Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman elder whose letter to a quarrelling church, known ever since as 1 Clement, is the oldest Christian writing outside the New Testament that can be dated with confidence. + Around the year 96, a church in Rome sat down to write to a church in Corinth about a fight in Corinth, and the letter it sent is the earliest Christian document outside the New Testament that can be dated with any confidence. The Didache, a short manual of church practice, may be as old or older, but its date has been argued back and forth across a hundred years and nobody has settled it. The man who wrote the letter from Rome is called Clement. The letter never says so. That is the shape of almost everything about him. It is a long letter, sixty-five short chapters, careful and warm and unmistakably the work of one mind, and that mind stays out of sight from the first line to the last. It speaks throughout as "we," and it signs itself not with a name but with a city: the church of God which sojourns at Rome, to the church of God sojourning at Corinth. Within two generations the churches were calling it Clement’s, and the churches that said so, Corinth among them, were the ones in a position to know. The same silence is why his years come with fl. in front of them rather than the usual pair of dates. The abbreviation is short for the Latin floruit, "he flourished," and historians reach for it when a man’s birth and death years are simply gone and all that can honestly be given is the stretch in which he is known to have been at work. Some men get a floruit of thirty years. Clement’s is about one letter long. The c. in front of the year is the other piece of shorthand worth having, short for the Latin circa, "about," and it is there because even that one year is a reckoning rather than a record. Here is the fact worth carrying away. Seventy years after it arrived, the Corinthians were still reading it aloud in worship on Sundays. A letter written to settle one congregation’s argument about its elders was kept, copied, carried, translated into Latin and Syriac and Coptic, and eventually bound into a fifth-century Greek Bible directly after the book of Revelation.

(●) c. 64 – 68 AD: He speaks of the Christians Nero killed as people of his own generation. + Go looking in the letter for its author and you come away with a voice and no face. There is no birth year, no family, no city of origin, no conversion story, not even a name. What there is, in the fifth and sixth chapters, is a passage about people dying, and the way he handles it tells you roughly when he lived. Rome burned in July of 64, and Nero needed someone to blame. The Roman historian Tacitus, who despised Christians and said so, describes what followed: men and women wrapped in animal skins and torn apart by dogs, others nailed to crosses, others set alight after dark so that the emperor’s gardens would have light to walk by (Annals 15.44). Clement does not narrate any of this. He reaches for it the way you reach for something everyone in the room already remembers. Leaving the ancient examples aside, he says, take the ones from our own generation, and he names Peter and Paul, and then a great multitude of the elect who suffered alongside them, and then women tortured as "the Danaids and Dircae." Those are stage names. Danaus’ daughters and Queen Dirce were figures out of Greek myth whose punishments the arena liked to stage on real bodies, which is to say that the women died inside somebody’s entertainment. Whether Clement stood in Rome and watched, the letter does not say, and it is exactly the sort of thing he would not say about himself. What the passage does establish is that the man writing it counted Nero’s victims among his own contemporaries, not among the ancients.

