The Third Bishop of Rome

Clement of Rome stands in the earliest succession-list the Church possesses — that of Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.3 — as “the third place from the apostles,” after Linus and Anencletus, and as a man who had himself seen and conversed with the apostles. Eusebius dates his episcopate to the twelfth year of Domitian, gives it nine years, and ends it in the third year of Trajan (c. 101). Yet the order of the early lists is not unanimous — Tertullian and the Apostolic Constitutions make Clement the direct ordainee of Peter — and behind the lists lies a larger and still-open historical question: whether the first-century Roman church was governed by a single monarchical bishop at all, or by a college of presbyter-bishops, with the succession-lists a later, anti-Gnostic systematization.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Clement (d. c. 99/101) is, after the New Testament itself, one of the very few named figures of the sub-apostolic Roman church about whom anything can be said with confidence — and what can be said comes almost entirely from two streams: his own letter, 1 Clement, which never names him; and the second-century succession-lists, of which Irenaeus’ is the oldest surviving. This file sets out his place in those lists, the variant orderings the lists preserve, and the genuinely unresolved question of the form of Roman church leadership in his day. It does not attempt to settle that question; it shows where the evidence stands and which scholars stand on each side.

The Earliest Succession-List: Irenaeus

The fountainhead of the Roman succession is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing c. AD 180 against the Gnostics. In Against Heresies 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1] he traces the line of those who held “the office of the episcopate” at Rome from the apostles, precisely in order to show that the rule of faith had been handed down publicly and unbrokenly, with no secret Gnostic deposit alongside it. The apostles Peter and Paul, “having founded and built up the Church,” committed “into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate.” Irenaeus identifies this Linus with the Linus named in 2 Timothy 4:21. “To him succeeded Anacletus” (Anencletus, also transmitted as Cletus); “and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric.”

Of Clement specifically, Irenaeus records the detail that gives him his weight as a witness: this Clement, “as he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes” (Adv. Haer. 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1]). Irenaeus then notes that it was in Clement’s time that “no small dissension having occurred among the brethren at Corinth, the Church in Rome despatched a most powerful letter to the Corinthians” — the letter we know as 1 Clement. Irenaeus continues the list past Clement: Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, Anicetus, Soter, and Eleutherus “in the twelfth place from the apostles.” The list is constructed to terminate in Irenaeus’ own day and to certify the public continuity of teaching.

Two things about Irenaeus’ notice deserve emphasis. First, his interest is doctrinal succession, not biography: the lists exist to anchor the rule of faith, not to satisfy historical curiosity. Second, the language he uses — “the office of the episcopate,” “the bishopric” — is his own second-century vocabulary, and whether it accurately describes the institutional reality of Clement’s generation is exactly the disputed point of §4 below.

See The Roman Church in the First Century for the apostolic foundation Irenaeus presupposes, and St. Irenaeus of Lyons for the source himself.

Eusebius and the Chronology

Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Ecclesiastical History in the early fourth century, takes over the Roman succession and fixes it to a regnal chronology. In HE 3.4 [NPNF II/1] he names Linus as the first to receive the episcopate of the Roman church after the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, citing the 2 Timothy 4:21 reference, and notes Clement as the third bishop, “a co-laborer of Paul” whom he associates with the Clement of Philippians 4:3 — though that identification is Eusebius’ inference, not certain.

The dated notices are these. In HE 3.15 [NPNF II/1] Eusebius records that Anencletus, having been bishop of the Roman church for twelve years, was succeeded by Clement “in the twelfth year of the reign of Domitian” (i.e. c. AD 92). In HE 3.16 he refers to 1 Clement as the great and admirable epistle Clement wrote to the Corinthians, read publicly in many churches “both in former times and in our own.” In HE 3.21 [NPNF II/1], placing events in the reign of Trajan, he notes that Clement, having held the ministry at Rome nine years, was succeeded by Evaristus. And in HE 3.34 [NPNF II/1] he gives the terminus: “In the third year of the reign of the emperor above mentioned [Trajan], Clement committed the episcopal government of the church of Rome to Evaristus, and departed this life after he had superintended the teaching of the divine word nine years in all.” This yields a death-date of c. AD 101. The repository follows this chronology in dating Clement “d. c. 99/101.”

