The Apostles in Rome

In the fifth and sixth chapters of 1 Clement, written from Rome about the year 96, the catalogue of what jealousy and envy have destroyed turns from ancient examples to “the noble examples of our own generation” — and names the apostles Peter and Paul. Peter “endured many labours” and “bore his witness” before going to his appointed place of glory; Paul “reached the farthest bounds of the West” and “bore his witness before the rulers” before departing to the holy place. These few verses are the earliest datable testimony in Christian literature, outside the New Testament, that the two chief apostles died as martyrs. The passage names no city, no emperor, no manner of death; but it is written from the city in which they are traditionally held to have died, within living memory of the events, and it stands at the head of the long line of witnesses that the later tradition would make explicit.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The passage examined here belongs to the long indictment of jealousy (zēlos kai phthonos) that occupies the opening movement of 1 Clement and is treated as a theme in Concord and Humility. There the apostolic martyrdoms function morally, as the climax of the catalogue: if jealousy could destroy even Peter and Paul, the Corinthians must see what spirit they are entertaining. Here the same verses are read for what they are historically — the first external witness to the deaths of the apostles — and for the long-debated phrase “the farthest bounds of the West.” The companion file The Historical Value takes up the wider question of the letter’s standing as a source for the apostolic age.

The Passage: “The Noble Examples of Our Own Generation”

From the Old Testament series of those whom jealousy ruined — Cain, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Dathan and Abiram, Saul and David — Clement turns, at chapter 5, to the present: “But, to cease from the examples of old time, let us come to those who contended in the days nearest to us; let us take the noble examples of our own generation” (1 Clement 5.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The transition is deliberate and weighted. It is one thing to recall how jealousy destroyed the patriarchs; it is another, and far more pointed, to recall what it has cost the Church within the memory of the living. “Because of jealousy and envy,” he continues, “the greatest and most righteous pillars were persecuted and contended even unto death” (1 Clement 5.2; trans. Holmes 2007). The metaphor of the apostles as “pillars” (stylous) recalls Galatians 2:9, where James, Cephas, and John are “reputed to be pillars”; Clement applies it to the two whose witness he is about to set before the Corinthians.

Of Peter the words are spare: “Let us set before our eyes the good apostles. There was Peter, who by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one or two but many labours, and thus having borne his witness went to his appointed place of glory” (1 Clement 5.3–4; trans. Holmes 2007). The verb rendered “having borne his witness” is martyrēsas, from martyreō — the word that would later harden into the technical sense of “to die as a martyr,” but which in Clement still carries primarily the older sense of “to bear witness, to testify.” The collocation with Peter’s death (“went to his appointed place of glory”) is precisely the context in which the word is on its way toward its later meaning; but it would be anachronistic to read into Clement the developed concept. What he says, plainly, is that Peter suffered many labours through jealousy and so came to the glory due to him — a death understood as the seal of his testimony.

Of Paul the notice is fuller and more circumstantial: “By reason of jealousy and strife Paul pointed out the prize of patient endurance. After he had been seven times in bonds, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, had preached in the East and in the West, he won the noble renown which was the reward of his faith, having taught righteousness unto the whole world and having reached the farthest bounds of the West (to terma tēs dyseōs); and when he had borne his witness before the rulers (martyrēsas epi tōn hēgoumenōn), so he departed from the world and went unto the holy place, having been found a notable pattern of patient endurance” (1 Clement 5.5–7; trans. Holmes 2007). The details — seven imprisonments, exile, stoning, preaching in East and West — overlap with but exceed what the Acts of the Apostles and the undisputed Pauline letters record (cf. the catalogue of sufferings at 2 Corinthians 11:23–25, which already speaks of frequent imprisonments, beatings, and a stoning), and may reflect Roman knowledge of Paul independent of the New Testament narrative. Two phrases in particular have carried the weight of later discussion: “the farthest bounds of the West” and “having borne his witness before the rulers.”

