The Letter to the Corinthians

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (1 Clement, c. 96) is the earliest Christian writing of certain date outside the New Testament: a long letter sent by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, where a faction had deposed its lawfully appointed presbyters, calling the congregation back to repentance, humility, and concord. Written in the corporate name of the Roman church, attributed early and consistently to Clement, and composed in the form of Greco-Roman deliberative rhetoric on homonoia, it stands at the head of the literature of the Apostolic Fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The letter that the manuscripts and the early church call 1 Clement is, by any reckoning, a document of the first rank. It is the oldest piece of Christian writing outside the New Testament that can be dated with real confidence; it is a fixed point against which the chronology of the sub-apostolic age is measured; and it gives the earliest extended glimpse — from within, and at length — of how one first-century church reasoned with another about order, ministry, and the healing of a schism. What occasioned it was neither a heresy nor a persecution but a quarrel: a congregation that had thrown out its leaders, and a sister church that would not let the matter rest.

The Occasion: The Corinthian Sedition

The letter is addressed to a concrete and recent crisis. At Corinth a faction had risen up against the presbyters of the church and deposed them — without cause, the Roman church insists, and in violation of the order under which they had been appointed. The writer calls the affair a stasis, a sedition, the technical Greek term for civil faction and the word that frames the whole argument: “the detestable and unholy sedition (stasis), so alien and strange to the elect of God, which a few rash and self-willed persons have kindled to such a pitch of madness that your name, once revered and renowned and lovely in the sight of all men, has been greatly reviled” (1 Clement 1.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The instigators are repeatedly characterized as a small, ambitious minority: “one or two persons” who have set themselves against the presbyters (1 Clement 47.6), “the leaders of the sedition” (51.1), men driven by jealousy (zēlos) and the desire for place.

The substance of the wrong is set out most plainly in chapters 44 and 47. The presbyters had been appointed in due order — by the apostles, or by other eminent men with the consent of the whole church — and had ministered the flock blamelessly; yet they had now been thrust out of their office. This the letter regards as no small sin: “it will be no small sin for us if we depose from the bishop’s office those who have offered the gifts blamelessly and in holiness” (1 Clement 44.4; trans. Holmes 2007). Those responsible are summoned to repentance; the deposed presbyters are to be restored; and the authors of the sedition are urged, if they have any nobility, to withdraw rather than tear the body of Christ (1 Clement 54.1–2).

That this is the same church Paul had rebuked is not lost on the Roman writer, and he makes the parallel explicit. He turns the Corinthians back to their own archive: “Take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle. What did he first write to you in the beginning of the gospel? Truly he wrote to you in the Spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even then you had split into factions” (1 Clement 47.1–3; trans. Holmes 2007). The reference is unmistakably to 1 Corinthians 1:10–13, where Paul had condemned the slogans “I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas.” The point is sharp: the old factionalism that Paul named over the great apostles has now broken out afresh over “one or two persons” — a far less excusable thing. The Roman church writes, in effect, as the heir of Paul’s pastoral concern for Corinth, taking up the work the Apostle had begun (cf. the earlier Corinthian correspondence).

The letter’s own account of how it came to be written is that the Roman church had been hindered from attending to the matter sooner by “the sudden and repeated misfortunes and calamities that have befallen us” (1 Clement 1.1) — a phrase whose interpretation bears on the date (below). The remedy proposed throughout is concord (homonoia) restored through humility (tapeinophrosynē), repentance, and submission to the established order — the themes developed at length in Concord and Humility.

Authorship and the Corporate Voice

The letter never names Clement. It opens, rather, in the corporate voice of one congregation addressing another: “The church of God that sojourns in Rome to the church of God that sojourns in Corinth, to those who are called and sanctified by the will of God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Clement, salutation; trans. Holmes 2007). Throughout, the first person is plural — “we,” the Roman church — and no individual author claims a personal title or office. This corporate self-presentation is a genuine feature of the document, not a literary modesty: the letter speaks as the act of a church.