These figures are schematic. Eusebius worked from earlier chronographers and from lists that already assigned regnal years; the nine-year episcopate and the twelfth-year-of-Domitian accession are the kind of round, list-derived data that cannot bear great weight, but they represent the settled Eusebian tradition.

Hegesippus and the List-Making Enterprise

Behind both Irenaeus and Eusebius lies the work of Hegesippus, a second-century writer (fl. c. 160–180) whose Memoirs (Hypomnemata) survive only in Eusebian fragments. Eusebius reports that Hegesippus, on a journey to Rome, “made for himself a succession” (diadochēn epoiēsamēn) down to Anicetus — that is, he drew up a list of the bishops of the Roman church — and that he found the same doctrine taught in every see he visited (HE 4.22 [NPNF II/1]). Eusebius also draws on Hegesippus and on the chronographic tradition at HE 4.5 (the succession of bishops at Jerusalem) and HE 4.11 [NPNF II/1], where the Roman succession is carried forward and Anicetus, Soter, and Eleutherus are placed in sequence.

Hegesippus’ purpose, like Irenaeus’, was anti-heretical: the unbroken public succession of teachers in the great sees was his proof that the apostolic faith had been preserved against Gnostic claimants. The list-making enterprise of the later second century is thus inseparable from the polemical context that produced it — a point that bears directly on how the lists should be read as historical evidence for the first century. Whether Hegesippus found a pre-existing Roman list or compiled the names himself from memorial tradition is not recoverable from the fragments.

The Variant Order

The early lists are not unanimous about Clement’s position, and the disagreement is old.

[Disputed: Clement’s place in the Roman succession — Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1] and Eusebius, HE 3.4, 3.15, 3.21, 3.34 [NPNF II/1] place him third after the apostles, in the order Linus – Anencletus (Cletus) – Clement; whereas Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum 32 [ANF Vol. 3], states that the Roman church “reckons Clement as ordained in like manner by Peter,” making him effectively Peter’s direct successor; and the Apostolic Constitutions 7.46 [ANF Vol. 7] has Clement ordained by Peter (while also naming Linus as ordained by Paul), a tradition that places Clement second or even first in dignity. The later Liberian Catalogue (the Roman chronicle of 354) and other Western lists vary further in the relative order of Linus, Cletus/Anacletus, and Clement, in some cases doubling Cletus and Anacletus into two persons. The variation is best explained as the survival of independent, partly memorial traditions later harmonized into a single line, and possibly as the retrojection of a later monepiscopal model onto a generation that did not have one — so Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus (Fortress, 2003), and Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century (Brill, 1995). No reconstruction commands consensus; what is agreed is that the earliest lists do not speak with one voice on Clement’s rank.]

The Tertullian–Apostolic Constitutions line, associating Clement directly with Peter, is the tradition that fed the later Western image of Clement as Peter’s appointed heir and that underlies the pseudo-Clementine literature (the Letter of Clement to James prefacing the Recognitions and Homilies), in which Peter consecrates Clement as his successor at Rome. The Irenaean–Eusebian line, placing two bishops between Peter and Clement, is the older and historically better-attested ordering, but even it is a second-century construction reaching back across three generations.

The Episcopate or the Presbyterate?

The variant order is a problem within the lists. Beneath it lies a larger problem about the lists themselves: did the first-century Roman church have a single ruling bishop at all? This is the genuinely open question, and it is not to be resolved here.

