The author of 1 Clement is communicating that internal disputes between Christians provoked imperial attention and eventually led to the deaths of Peter and Paul. The evidence from the text itself points strongly in that direction, although this is certainly a story that authors like Luke and Clement would not want to highlight, for it would directly undermine the desired image of Peter and Paul standing together as symbols of apostolic and ecclesiastical unity in Rome and elsewhere.
Although Luke has much to say in Acts about the lives and missions of these two apostles, he remains strangely silent when it comes to describing the locations and circumstances of their deaths. Luke takes the reader all the way to Rome with Paul but then ends with the positive but abrupt outcome that Paul was able to preach unhindered. The stories of the apostles were picked up and completed later in some of the apocryphal acts, yet the earliest reference to their deaths by martyrdom is usually ascribed to 1 Clement, written probably at the end of the first century C.E. 1 Clement 5,2−7 (SUC 1, 30,5−32,6 Fischer): “On account of jealousy and envy the greatest and most righteous pillars were persecuted and fought to the death. Let us place before our eyes the noble apostles. Because of unjust jealousy Peter endured hardships, and not once or twice but many times. Thus, after bearing witness he went to the place of glory that was due him. On account of jealousy and conflict Paul pointed the way to the prize for perseverance. After he had been bound in chains seven times, driven into exile, stoned, and had preached in both the East and in the West, he received the noble glory for his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and having gone even to the limit of the West. When he had borne witness before the rulers, he was thus set free from the world and was taken up to the holy place, having become the greatest example of perseverance.” All translations in this article are my own, if not indicated otherwise. The verb μαρτυρέω had not yet taken on the technical meaning of dying as a martyr, as shown by Boudewijn Dehandschutter, “Some Notes in 1 Clement 5,4−7,” in Fructus Centesimus: Mélanges offerts à Gerard J.M. Bartelink à l’occasion de son soixante-cinquième anniversaire (ed. Antoon A. Bastiaensen, Anthony Hilhorst, Corneille H. Kneepkens; Instrumenta Patristica 19; Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 83−89.
The author of 1 Clement is communicating that internal disputes between Christians provoked imperial attention and eventually led to the deaths of Peter and Paul Rome needed political capital, and that capital came in the form of claims that not one, but two of the apostles had died in Rome as martyrs. And these were not just any two apostles: Peter, the apostle to the Jews, and Paul, the apostle to the nations. In these two apostles, then, the entire Christian world was symbolically placed under Rome. 1 Clement does not actually tell us when or where Peter and Paul died. The tradition of Roman martyrdom was not clearly articulated until the final decades of the second century in the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, and authors like Irenaeus. By the turn of the third century—according to Papias—Rome claimed to have the apostolic “trophies” (τρόπαια), which most scholars agree were their tombs (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 2,25,7 (GCS Eusebius 2,1, 178,3−6 Schwartz/Mommsen/Winkelmann). See also Eastman, Paul the Martyr (see note 3), 21−24).
Even if every author seemed to agree that Peter and Paul died in Rome, beyond that there was great variety. Did Peter die alone, as in the Acts of Peter, after a conflict with Simon Magus involving a talking dog and a rejuvenated herring, but where his death sentence was actually the result of the fact that his teaching led aristocratic wives to refuse to have sex with their husbands? Did Paul die alone, as in the Acts of Paul, because he raised one of Nero’s servants from the dead and gathered unwanted attention as the servant of another king, Jesus? Or, as other texts claim, did Peter and Paul die together in Rome because they struck down Simon Magus, Nero’s favorite sorcerer? And did they therefore die on the exact same day, as Jerome, Maximus of Turin, and probably Dionysius of Corinth suggest? (Jerome, De viris illustribus 5 (ed. Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Gerolamo: Gli Uomini Illustri [Biblioteca Patristica 12; Firenze: Nardini Editore, 1988], 80−86); Jerome, Tractatus in psalmos 96,10 (CSEL 78, 445,179−181 Morin); Maximus of Turin, Sermones 1,2 (CChr.SL 23, 2,30 Mutzenbecher); 2,1 (6,1−30 M.); 9,2 (32,44 M.); Dionysius of Corinth in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 2,25,8 (179,10−14 S./M./W.). The ascription of this same idea to Damasus of Rome is spurious, as shown by Cuthbert H. Turner, ed., Ecclesiae occidentalis monumenta iuris antiquissima, Vol. 1,1,2 (Oxford: Clarendon: 1804), 157, 245−246). Or did they die on the same date but a year apart, as Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Prudentius, Gregory of Tours, and Arator all claim? (Ambrose of Milan, De virginitate 19,124 (PL 16:299 A-B); Augustine, Sermones 295,7 (PL 38:1352); 381,1 (PL 39:1683); Prudentius, De coronis martyrum 12,5,21−22 (CChr.SL 126, 379 Cunningham); Gregory of Tours, De gloria martyrum 28 (MGH Gregorii Turonensis Opera 1,2, 54,17−18 Krusch); Arator, De actibus apostolorum 2,1247−1249).
