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Dating of 1 Clement 📜
On the internal evidence for the dating of 1 Clement, Welborn writes (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 1, p. 1060):
The epistle is customarily dated to the end of the reign of Domitian (95 or 96 C.E.). In the first sentence of the letter, the author explains that the Roman church has been delayed in turning its attention to the dispute at Corinth by “sudden and repeated misfortunes and hindrances which have befallen us” (1:1). This statement is usually interpreted as an allusion to a persecution through which the church at Rome has just been passing. Since chap. 5 speaks of the Neronian persecution as something long past, the sporadic assaults of Domitian must be meant. But the langauge of 1:1 is so vague that one may doubt whether it refers to persecution at all (Merrill 1924: 160); and the evidence for a persecution under Domitian is tenuous (Merrill 1924: 148-73). In letters and speeches on concord, one often finds an apologetic formula like that which introduces 1 Clement; it was customary for one who gave advice on concord to excuse his delay by reference to personal or domestic hindrances (e.g., Dio Chrys. Or. 40.2; Aelius Aristides Or. 24.1; Socratic Ep. 31).
Laurence Welborn writes about the dating of 1 Clement (op. cit., p. 1060):
Thus one must rely upon more general statements in the epistle and in tradition. The account of the deaths of Peter and Paul in chap. 5 is not that of an eye-witness. The presbyters installed by the apostles have died (44:2), and a second ecclesiastical generation has passed (44:3). The church at Rome is called “ancient” (47:6); and the emissaries from Rome are said to have lived “blamelessly” as Christians “from youth to old age” (63:3). Thus the epistle cannot have been written before the last decades of the 1st century. There are references to the letter by the middle of the next century in the works of Hegesippus and Dionysius of Corinth (apud Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.16; 4.22; 4.23). Thus one may place the composition of 1 Clement between A.D. 80 and 140.
Loisy maintains that the author of 1 Clement was a distinguished Roman elder who flourished 130-140 and that this Clement was named in the Shepherd of Hermas (Vision, 8:3), which is also to be dated to the mid second century. Notably, 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 for 1 Clement 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, the document can scarcely be dated to the time of the first Christian generation. Other indications of lateness include the tradition in chapter 5 that Paul traveled to the extremities of the west (i.e., Spain) and the emphasis on the appointment of “bishops and deacons” (42:1-5). Most notably, there is stated to be “a rule of succession” for bishops and deacons who have “fallen asleep” (44:2). This suggests a second century date for 1 Clement.
Alvar Ellegård has argued for a date as early as the sixties of the first century for a few reasons in his Jesus: the Temple cult is mentioned in the present tense (pp. 38-39), Peter and Paul are mentioned as of “our generation” (pp. 39-40), and the letter seemed to have been written during a persecution, perhaps that of Nero (p. 40). On the other hand, as is pointed out with Hebrews, a mention of the Temple cult in the present does not prove that the author was writing before 70 CE. The reference to “our generation” is simply a contrast between the Christian era and the previously mentioned era of ancient Judaism. Finally, the supposed reference to persecution may be a literary device, as pointed out by Welborn. Besides, there were also persecutions under Domitian, Trajan, and other emperors.
The author writes because certain factions in Corinth have not given proper respect to the bishops and deacons and have set up new leaders in their place. On the occasion of the epistle, Welborn states (op. cit., p. 1059):
Whatever the causes of the conflict in Corinth, money seems to have been involved. Contrasting the former humility of the Corinthians with the ambition which has now given rise to strife, the author states that the Corinthians had once been ‘satisfied with the provision (ephodios) of Christ’ (2:1). Dionysius of Corinth, in his letter to Soter, observed that it had been the custom of the Roman church from the beginning ‘to send contributions (ephodia) to many churchs in every city’ (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.23.10). From the Roman point of view of Clement, the younger generation of leaders at Corinth are dissatisfied with the provision for their church. What role did this play in the revolt against the presbyters? Were the established presbyters accused of embezzlement? Did the new leaders seek another contribution, to replace the funds their predecessors stole? Polycarp reports that the presbyter Valens was deposed from office for “avarice” (Ad Phil. 11). The unrest of the 1st and 2d centuries almost always had economic causes; and the agreements which brought strife to an end usually included concrete provisions which served the interests of all parties.