Chapter 6 widens the lens from the two apostles to the company that suffered with them. “To these men of holy lives was gathered a great multitude of the elect, who through many indignities and tortures, being the victims of jealousy, set a brave example among us” (1 Clement 6.1; trans. Holmes 2007). Then comes a notoriously difficult sentence: “Through jealousy women were persecuted, after they had suffered cruel and unholy insults as Danaids and Dircae, and so reached the safe goal in the race of faith, and received a noble reward, feeble though they were in body” (1 Clement 6.2; trans. Holmes 2007). The Greek text of the words rendered “Danaids and Dircae” (Danaides kai Dirkai) is uncertain — the manuscripts and emendations diverge, and some scholars have proposed quite different readings — but on the traditional text the names evoke figures of Greek myth, and the most common interpretation takes them as an allusion to executions staged in the arena as mythological tableaux, in which the condemned were costumed and killed in the manner of legendary figures. The historian Tacitus records that under Nero, after the fire of 64, Christians were put to death in elaborate and cruel public spectacles (Annals 15.44); if the “Danaids and Dircae” reading is sound, 1 Clement 6 may be an independent and nearly contemporary echo of just such scenes, applied to Christian women. But the textual uncertainty is real, and the allusion, however suggestive, cannot bear a great weight of historical reconstruction.

Why It Matters: The Earliest External Witness

The significance of these verses lies in their date and provenance. 1 Clement is most commonly dated to about 96, in the last years of Domitian, and even the scholars who would place it somewhat earlier or somewhat later keep it within the closing decade of the first century. That makes it the earliest datable Christian text outside the New Testament to speak of Peter and Paul as having died, and to speak of their deaths as martyrdoms — testimonies sealed in suffering. The New Testament itself nowhere narrates the deaths of either apostle: Acts leaves Paul under house arrest in Rome (Acts 28:30–31), the Pastoral Epistles speak of an imminent departure (2 Timothy 4:6–8) without recounting it, and the prophecy of Peter’s death in John 21:18–19 is allusive. 1 Clement is the first text to look back on those deaths as accomplished facts within recent memory.

What the passage establishes, and what it does not, must be stated carefully. It attests that Peter and Paul suffered greatly and died, and that their deaths were understood as the witness of faith borne unto the end. It does not explicitly say that they died at Rome; it does not name Nero or any emperor; it does not say that Peter was crucified or that Paul was beheaded; it gives no date and no narrative of the manner of death. These are the strengths and the limits of the text together. Its evidential force rests on inference: the letter is written from the Roman church, by an author who appeals to the martyrs as recent and known examples, and who places them at the head of “a great multitude of the elect” who suffered “among us” (1 Clement 6.1). The natural reading is that he speaks of sufferings the Roman church remembered as its own — and the Roman church’s memory of Peter and Paul as having died in its midst, under Nero, is attested by the later tradition with one voice.

That later tradition makes explicit what 1 Clement leaves allusive. Around 170, Dionysius, bishop of Corinth — writing, significantly, to the Roman church — declares that Peter and Paul “taught together in Italy” and “suffered martyrdom at the same time,” and links their planting of the churches of Rome and Corinth (in Eusebius, HE 2.25 [NPNF II/1]). In the same chapter Eusebius quotes Gaius, a Roman presbyter of the early third century, who points to the “trophies” (tropaia) of the apostles on the Vatican and on the Ostian Way — the memorials marking the places of Peter’s and Paul’s deaths at Rome (Eusebius, HE 2.25 [NPNF II/1]). Tertullian, writing around 200, names Rome as the place “where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s, where Paul wins his crown in a death like John’s [the Baptist’s, i.e. beheading]” (Scorpiace 15 [ANF Vol. 3]; cf. De Praescriptione Haereticorum 36). The distinct manners of death — Peter crucified, Paul beheaded as a Roman citizen — and the Neronian setting belong to this second-century and later stratum. 1 Clement is the seed from which that tradition grows: the first witness that there was a martyrdom at all, written from the city the tradition would name.