- And where did Paul die, on the Ostian Road or at the Three Fountains on the Laurentinian Road? (see Eastman, Paul the Martyr (see note 3), 62−69) And were they buried together or apart? And were these burials on the Ostian Road and the Vatican hill, or were they on the Appian Road? (Eastman, Paul the Martyr (see note 3), 94−114) And was Paul’s head buried with his body, or was it found later by a shepherd and reattached to his body? And when did the apostles die? Did they die in the year 64, 68, 69, or 57? There was no single Roman story about the deaths of Peter and Paul (David L. Eastman, The Deaths of the Apostles: Ancient Accounts of the Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul).
It may be reasonable to infer from 1 Clement that Peter and Paul died in Rome, but this claim is made explicit only in later traditions—and among these traditions there are different renditions of why, where, and when the apostles died, and of what happened to their bodies after their deaths. Cullmann observed that 1 Clement may have more information to yield on the circumstances of the deaths of Peter and Paul. He first articulates this in his 1930 article “Les causes de la mort de Pierre et de Paul d’après le témoignage de Clément Romain”. As he notes, each of the examples given by the author of 1 Clement is introduced by a reference to jealousy using the terms ζῆλος, φθόνος, and ἔρις. Cullmann is careful to argue: 1) that all of these words denote jealousy, not hatred, and 2) that all these terms presuppose discord among members of the same community ( Cullmann, “Les causes” 296−300). Because the deaths of Peter and Paul also result from this same jealousy, “This in the context of our letter can only mean that they were victims of jealousy from persons who counted themselves members of the Christian Church [his emphasis]” (Cullmann, Peter (see note 12), 102). Cullmann goes on to clarify that he is not implying that Christians did the actual killing, but that Roman authorities may have had to intervene in disputes among Roman Christians, and even may have done so as a result of some Christians informing on others. The Christians in Rome, Cullmann postulates, were actually too weak to earn the attention of the Roman authorities and provoke jealousy from them, but they may have posed a perceived threat to the peace if they were having internal turmoil. This possibility is actually mentioned in 1 Clement with reference to the Corinthian situation at the time the letter was written.
- This community had a long tradition of internal division, and the author reminds them of Paul’s letter to them (1 Clement 47,3 (84,6−8 F).
- Cullmann argues that his theory about 1 Clement also helps us interpret several other New Testament texts
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- (1) In a letter to the Corinthians themselves, Paul had listed his many trials, including κινδύνοις ἐν ψευδαδέλφοις (2 Cor 11:26; See Cullmann, Peter (see note 12), 103). The apostle compares these “false brothers” to dangers to his very life, such as being beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and attacked by robbers. Perhaps Paul understood that internal strife could be lethal, because it nearly had been for him already on more than one occasion.
- (2) Cullmann suggests that if Christian disputes had led to the deaths of Peter and Paul, then this would explain the silence at the end of Acts. Luke is certainly not going to end a work on the expansion of the early church, with Peter and Paul as the two pillars of that expansion, with the story of how internal disputes provoked their deaths: “les événements qui se produisirent alors n’étaient pas dignes d’être mentionnés dans un écrit qui visait à prouver l’unité de l’Église chrétienne” (Cullmann, “Les causes” (see note 12), 298).
- (3) Cullmann points out that in Phil 1:15−18 Paul writes—perhaps from prison in Rome (probably Ephesus) —about those who preach διὰ φθόνον καὶ ἔριν, two of the terms in 1 Clement. Cullmann reads the objects of Paul’s polemic as Jewish-Christians, the “dogs” against whom the apostle rails in Phil 3:1−7 (Cullmann, Peter (see note 12), 105−106). They are not outsiders but are scandalizing the community of Jesus followers from within, and Cullmann suggests that a similar dynamic could have been at work in the deaths of the apostles.
- (4) Paul’s letter to the Romans as a whole, in Cullmann’s view, suggests significant friction between Jewish Christian and Gentile Christian factions (Cullmann, Peter (see note 12), 106−107).
In 2 Tim the author states that the insidious Alexander the coppersmith had harmed Paul greatly and opposed his teaching: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ χαλκεὺς πολλά μοι κακὰ ἐνεδείξατο· ἀποδώσει αὐτῷ ὁ κύριος κατὰ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ· ὃν καὶ σὺ φυλάσσου, λίαν γὰρ ἀντέστη τοῖς ἡμετέροις λόγοις. According to 2 Tim 1:17, Paul is in Rome at this point, so is this a reference to the betrayal of the apostle in Rome by those within the Christian community? The evidence does not allow us to speak definitively on this point, but the broader context of 2 Tim 4:6−16 strongly suggests a connection between a betrayal of Paul, his current state of abandonment and imprisonment, and his impending execution in Rome (See Martin Dibelius and Hans Concelmann, The Pastoral Epistles, 16, 124). This text may well reflect a tradition in which the φθόνος of a certain Alexander had contributed to the apostle’s demise, as 1 Clement suggests.
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