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Are the Pastoral Epistles cited in 1st Clement? 📜
I. Howard Marshall’s commentary (ICC) on the Pastoral epistles discusses the systematic evaluation of literary dependence on NT writings by the Oxford “New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers” (NTAF) committee. They graded the likelihood of dependence on a four point scale (A-D, with A meaning “certain” and D meaning “uncertain”). They grade Polycarp’s potential use of 1-2 Timothy a “B”, Ignatius’ use of the three Pastorals a “C”, 1 Clement’s use of Titus a “C”, and 1 Clement’s use of 1-2 Timothy a “D” (while 1 Clement gets an “A” rating for its use of 1 Corinthians). So it is possible but with low probability with a “C” rating. Marshall gives his own evaluation: “The fact that it is Polycarp who of all the AF furnishes the strongest evidence for use of the Pauline corpus generally strengthens the case that he is also referring to the PE rather than echoing language that was current in the church. The evidence for knowledge by Ignatius is weaker, amounting as it does to similarities in phraseology. In my judgment the evidence for possible knowledge by 1 Clement is somewhat stronger” (pp. 3-4).
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Does 1 Clement think that the Temple still exists? 📜
Many post 70 AD Jewish texts refer to the Temple as if it still standing, eg. –
… in the world described by the Mishnah the Temple still exists and the laws that governed it are expressed in the present tense … the Mishnah itself ignores the events of the Roman occupation of the land of Israel. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mishnah/
In the past, the Mishnah’s ritual narratives have been studied in one of two ways …[1] as transparent historical accounts which provide the historian or the scholar of religion access to historical events and to rituals performed in the time of the Second Temple. Jacob Neusner took the opposite approach, arguing that the Temple-oriented ritual narratives (like all Temple material in the Mishnah) were…a utopian fantasy in which the sacred center of Judaism, the Temple, continued to exist within the religious imagination of its authors. Both of these approaches, which are problematic in their extreme stances toward the narratives, took important steps in describing the ritual narratives as a collectivity.
In this dissertation I break with the earlier approaches and treat these narratives neither as transparent history nor as total fantasies, but as far more complicated and nuanced texts with characteristic narrative shape and thematic.
The “First Letter of Clement” is a misnomer, as no other letter from the author survives: “Second Clement,” which is not a letter, comes from a different hand (see Introduction to Second Clement). Moreover, the present letter does not claim to be written by Clement, who, in fact, is never mentioned in its text.
The author speaks of at least two generations of Christians passing on before him, so it likely isn’t Clement.
Laurence Welborn had this to say on the issue:
The epistle is customarily dated to the end of the reign of Domitian (95 or 96 C.E.). In the first sentence of the letter, the author explains that the Roman church has been delayed in turning its attention to the dispute at Corinth by “sudden and repeated misfortunes and hindrances which have befallen us” (1:1). This statement is usually interpreted as an allusion to a persecution through which the church at Rome has just been passing. Since chap. 5 speaks of the Neronian persecution as something long past, the sporadic assaults of Domitian must be meant. But the langauge of 1:1 is so vague that one may doubt whether it refers to persecution at all (Merrill 1924: 160); and the evidence for a persecution under Domitian is tenuous (Merrill 1924: 148-73). In letters and speeches on concord, one often finds an apologetic formula like that which introduces 1 Clement; it was customary for one who gave advice on concord to excuse his delay by reference to personal or domestic hindrances (e.g., Dio Chrys. Or. 40.2; Aelius Aristides Or. 24.1; Socratic Ep. 31).
