05 — The Second Epistle and the Spuria
Clement’s name, once attached to one genuine and influential letter, drew to itself a body of later writing that is not his. The so-called Second Epistle of Clement is in fact the earliest surviving Christian sermon, transmitted beside 1 Clement but, on the scholarly consensus, neither a letter nor by Clement. Beyond it lies the Pseudo-Clementine literature — the Recognitions and Homilies — a fourth-century romance of apostolic travels and disputations built around the figure of Clement, clearly spurious and far later. These files distinguish the secure from the pseudonymous.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)
A figure who leaves one important document behind, and about whom little else is known, is a natural magnet for later attribution. So it was with Clement. The works gathered under his name in antiquity and after include, besides the genuine 1 Clement: a homily long called 2 Clement; two letters On Virginity; the apocryphal romance of the Pseudo-Clementines; and various canonical-liturgical compilations (the Apostolic Constitutions, the so-called Clementine Liturgy) that claim his authority. None of these is his. This section treats the two most important: 2 Clement, valuable in itself as the oldest Christian sermon but misnamed; and the Pseudo-Clementines, a large and influential body of clearly later fiction. Sorting the authentic from the spurious is, per the methodology, not a digression but a duty, and Eusebius already registered the suspicion attaching to the works circulated in Clement’s name.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| 2 Clement | The so-called Second Epistle of Clement — in fact the earliest surviving Christian homily, c. 120–160; its transmission with 1 Clement, its content, and the attribution problem (Eusebius’s doubt; the modern consensus that it is neither a letter nor by Clement); how it should be valued and named. |
| The Pseudo-Clementine Literature | The Recognitions (in Rufinus’s Latin) and the Homilies (Greek), a fourth-century apostolic romance on a third-century base (the Grundschrift); its narrative, its Jewish-Christian and anti-Pauline elements, its relation to Clement, and its firm classification as spurious and much later. |
See Also
- The Letter to the Corinthians — the one genuine letter against which the spuria are measured
- The Manuscript Tradition — the codices that transmit 1 and 2 Clement together
- The Historical Clement — the man behind the name the spuria exploit
- The Church Fathers — the genuine patristic corpus
References
- Second Epistle of Clement (2 Clement). In Holmes, Michael W., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
- The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886.
- Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History, 3.38. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1.
- Ehrman, Bart D. The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. 1. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.