The attribution to Clement is therefore external, but it is early and remarkably consistent. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, writing about 170 and quoted by Eusebius, refers to “the former epistle written to us through Clement” and reports that it was still read aloud in the Corinthian assembly (Eusebius, HE 4.23 [NPNF II/1]). Irenaeus, in the same period, names Clement as a leading figure of the Roman church and says that “under this Clement, no small dissension having occurred among the brethren at Corinth, the church in Rome despatched a most powerful letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace” (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1]). Hegesippus, whose now-lost memoirs Eusebius drew on, likewise knew of the letter and the affair (Eusebius, HE 3.16; 4.22). The tradition is unanimous in connecting the letter with a Clement who stood among the leaders of the Roman church in the late first century (see The Third Bishop of Rome).

Modern scholarship has largely accepted this attribution, while reframing what it means. The dominant view is that Clement — most plausibly a leading presbyter or the secretary (the church’s “foreign minister,” in a common image) of the Roman community — drafted or composed the letter, which was then sent in the name of the whole church (Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, 1890; Lona, Der erste Clemensbrief, 1998). The corporate salutation and the singular drafting hand are not in tension: a body acts through an author, and the early witnesses naturally remembered the man who held the pen. There is no serious case for pseudonymity; the letter claims nothing for “Clement” that could motivate a forgery, and the external attestation reaches back close to living memory. What remains contested is only the precise ecclesiastical rank the historical Clement held — a question that belongs to the wider debate over the shape of the Roman ministry in this period (The Roman Church in the First Century).

The Date

By long-standing consensus the letter is placed about 96, at or just after the end of the reign of Domitian (81–96). The traditional dating rests on two internal data. First, the “sudden and repeated misfortunes and calamities” of 1 Clement 1.1 are read as an allusion to a recent affliction of the Roman church — commonly identified with troubles under Domitian, whose final years Christian and pagan tradition alike associated with cruelty toward dissidents. Second, the letter’s account of the ministry in chapters 42–44 presupposes that a generation has passed since the apostles appointed the first ministers: the apostles foresaw strife over the bishop’s office and provided that, when the first appointees died, “other approved men should succeed to their ministry” (1 Clement 44.2–3; trans. Holmes 2007). A succession already in its second or third stage implies a date some decades after the apostolic founding — consistent with the 90s and difficult to square with a very early date.

[Disputed: The c. 95–97 dating is the consensus position (Lightfoot 1890; Lona 1998; Lindemann 1992; and most handbooks), but it is not unchallenged on either side. L. L. Welborn, “On the Date of First Clement,” Biblical Research 29 (1984): 35–54, argues that the letter can be dated no more precisely than within a broad range of c. 80–140. His central contention is that the “sudden and repeated misfortunes” of 1.1 are a rhetorical topos — a conventional apology for delay — and not a datable reference to any specific persecution; the supposed Domitianic persecution itself, he notes, rests on thin and largely later evidence. On the other side, a minority argues for a date before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70. Thomas J. Herron and others point to 1 Clement 40–41, which describes the Temple cult in the present tense — the high priest, the priests, and the Levites each have their appointed liturgies, and the offerings and sacrifices are made “at Jerusalem only” (41.2), “at the altar before the sanctuary” — language that, the early-date advocates urge, would be strange after the cult had ceased in 70. Defenders of the consensus reply that Jewish and Christian writers regularly used the present tense for the Temple service as the timeless pattern set out in the Law (the LXX prescriptions), regardless of the building’s fate, and that 44.2–3’s developed succession tells decisively against so early a date. The consensus remains c. 96.]

Structure and Rhetoric

1 Clement is a long and carefully built composition — sixty-five chapters in the modern division — and its architecture is that of a Greco-Roman deliberative oration adapted to a letter: a sustained argument urging a course of action, here the restoration of concord (homonoia) over against faction (stasis). The rhetoric of homonoia, with its stock appeals to civic peace, cosmic order, and the harmony of the body, was a recognized genre in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and the letter draws on it throughout while filling it with biblical content.