(●) c. 92 AD: The Roman church’s own lists put him third in line from the apostles. + Everything we are told about Clement’s office comes from outside his letter, and the earliest witness is writing about eighty years later. That witness is Irenaeus of Lyons, and he is not writing a biography; he is in the middle of an argument. Around 180 he was answering the Gnostics, teachers who claimed that the apostles had handed a secret knowledge down a private line of initiates, and his reply was that the churches the apostles actually founded had kept their teaching out in the open where anybody could walk in and check it. To show that, he ran through the succession at Rome: the apostles handed the office to Linus, then Anacletus, and then, he writes, "in the third place from the apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric." He adds a detail he clearly thinks matters, that this man "had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them" (Against Heresies III.3.3). A generation later the North African writer Tertullian reports something different. The Roman church, he says, "makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter" (Prescription Against Heretics 32), which puts Clement directly after Peter and does not sit easily beside Irenaeus’ three names. The early lists agree on the name and disagree about the order. As for the years, they come from later still, and from one man. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his church history in the fourth century, dates the succession to the twelfth year of Domitian and the handover to Evarestus to the third year of Trajan, "after he had superintended the teaching of the divine word nine years in all" (Church History III.15, III.34). That is a chronicler’s reckoning made two centuries after the fact, and it yields roughly 92 to 101. It is the source of every date anyone gives for Clement, and no earlier writer offers a year at all. Two other Clements have been tied to this one, and the two knots are not equally tight. The first was pulled by Eusebius, who took the author of the letter to be the Clement that Paul greets at the end of Philippians, "together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life" (Philippians 4:3); Origen, the great Alexandrian scholar of the generation before him, had made the same connection already. It is an attractive thought and there is nothing to hold it up. Clement was one of the commonest names in the empire, the way Smith is a common surname now, Paul’s Clement is at Philippi rather than Rome, and the letter itself never claims to have known Paul. That link is an early guess, not a record. The second knot holds better. The Shepherd of Hermas, a Roman book of visions from the first half of the second century, mentions a Clement in Rome whose particular job is to send writings out to the churches in other cities (Vision 2.4.3). That is at least the right man doing the right work, in the right city, at nearly the right time. The letter itself settles one thing about the office, and it cuts against the neatness of the lists. In chapter 44 Clement uses two words, "bishop" (from the Greek episkopos, an overseer, a supervisor) and "presbyter" (presbyteros, an elder), and he uses them of the same men. Whatever Clement was at Rome, he was not yet describing the single bishop ruling a city that Ignatius of Antioch would describe little more than a decade later.

(●) c. 95 AD: Word reached Rome that the church at Corinth had thrown out its elders. + Anyone who has watched a congregation come apart will recognise the story before the details arrive. A group in the church at Corinth, younger men by Clement’s account, had decided that the elders who led them had to go, and had removed them. Clement does not say the elders had done anything wrong. He says the opposite: they had served blamelessly, some of them for a long time, and were put out anyway, by "one or two persons" who had set the whole church against its own leadership (chapters 44 and 47). For the cause of it he keeps returning to one word, jealousy, and he spends five chapters at the start of the letter showing what jealousy has already cost, from Cain and Abel down to the Christians who had died in Rome inside living memory. Corinth had been this way before, and Clement knew it. Forty years earlier Paul had written to the same city about the same disease, people lining up behind favourite teachers and against each other (1 Corinthians 1:11-12), and in chapter 47 Clement tells them to go and get that letter off the shelf and read it again. The quarrel he is answering was real enough to be remembered independently: Hegesippus, a Christian traveller of the next century, reported the Corinthian sedition, and Eusebius cites him as a witness that it happened (Church History III.16). What is not clear is how Rome came into it at all. Did Corinth write first and ask for help, or did the news simply travel, as news does, until a church on the other side of the sea decided it could not keep quiet? The letter opens by apologising for being slow to give its attention to the trouble, and the Greek of that opening sentence is loose enough that the translators have gone both ways with it. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, the nineteenth-century collection in which most English readers still meet the early Christian writers, has Rome tardy in turning to "the points respecting which you consulted us," and consulted only makes sense if Corinth asked. J. B. Lightfoot, the Anglican bishop who produced the standard nineteenth-century edition of the Greek text, has Rome tardy in giving heed to "the matters of dispute that have arisen among you," which decides nothing and leaves the news free to have travelled on its own. Nothing else in the letter settles it either.