The connection to the Neronian persecution of 64–67, treated in The Roman Church in the First Century, is therefore traditional and reasonable rather than something 1 Clement states. The chapter 6 reference to “a great multitude of the elect” who suffered “many indignities and tortures” coheres remarkably with Tacitus’s account of the Neronian executions (Annals 15.44), and most scholars read the two passages together as describing the same persecution. But the identification is an inference from the text’s date, provenance, and content, not an assertion within it.

“The Farthest Bounds of the West”

The phrase to terma tēs dyseōs, “the limit” or “boundary of the West,” has generated more discussion than any other words in the letter. The question is geographical and biographical: how far west did Paul go, and what does Clement’s phrase tell us about the end of his life?

[Disputed: whether “the farthest bounds of the West” (to terma tēs dyseōs) means Spain — implying that Paul was released from a first Roman imprisonment, conducted a mission to Spain, and was arrested a second time and martyred — or means Rome itself, the western limit of his preaching as Clement’s narrative reaches it.] On the first reading, the words are taken at face value from the standpoint of a writer in Rome: for a Roman, “the limit of the West” is not the city in which he sits but the western edge of the known world, the Iberian peninsula. This coheres with Paul’s own stated intention in Romans 15:24, 28, to travel to Spain by way of Rome — a plan the New Testament never reports as fulfilled. On this view Clement attests that Paul did reach Spain, which in turn requires that he was released after the imprisonment with which Acts ends (Acts 28), undertook the Spanish journey he had planned, and was only afterward re-arrested and put to death — the “two imprisonments” or release-and-recapture theory, which also provides a historical setting for the Pastoral Epistles and their references to movements (Crete, Miletus, Troas, Nicopolis) that do not fit the Acts narrative. This reading was argued at length by J. B. Lightfoot (1890), who regarded the Spanish journey as historically probable, and it is supported by the Muratorian Fragment, which mentions “the departure of Paul from the city [Rome] as he journeyed to Spain.” Many traditional and a number of modern scholars follow it.

On the second reading, Clement means Rome, or speaks rhetorically of the western limit of Paul’s own preaching, which his narrative has just brought to the imperial capital. Proponents observe that Clement is constructing a rhetorical arc — Paul “preached in the East and in the West,” “taught righteousness unto the whole world,” and “reached the farthest bounds of the West” — in which “the limit of the West” functions as the climax of a universalizing description rather than as a precise geographical datum, and that to extract a Spanish journey from it over-reads the rhetoric. On this view the phrase is satisfied if Paul reached Rome, the great city of the West, where his preaching ended in his death; no second imprisonment need be inferred. Scholars sceptical of the Spanish journey — among them Otto Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom (2009), who is sceptical of much of the early Roman-martyrdom tradition, and others who read the phrase rhetorically — take this side, and note that the only first-century evidence for a Spanish mission is this single contested phrase. The commentary tradition represented by Horacio Lona’s Der erste Clemensbrief (1998) and Andreas Lindemann’s Die Clemensbriefe (1992) lays out the arguments on both sides without forcing a resolution. This file does not resolve the question; it records that “the limit of the West” is read as Spain by some and as Rome by others, and that the choice is bound up with the larger question of whether Paul had one Roman imprisonment or two.

“Borne His Witness Before the Rulers”

The clause martyrēsas epi tōn hēgoumenōn, “having borne his witness before the rulers,” is the closest the passage comes to placing Paul’s death in a juridical setting. The “rulers” or “leaders” (hēgoumenoi) are most naturally the Roman authorities before whom Paul, as a citizen, would have been tried — consonant with the appeal to Caesar narrated in Acts 25:11–12 and 28:19. The clause thus supports the picture of a trial and execution under Roman authority, and dovetails with the later, explicit tradition of Paul’s beheading at Rome.

