Clement of Rome

Around AD 96 a letter went out from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth. The Corinthians had thrown their elders out of office over a quarrel about who should lead — the same congregation Paul had written to forty years earlier, still fighting. The reply that came back is the oldest Christian writing we have outside the New Testament. The man who sent it was Clement. He was a leader of the Roman church at the end of the first century. Later lists name him the third or fourth bishop of Rome after Peter. Irenaeus, writing about eighty years afterward, says Clement "had seen the blessed apostles and conversed with them," and still had their preaching ringing in his ears. Origen and Eusebius both wondered whether he was the Clement whom Paul greets in Philippians 4:3 as a fellow worker whose name is in the book of life. Nobody can prove it. The letter itself — we call it 1 Clement — is long, patient, and soaked in Scripture. Clement quotes the Old Testament constantly, walks through the whole history of jealousy from Cain forward, and points to Peter and Paul as men "of our own generation" who suffered and died. That single passage is one of the earliest outside witnesses we have to the deaths of both apostles at Rome. He does not order Corinth around. He reasons. He tells them that God set order into creation, that an army has ranks and a body has parts, and that men appointed by the apostles should not be pushed out by a faction. He asks the ringleaders to leave the city, if that is what it takes to give the church peace. Then he closes with one of the longest prayers surviving from the first-century church. The letter worked well enough that Corinth kept it. Seventy years later Bishop Dionysius of Corinth wrote that they still read it aloud in worship. Some churches treated it almost as Scripture; the great fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus binds it in right after Revelation. How Clement died is not recorded by anyone close to the event. Eusebius simply says he held his office nine years and died in the third year of Trajan, about AD 101. The famous story — exile to the Crimea, forced labor in the marble quarries, drowned in the sea with an anchor tied to his neck — appears only in a set of acts written centuries afterward. The anchor became his emblem in Christian art anyway. What is certain is the letter. A church in one city, barely thirty years after Nero's fires, writing across the sea to beg another church to stop tearing itself apart in the name of Jesus — and doing it with Scripture in nearly every paragraph. Sources: 1 Clement, in J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers; Eusebius, Church History, books III–IV; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.3; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.