(●) c. 96 AD: Rome answered at length, and the letter went out with no author’s name on it. + The reply is long, and its length is part of its argument: a church that wanted to give orders could have done it in a page. Instead Clement takes sixty-five chapters to work his way toward a request, through the order of the seasons, the discipline of the Roman army, the patience of Abraham and Job and Moses, the hospitality of Rahab, the sayings of Jesus, a hymn in praise of love, and a long closing prayer. The word he keeps using for what he wants is peace. The letter dates itself only once, and vaguely. It begins by blaming the delay on "the sudden and successive calamitous events which have happened to ourselves," which most readers take to be the troubles at Rome late in Domitian’s reign, and that is why the letter is usually put at about 95 or 96. The phrase is vague enough that a minority of scholars have argued for the 70s instead. Nobody has produced anything more precise, so the conventional date stands as a convention. Two details at the end are easy to miss and hard to forget. The first is that the letter names its couriers and not its author: three men, Claudius Ephebus, Valerius Bito and Fortunatus, are to be sent back speedily in peace so that Rome can hear the quarrel is over (chapter 65). The second is the pronoun. From beginning to end this is "we," a church writing to a church, and the man who almost certainly composed every line of it never once steps forward to say so.

(●) c. 101 AD: The record of his life stops without saying how it ended. + Eusebius has Clement hand the Roman church over to Evarestus in the third year of Trajan and depart this life, and there the earliest evidence runs out. How he died, nobody says. Irenaeus, who is keen on him, gives him a place in the succession and nothing more. Eusebius, who admires the letter and quotes it, supplies a year and not a manner. Jerome, cataloguing Christian writers at the end of the fourth century, copies that year from Eusebius and adds only that a church at Rome still keeps his name alive. That silence is worth sitting with, because it is unusual. The early church was not shy about martyrdom; it collected the accounts, kept the dates, and read them aloud on the anniversaries. Polycarp of Smyrna and Justin Martyr both have early accounts of how they died, and Ignatius of Antioch wrote his own letters on the road to the beasts. For the most widely read Christian author of his generation, there is no account of a death at all. The first writer to call Clement a martyr appears to be Rufinus, around the year 400, which is roughly three hundred years after the fact.

(●) The 300s AD onward: Three centuries later he was given a martyrdom, an anchor, and a shrine under the sea. + Legends grow in empty ground, and the silence about Clement’s death left a great deal of it. A set of Greek Acts, which cannot be dated earlier than the fourth century, tells the story that the medieval church inherited: Trajan banishes Clement to the Crimea, where he is set to work in the marble quarries among two thousand Christian convicts; he finds them a spring of water, converts the district, and is martyred by being thrown into the Black Sea with an iron anchor tied to his neck. Every year afterwards, the story goes, the sea draws back and leaves a shrine standing dry on the seabed. Gregory of Tours knows the tale in the sixth century and repeats it. It had a long afterlife. In 861 the missionary Cyril, travelling through the Crimea on his way to the Khazars, a steppe people whose lands lay north and east of the Black Sea, dug bones and an anchor out of a mound near Cherson and identified them as Clement’s; seven years later he and his brother Methodius carried them to Rome, where in 868 Pope Hadrian II laid them under the altar of the basilica of San Clemente, which still stands over its own fourth-century predecessor a few streets from the Colosseum. No one has been able to show that any tradition was attached to the mound before Cyril dug it. The anchor stayed. It is why Clement is the patron of mariners and stonecutters, why his emblem in stained glass is a ship’s anchor, and why more than one harbour church in England carries his name. It is a good story, and the honest thing to say about it is that it is a story, three hundred years younger than the man, grown up around a name that the earliest sources leave unfinished.

