dyseōs*) is the earliest evidence cited for the tradition that Paul reached Spain, which he had said he hoped to do — "When therefore I shall have accomplished this, and consigned to them this fruit, I will come by you into Spain" (Romans 15:28; cf. 15:24). (Scripture) But scholars debate what "the west" means from the standpoint of a writer already in Rome: it may point to Spain specifically, or it may mean nothing more than Rome itself as seen from the eastern Mediterranean. (Scholarship) The phrase is suggestive, not decisive.

The letter and Paul's own writings

1 Clement is also early evidence for the circulation and authority of Paul's letters. In chapter 47 the Roman church tells the Corinthians to "take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the apostle," reminding them that Paul had written to them about their factions "at the beginning of the gospel." This is an external witness, within perhaps forty years, that 1 Corinthians was known at Corinth and treated as authoritative — and that the Corinthian tendency to form parties, which Paul had rebuked, had resurfaced. (Tradition)

How to weigh it

1 Clement is a documentary source of the first rank: an actual letter, securely early, from Rome to a church Paul knew. What it *reports* about Paul — the seven imprisonments, the stoning, the martyrdom, the "extreme limit of the west" — is the earliest external tradition about the Apostle's later life, and should be presented as early tradition rather than as first-hand record. For Paul's own account of his sufferings, compare his letters directly, especially Romans; for the connected narrative of his career and the later martyrdom traditions, see the Acts of the Apostles and the reference on the Apostle Paul.