Thus one must rely upon more general statements in the epistle and in tradition. The account of the deaths of Peter and Paul in chap. 5 is not that of an eye-witness. The presbyters installed by the apostles have died (44:2), and a second ecclesiastical generation has passed (44:3). The church at Rome is called “ancient” (47:6); and the emissaries from Rome are said to have lived “blamelessly” as Christians “from youth to old age” (63:3). Thus the epistle cannot have been written before the last decades of the 1st century. There are references to the letter by the middle of the next century in the works of Hegesippus and Dionysius of Corinth (apud Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.16; 4.22; 4.23). Thus one may place the composition of 1 Clement between A.D. 80 and 140.
There’s a few details we can use to further narrow down the date. Welborn speaks of the Domitianic persecution as a possible reference point, but more recent scholarship suggests a major persecution of Christians under Domitian is, in all likelihood, a myth invented by Eusebius by distorting historical accounts of the emperor exiling a handful of Christians to islands in the Aegean Sea (John of Revelation was among the expatriates whom early sources also suggest Domitian had the mercy to recall). This hardly fits the description of “sudden and repeated misfortunes and hindrances” that our author speaks of. The next evidence of Christian persecution in Rome after Nero, whom the author speaks of as long since history, is a letter written from northern Anatolia by Pliny the Younger to emperor Trajan in A.D. 112, at least a decade after Clement I had died.
Aside from historical data, we can also use biographical information to weed out the author’s identity. He describes himself as among a generation that has been in the faith “from youth to old age”. Clement was most likely born around the mid-30s A.D. in Rome. He would have had a pagan upbringing and converted to Christianity at the very earliest as a young man in the late 40s A.D. Not to mention it’s hardly fitting for somebody to refer to the church in Rome as “ancient” when he was there to see its foundations laid, but this isn’t to say the author wasn’t a Clement. A non-canonical Christian work titled the Shepherd of Hermas, dated firmly in the mid-2nd century by its author’s apparent kinship with Pius I, mentions a certain Clement who is instructed to spread the word of Hermas’ revelation far and wide. This tracks with our man’s role of communicating with churches as a sort of ambassador of the proto-Catholic congregation in Rome.
I believe there’s yet another oft-disregarded piece of the puzzle that even further cements the letter in question well after Clement I had passed on. Our author briefly mentions temple rituals in Jerusalem before offering a severe warning to those who partake in that which is displeasing to the Lord. As we already know, this cannot be in reference to the Second Temple since the reign of Nero and the subsequent chaotic rise of the Flavians which culminated with the destruction of Jerusalem are far away in hindsight for him. There wouldn’t be a temple in Jerusalem again until emperor Hadrian began to construct the colony of Aelia Capitolina over the rubble in A.D. 129. The writer of the similarly pseudepigraphal Epistle of Barnabas alludes to this when he mentions Jews building a new temple under the yoke of their pagan oppressors, placing it in the few years leading up to Bar Kokhba’s revolt in 132. This striking parallel pushes our epistle even farther away from Clement’s death around the turn of the 2nd century.
My conclusion is that the so-called first epistle of Clement is part of a trend in 2nd-century Roman proto-orthodoxy which reflects the early days of a power struggle between their own claims to authority and the diverse assortment of Christian communities that existed throughout the Roman world. The church in Corinth had revolted against the proto-papacy and its ecclesiastical hierarchy, and Clement’s job was to reprimand them and make sure they wouldn’t step out of line again. This same conflict is also reflected in orthodox scripture stressing Petrine primacy (ergo the church in Rome’s claim to authority) such as John 21, the book of Acts, and certain interpolations in the Pauline corpus. The three-sided war between pagan imperium, papist orthodoxy, and heterodox Christianity was won by the proto-Catholics and the victors ultimately dictated the narrative on it until discoveries made starting in the late 19th century led to a scholarly re-evaluation of the so-called heretics and their place in the early church. This letter may not be in the early pope’s hand (and indeed we can’t even be sure that such title isn’t a revisionist anachronism), but it does allow us to peek behind the curtain of history and glean just a little bit of a critical event in the centuries-long struggle for orthodoxy.