What He Taught

(T1) God runs his world by appointed order, and a church is not an exception to it. + Clement’s first move, when he finally gets to the argument, is to take the Corinthians outdoors. Look at the sky, he says. The heavens turn without colliding; day hands over to night and night to day without either crowding the other; the seasons arrive in their order; the sea keeps to the limit it was given; the smallest living things hold together in peace and concord. None of that is an accident of temperament. It is a world doing what it was told (chapter 20). Then he brings it indoors, and the analogy tightens. He points to the Roman army, which any reader in Corinth could see on any given week: the ranks do not all give the same orders, and precisely because they do not, the thing works (chapter 37). He points to the human body, where the head is no use without the feet. He points to the old temple service, where offerings were made not "thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours," by particular people in particular places (chapter 40). Every one of these is the same shape: a whole made of unequal parts, held together because each part stays where it was put. Clement is clear about what kind of argument he is making, and it helps to name it. He is reasoning by analogy, from the order God visibly keeps everywhere else to the order he expects among Christians. An analogy is a comparison that carries weight without proving a case: it shows what a thing is like. Clement never claims the church is the temple or the army. He claims that a God who is this consistent about order is unlikely to be indifferent to a congregation that has just torn up its own.

(Q) "The heavens, revolving under His government, are subject to Him in peace. Day and night run the course appointed by Him, in no wise hindering each other." + Source: 1 Clement 20 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The opening of the chapter in which Clement turns from the quarrel to the sky. What follows in the same passage is the sea keeping its boundary, the seasons giving way to one another, and the winds doing their work in season, all of it gathered as evidence that peace and concord are how the Maker arranges things (T1).

(T2) The apostles appointed leaders and arranged for others to follow them, so removing a blameless elder is a sin. + This is the heart of the letter, and it is the passage everyone has argued about since. Clement tells it as a chain. Christ was sent from God; the apostles were sent by Christ; the apostles preached through the countryside and the towns and appointed their first converts, having tested them, to be overseers and servants of those who would believe later (chapter 42). Two Greek words are doing the work there. An episkopos is an overseer, the man who watches over the flock; the English "bishop" is worn down from it. A diakonos is a servant or attendant, which English keeps as "deacon." Clement uses a third word, presbyteros, "elder," for the same men he has just called overseers, which is how the New Testament uses the words too (Acts 20:28, 1 Peter 5:1). Then comes the step the Corinthians will not like. The apostles, Clement says, knew there would be a fight over the office one day, so they did not leave the succession to chance: they appointed the men they appointed, and they laid down that when those men died, other approved men should take up their ministry. And they did not do it over the congregation’s head. The appointments were made, he writes, with the consent of the whole church (chapter 44). So a church that removes such men, men who have offered the gifts of the office blamelessly and holily, is not reorganising. It is committing a sin, and Clement names it as one. Notice what this settles and what it leaves open. It settles that within living memory of the apostles, Christians already believed that leadership in the church came down from the apostles by deliberate appointment rather than by acclamation or gift. It leaves open a great deal else, because Clement’s overseers and elders are still the same men, and the congregation’s consent is still part of the process. Christians who read this passage as the seed of the episcopate, the later arrangement in which one bishop governs a city and the clergy under him, are reading something Clement genuinely wrote. So are Christians who read it as a plural eldership, a group of elders sharing the oversight of a congregation between them. The sentences are his either way.

(Q) "For our sin will not be small, if we eject from the episcopate those who have blamelessly and holily fulfilled its duties." + Source: 1 Clement 44 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The sentence the whole letter has been walking toward. Clement has just described how the apostles arranged for approved men to succeed them with the consent of the whole church; this is the conclusion he draws for Corinth, and he includes himself in the "our" (T2).

(T3) No one is put right with God by his own wisdom or his own record, and the men God commended had nothing to show either. + Before Clement asks the Corinthians to humble themselves, he takes the ground out from under anyone in the room who thinks he has standing to stand on. He runs through the great names of Israel, and asks what any of them were given for. Abraham, he says, was not blessed for his own sake or by his own doing. Isaac, Jacob, the whole line down to Christ according to the flesh: none of them received what they received because they had earned it, but because God willed it (chapters 31 and 32). Then he turns the same knife on his readers, and on himself, in the sentence quoted below. To be "justified" is courtroom language: to be declared in the right, acquitted, not condemned. Clement’s claim is that nobody in the Corinthian church is in the right by virtue of his wisdom, his understanding, his piety, or his good works, however honestly those works were done; they stand where they stand by faith, and by faith alone, and by the same faith through which God has been putting people right since the beginning. Paul had written the same thing to Ephesus and to Titus and about Abraham (Ephesians 2:8-9, Titus 3:5, Romans 4:5), and it is striking to hear it again, in Rome, within a generation. What Clement does next is just as important, because it is the question every reader of that sentence asks. Well then, he says, putting the objection in his readers’ mouths before they can raise it: shall we give up doing good and let love go? God forbid. God himself does not rest from working, and neither should we (chapter 33). The two halves are not in tension in his mind for a moment. The faith that saves is not the sort of thing that sits still.