The movement of the letter may be traced as follows. After the salutation, an opening section praises the Corinthians’ former virtue, hospitality, and good order — the harmony that had once been theirs (1 Clement 1–2). Then comes the turn: jealousy and envy entered, and from them sedition, illustrated first by the great envies of Scripture (Cain, the patriarchs’ jealousy of Joseph, the persecutions of Moses and David) and then, strikingly, by the recent martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, who suffered “because of jealousy and envy” (1 Clement 3–6; on which see The Apostles in Rome). There follows a long hortatory section calling the Corinthians to repentance, marshalling Old Testament examples of penitence, faith, and humility, and the figures of Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Lot, Rahab, and many others (1 Clement 7–39).

At the center stands the argument from order (1 Clement 40–44): from the ordered cosmos and the orderly succession of day and night and the seasons, to the appointed times, places, and ministers of the Old Testament cult — high priest, priests, Levites, and laity, each with a fixed station — to the ordered ministry of the church, which the apostles established and provided to be continued by succession. This is the material examined in Order and the Ministry, and it is from these chapters that the letter’s later importance for the doctrine of apostolic succession derives. On the strength of the argument from order, the letter then makes its central appeal: the deposition of the blameless presbyters is unjust and must be undone, and the authors of the sedition must yield and repent (1 Clement 44–58). Near the close comes one of the treasures of early Christian literature, the long intercessory prayer for rulers, the suffering, and the whole people — a liturgical-sounding doxological prayer that some have thought reflects Roman eucharistic usage (1 Clement 59–61). The letter ends with a recapitulation and the commendation of the envoys who carried it (1 Clement 62–65).

Two features of its texture deserve note. The letter is saturated in the Greek Old Testament: it quotes the Septuagint constantly and at length, and its argument is built course by course out of scriptural example. It also shows clear knowledge of New Testament writings — it cites and alludes to 1 Corinthians by name, draws heavily on Hebrews (the high-priestly and faith material), and echoes Romans and other Pauline letters, giving it real value as an early witness to the circulation of these texts. And its language of cosmic order is tinged with Stoic vocabulary — the harmony of the elements, the appointed bounds of sea and land — pressed into the service of a thoroughly biblical theology of the God who orders all things in peace.

Standing and Reception

The decisive thing about 1 Clement is its early and secure date: it is the first Christian document outside the New Testament that can be placed with confidence, and so it anchors the chronology of the period and stands at the head of the corpus of the Apostolic Fathers (Church Fathers). Its authority in the ancient church was correspondingly high. Dionysius of Corinth reports, around 170, that the letter was still read aloud in the Sunday assembly at Corinth — generations after it was written — and held in honor as an authoritative word from a sister church (Eusebius, HE 4.23 [NPNF II/1]); the practice of reading it in worship is attested elsewhere as well.

In some quarters the letter stood at the very edge of the canon. It is bound, together with 2 Clement, at the end of the New Testament in the great fifth-century biblical manuscript Codex Alexandrinus, and it appears among the scriptures in some later lists — a sign of the esteem in which it was held, even where it was not finally received as canonical. The fuller story of how the Greek text survived — chiefly in Alexandrinus, the eleventh-century Codex Hierosolymitanus, and the Syriac, Latin, and Coptic versions — belongs to another file; see The Manuscript Tradition. What matters here is the document itself: a letter of the Roman church to the Corinthian, written about 96, calling a divided congregation back to the order and concord from which it had fallen, and in so doing leaving the church its earliest dated witness to its own life after the apostles.

References

Clement of Rome. First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Clement). In Holmes, Michael W., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Ehrman, Bart D. The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1890.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
Lindemann, Andreas. Die Clemensbriefe. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992.
Lona, Horacio E. Der erste Clemensbrief. Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern 2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.
Welborn, L. L. “On the Date of First Clement.” Biblical Research 29 (1984): 35–54.