I return her to the book of 1 Clement, probably unknown to many people on the blog, but an important work written at about the time of some of some of the writings of the New Testament – or so I’ll b arguing in the post after this.  First I need to say something about the author.  Why is it attributed to someone named Clement?   Could this really have been written by a first-century pope (i.e., the Bishop of the church in Rome)?

Again, I am taking this information from the Introduction to the letter, which I give in a new English translation (with the Greek text on the facing page) in the first volume of my Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press).

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The Author of the Book

Even though the letter claims to be written by the “church … residing in Rome,” it has from early times been attributed to Clement, a leader of the Roman church near the end of the first century.  In his celebrated church history, Eusebius sets forth the tradition, earlier found in the writings of the third-century church Father Origen, that this Clement was the companion of the apostle Paul mentioned in Phil 4:3 (Eccl. Hist. 3.4.15; see Origen Comm. Jn. 6.36).   Some of the early traditions claim that Clement was the second bishop of Rome, ordained by Peter himself (Tertullian, Prescription 32); more commonly it was thought that he was the third, following Linus and Anacletus (thus Irenaeus in Agst. Heresies 3.3.1 and Eusebius Eccl. Hist. 3.4.21).  The first reference to any …

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