(Q) "And we, too, being called by His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men." + Source: 1 Clement 32 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The chapter closes with a doxology, which is a short burst of praise breaking into the middle of a line of reasoning, the way Paul’s letters keep doing it: "to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." Clement has just finished listing the patriarchs and saying that none of them was given greatness for anything he had done. This is the application, and the "we" includes the men in Rome as much as the men in Corinth (T3).

(T4) The dead will be raised, and the world God made is already rehearsing it. + Corinth had a history with this doctrine. It was the church Paul had to write a whole chapter to about the raising of the dead (1 Corinthians 15), and forty years on Clement evidently thought the point still needed making. His approach is to say: you watch a resurrection happen every morning and think nothing of it. He gives three pictures in a row, and they get progressively harder to shrug off. Night goes down to sleep and day gets up; day leaves and night comes on, and it happens whether or not anyone believes in it. A farmer takes dry seed, which is to say a dead-looking thing, and puts it in the ground where it falls apart, and out of that dissolution comes a harvest many times larger than what he buried. Then, in the same breath, Clement offers the phoenix, the Arabian bird of which there is only ever one, which lives five hundred years, builds itself a nest to die in, and is reborn out of its own remains. He is not being fanciful by his own lights; the bird was standard natural history in the first century, reported soberly by Roman writers, and he offers it as one more thing God does in front of us. Then he stops arguing from the world and goes to Scripture, quoting the Psalms and Job on the God who raises up and the flesh that shall see him, and lands where the whole passage has been heading: if the Maker does this with birds and seeds and the sun, he is not going to be stopped by a grave (chapters 24 to 26).

(Q) "Day and night declare to us a resurrection. The night sinks to sleep, and the day arises; the day [again] departs, and the night comes on." + Source: 1 Clement 24 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The square brackets are the translators’ own, marking a word supplied for the English. The first of Clement’s three pictures of the resurrection, and the one he expects nobody to dispute. The seed and the phoenix follow it in the next two chapters (T4).

(T5) Love is what ends a quarrel, and a man who has it will leave town rather than split a church. + Late in the letter Clement writes a passage on love that anyone who knows 1 Corinthians 13 will recognise immediately, and that is the point: he is deliberately writing in Paul’s key, to the church Paul wrote it for. Love bears all things and is patient in all things, he says; there is nothing vulgar in love and nothing arrogant; love admits no schism and makes no sedition (chapters 49 and 50). Then he does something harder than praise it. He asks what it would actually cost. His answer is the most concrete sentence in the letter, and it is aimed straight at the ringleaders at Corinth. If the trouble is you, he says, then go. Leave. Live wherever the church tells you to live, do whatever the majority decides, only let Christ’s flock be at peace with the elders set over it (chapter 54). Clement clearly knows how much he is asking, because he spends the next chapter piling up people who have paid it: pagan kings who gave themselves up to death to save their cities, men who sold themselves into slavery to feed somebody else, and then Judith and Esther, who put themselves in danger for their people (chapter 55). This is why the letter has kept its readers. It is not a ruling handed down from a superior church to an inferior one; it is an appeal that asks the winners of the argument to lose it on purpose. Nothing in it threatens Corinth with anything Rome can do. The only leverage Clement uses is the example of Christ, who did not come in the pomp of arrogance though he could have, and the shame of being the kind of man who would rather be right than be reconciled.