The word martyreō deserves a second note here. As with Peter (5.4), so with Paul (5.7), Clement uses the verb for “bear witness” in close connection with the apostle’s death. This is one of the texts in which scholars trace the development of martys/martyreō from the general sense of “witness” toward the specifically Christian sense of “one who witnesses to Christ by dying.” In 1 Clement the word has not yet arrived at that technical meaning — Clement is not calling Peter and Paul “martyrs” in the later sense, but saying that they bore their testimony — yet the contexts of suffering and death in which he places the word are precisely the soil from which the later sense grew. By the time of the Martyrdom of Polycarp (mid-second century) the technical sense is established; 1 Clement stands at an earlier stage of that semantic history.

The Limits of the Testimony

Honesty about what these verses do and do not yield is itself part of their value, and is set out at length in The Historical Value. The passage is allusive, not a narrative: Clement is preaching, not chronicling, and he assumes in his readers a knowledge of the events he need only invoke. It attests that Peter and Paul suffered and died as witnesses of the faith, and that they did so within the generation before the letter; it places them at the head of a great company of sufferers whom the Roman church remembered as its own. It does not, by itself, supply the city, the date, the emperor, or the manner of either death. The “Danaids and Dircae” of chapter 6, however evocative of the Neronian arena, rest on an uncertain text. The “farthest bounds of the West” remains genuinely disputed. What the passage gives is a fixed point: that within thirty years or so of the events, the church of Rome looked back on the deaths of Peter and Paul as martyrdoms and held them up as the supreme recent examples of endurance. Everything more specific in the tradition — the Vatican and the Ostian Way, the cross and the sword, the reign of Nero — is later, and must be weighed on its own evidence.

Orthodox Significance

For the Orthodox reading of 1 Clement, the placing of Peter and Paul is not incidental but climactic. The whole catalogue of jealousy has been building toward them: the patriarchs and prophets ruined by zēlos in the ancient examples, and now, in “our own generation,” the very “pillars” of the Church brought to death by the same vice. That the chief apostles stand as the supreme “noble examples” of patient endurance gives the letter’s moral appeal its full gravity — and gives the Church its earliest external confirmation that the founders of its Roman community sealed their preaching with their blood. The apostolic foundation of the Roman church, which Clement everywhere presupposes, is here grounded in the memory of the apostles’ martyric witness: the church that writes to Corinth is the church in whose midst Peter and Paul died.

In the liturgical memory of the Orthodox Church the two apostles are joined as the Prōtokoryphaioi, the chief among the apostles, and commemorated together on June 29 — a pairing whose earliest literary root is precisely this passage, where Peter and Paul are named in a single breath as the greatest of the recent martyrs. Their veneration belongs to the apostolic and sub-apostolic foundation of the whole Church surveyed in The Pre-Schism Church, and the witness of 1 Clement 5–6 is the seed of the tradition that honors them. The fuller account of each apostle belongs to St. Apostle Peter and St. Apostle Paul; here it is enough to mark that the earliest voice to call them martyrs is the letter of the Roman church, written from the city of their crowning, within living memory of the day.

References

Clement of Rome. First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Clement) 5–6. 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. The Ecclesiastical History, 2.25; 3.1. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. (Dionysius of Corinth and Gaius the Roman presbyter on the apostolic martyrdoms at Rome.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
Lona, Horacio E. Der erste Clemensbrief. Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern 2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.
Lindemann, Andreas. Die Clemensbriefe. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992.
Tertullian. Scorpiace 15; De Praescriptione Haereticorum 36. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3.
Tacitus. Annals 15.44. (The Neronian persecution of the Christians at Rome, AD 64.)
Zwierlein, Otto. Petrus in Rom: Die literarischen Zeugnisse. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 96. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. (A sceptical assessment of the early evidence for the apostles’ Roman martyrdom.)