[Disputed: The form of leadership in the first-century Roman church — (A) The traditional/monepiscopal view: an unbroken line of single bishops governed Rome from the apostles onward, exactly as the succession-lists state; Linus, Anencletus, and Clement were monarchical bishops in turn. This is the reading at face value of Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1], and Eusebius, HE 3.4–3.34 [NPNF II/1], and it was the standard view of older scholarship, defended in detail by J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers Part I: S. Clement of Rome (Macmillan, 1890), who argued that the lists preserve genuine historical succession even if their absolute chronology is uncertain. (B) The now-widely-held critical view: Rome had no single monarchical bishop until the middle of the second century — somewhere around the time of Anicetus or Soter (c. 150–160s) — and before that was governed collegially by a body of presbyters or presbyter-bishops (presbyteroi / episkopoi, the terms still overlapping). On this reading the succession-lists are a retrospective systematization produced in the anti-Gnostic controversies by Hegesippus and Irenaeus, who projected the single-bishop model of their own day back onto the apostolic generation by selecting one leading name per period. This is the thesis of Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus (Fortress, 2003), who argued from the social topography of Roman Christianity that the community was a network of fractionated house-churches with no central monarchical head until late; and of Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century (Brill, 1995), who traced a collegial-presbyteral structure persisting into the third century. The primary-source evidence adduced for (B) is internal: 1 Clement itself, written from the Roman church, never names its author and never speaks of a single bishop; it uses “bishops and deacons” (episkopoi kai diakonoi) and “presbyters” interchangeably for the same ministry (1 Clement 42, 44, 47; trans. Holmes 2007), describing the apostles as appointing “bishops and deacons” and the resulting offices as a presbyterate. The Shepherd of Hermas (Rome, early/mid second century) likewise speaks of “the elders who preside over the church” and of “bishops” in the plural, naming no monarch. Neither side denies the data; they weigh it differently — (A) reads the plural terminology as consistent with a single presiding bishop among a presbyteral college, (B) reads it as evidence that no such single bishop yet existed.]

The terminological evidence inside 1 Clement is worth stating exactly, because it is load-bearing for both sides. In chapter 42 the letter says the apostles, preaching through the regions, “appointed their firstfruits… to be bishops and deacons of those who were going to believe.” In chapter 44 it speaks of the apostles foreseeing strife “over the bishop’s office” (epi tou onomatos tēs episkopēs) and of the wrong of deposing those “presbyters” who had served blamelessly — using episkopē and presbyteros of the same persons. In chapter 47 it rebukes the Corinthians for taking sides “with respect to one or two persons” against “the presbyters.” The letter knows two functioning orders, bishop-presbyters and deacons, and treats episkopos and presbyteros as describing one office. Whether this proves the absence of a monarchical bishop at Rome, or merely reflects an older terminology still in use under one, is precisely the disputed point.

The Orthodox Reading

For Orthodox ecclesiology, the historical question of when a single bishop emerged at Rome can remain genuinely open without disturbing the doctrine of apostolic succession. Succession in Orthodox theology is carried by the episcopal order as such — by the unbroken laying-on of hands that perpetuates the apostolic ministry — and not by the contingent question of whether, in a given first-century city, that order was exercised by one presiding bishop or by a college of bishop-presbyters from whom the monarchical episcopate later crystallized. The Church confesses that the ministry was instituted by the apostles and handed on (the very claim 1 Clement 42–44 makes against the Corinthian deposers); it does not stake that confession on the precise constitutional shape of the Roman community in the 90s. Clement is venerated as a successor of the apostles and an Apostolic Father regardless of how the monepiscopate debate is decided. See Order and the Ministry for the letter’s own teaching on appointed ministry, and Holy Orders for the sacramental theology of succession.

The later contest over what Clement’s Roman office implies — for the primacy of the Roman see — is a separate question, treated in The Primacy Debate. The historical Clement behind the lists, and the question of his identity (including the Flavius Clemens hypothesis), is treated in The Historical Clement.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses), 3.3.3. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica), 3.4; 3.15; 3.16; 3.21; 3.34; 4.5; 4.11; 4.22. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890.
Tertullian. The Prescription against Heretics (De Praescriptione Haereticorum), 32. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Constitutions of the Holy Apostles (Apostolic Constitutions), 7.46. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886.
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Trans. Michael Steinhauser. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
Brent, Allen. Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.