(Q) "If on my account sedition and disagreement and schisms have arisen, I will depart, I will go away whithersoever ye desire, and I will do whatever the majority commands; only let the flock of Christ live on terms of peace with the presbyters set over it." + Source: 1 Clement 54 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Clement has just asked "Who then among you is noble-minded? who compassionate? who full of love?" and this is the speech he wants one of them to make. It is the practical shape of everything he has said about love (T5).

(Q) "Take up the epistle of the blessed Apostle Paul. What did he write to you at the time when the Gospel first began to be preached?" + Source: 1 Clement 47 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Clement tells the Corinthians to fetch 1 Corinthians and read it again, and then summarises what is in it: Paul wrote to them about himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even then they had been forming parties. It is the earliest surviving instance outside the New Testament of one Christian writer telling another congregation to go and consult a letter of Paul’s by name, and a great deal of what historians want from Clement hangs on sentences like this one.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The churches kept his letter and read it in worship, and for a while some of them nearly read it as Scripture. + The letter did its job: the quarrel ended, and Corinth kept the letter. Around 170, Dionysius, bishop of that same church, wrote to Rome and mentioned in passing what they still did with it. "Today we have passed the Lord’s holy day, in which we have read your epistle," he says, and adds that they draw advice from it as they do "from the former epistle, which was written to us through Clement" (quoted in Eusebius, Church History IV.23). Seventy years after it arrived, it was still being read aloud at Sunday worship in the city it was sent to. Others went further. Clement of Alexandria, no relation, quotes him repeatedly and introduces one long extract with "the Apostle Clement also, drawing a picture of the Gnostic, says" (Stromata IV.17). The Alexandrian means something of his own by "the Gnostic," the mature Christian who has come to know God, and not the teachers Irenaeus was fighting; the word to watch in that sentence is the other one, because he has just called the man from Rome an apostle. Eusebius knows the letter as one "of considerable length and of remarkable merit" and notes that it "has been publicly used in a great many churches both in former times and in our own" (Church History III.16). And when a scribe in the fifth century assembled the great Bible we call Codex Alexandrinus, he copied 1 Clement into it directly after the book of Revelation, and a second Clementine text after that. The church did not, in the end, put it in the New Testament, and the reason is instructive rather than dismissive. Clement himself draws the line the church later drew. He quotes Paul as an authority to be consulted and the words of the Lord Jesus as words to be obeyed, and he never once writes as a man who supposes his own letter belongs in that company. He was a reader of the apostles, and he knew it.

(†) Historians go to him for what he mentions in passing: two apostles’ deaths, and a letter of Paul’s named out loud. + There is a kind of evidence that is worth more for being incidental. A witness who is trying to prove something can be doubted; a witness who mentions a fact in passing, on his way to some other point, is harder to explain away, because he had no reason to plant it. Clement is full of this sort of thing, which is why a letter about a church squabble ends up in footnotes about the first century. Three examples carry most of the weight, and the first is his account of Peter and Paul in chapter 5. Clement is not out to prove anything about either man. He is illustrating what jealousy does, and to do it he reaches for "the greatest and most righteous pillars" of the church, who were "persecuted and put to death": Peter, who endured many labours and then bore his witness and went to the place of glory owed him, and Paul, who was imprisoned seven times, taught righteousness to the whole world, reached the limit of the west, and bore his witness before the rulers. That is the earliest written notice outside the New Testament that the two chief apostles died for their faith, and it comes from the city where it happened, well within the lifetime of people who were there. Notice what he leaves out, too. He says that they were killed and never says how, which is itself the mark of a man writing for readers who already knew. The second is chapter 47, where he names 1 Corinthians and summarises its contents accurately. That is external attestation, which means a witness from outside a document confirming that the document existed and said what it says, and in this case the confirmation arrives roughly forty years after Paul’s letter was written. The third is quieter, and easy to read straight past. In chapters 13 and 46 Clement quotes sayings of Jesus as settled words that both churches already know, asking his readers once to be "especially mindful of the words of the Lord Jesus which He spake" and once to "remember the words of our Lord Jesus Christ." The sayings are recognisably the ones in the Gospels, and yet they do not match any one Gospel word for word, which is exactly what you would expect from a man drawing on what he had heard read aloud rather than checking a page. Alongside these, his thirty-sixth chapter is built almost entirely out of the letter to the Hebrews, following its argument about the Son who is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his nature (Hebrews 1:3), which is the earliest external trace of that book’s existence. None of this was Clement’s purpose. All of it is why he is cited.

(†) Both sides of the Reformation quarrel found their own doctrine in him, and both were reading real sentences. + It is a small comedy of church history that the same short letter has been produced as evidence by people who could agree on very little else, and the honest verdict is that they were all quoting him correctly. He simply wrote before the questions had hardened into the shapes that later divided Christians, and a man writing before a controversy does not take sides in it. Protestants have gone to chapter 32 and found justification by faith stated as flatly as Paul ever states it, sixty years before anyone needed to defend it, and they are right that it is there. Catholic readers have gone to the next chapter and to chapters 30 and 35, where Clement is equally plain that the justified are to be found in good works and that God rewards them, and they are right that this is there too. Neither half is a concession the other half extracted; Clement wrote both in the same sitting and saw no difficulty. The same thing happens with church order. Chapters 42 and 44 have been read for centuries as the earliest evidence for apostolic succession, the handing on of the church’s leadership in an unbroken line from the apostles to the men who hold it now, and as the earliest evidence for the authority of the Roman church over other churches. There is real substance to both readings, and it will not do to wave them off: Rome does intervene, and Clement does say that the apostles provided for successors. Lightfoot read the same chapters differently, and other readers have followed him. He never doubted that the ministry was handed on from the apostles; what he denied was that these chapters show one bishop ruling Corinth, or a church at Rome claiming authority over another church. The things he pointed to are just as true. Clement’s overseers and his elders are the same men, called by both names in the same breath. The appointments he describes were made with the consent of the whole church. The letter comes from a church rather than from a man, and it never names the man. And its single sharp sentence, the warning that those who disobey "the words spoken by Him through us" will fall into no slight danger (chapter 59), grounds itself on God rather than on Rome. Christians who differ about what all that adds up to are differing about how to weigh a genuinely early text, which is a better argument to be having than most.

(†) Where his own argument reaches too far: he rested a case for the resurrection on a bird that does not exist. + There is not much in Clement to quarrel with, and the honest thing is to say so. He asks nothing of Corinth that he does not ask of Rome, he claims no title for himself, and the harshest thing in sixty-five chapters is a warning that ends in an appeal. But one argument in the letter fails, and it fails in a way worth learning from. In chapter 25 he offers the phoenix as evidence for the resurrection of the body: the one bird of Arabia, which lives five hundred years, dies in a nest of spices, and rises out of its own decay, its story told as though a reader could go and check. A reader could not. The phoenix was never a bird; it was a piece of received natural history that ancient writers passed along in good faith, and Clement passed it along in good faith too. The trouble is not that he believed something false, which is the common lot. The trouble is that he placed it in a line of arguments alongside the sunrise and the seed, where his reader is invited to reason from things he can verify, and one of the three could not bear the weight. The damage is contained, and pointing at it does not cost much, because Clement does not leave the case there. He turns in the same passage to what God has said about himself, quoting the Psalms and Job, and it is Scripture and the raising of Christ, not ornithology, that his hope finally stands on (1 Corinthians 15:20). Later Christian writers went on repeating the phoenix for centuries, which is a fact about them. What belongs on Clement’s account is the smaller and more human error of reaching for one illustration too many.