2 Clement

The work conventionally called the Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (2 Clement) is neither a letter nor by Clement. It is, by firm scholarly consensus, the earliest surviving Christian sermon outside the New Testament — a homily of exhortation, read aloud in the assembly after the Scripture lesson, datable to the mid-second century. Its attribution to Clement arose only because it was copied and transmitted alongside the genuine 1 Clement. Correctly named and dated, it is a precious witness to early-second-century preaching, popular theology, the developing canon, and a strikingly high Christology and ecclesiology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Few documents in early Christian literature have suffered so persistently from a misleading name. The text known to the manuscripts and printed editions as the Second Epistle of Clement is not a second epistle, and it is not Clement’s. It is the oldest extant Christian homily, a sermon composed somewhere in the Greek-speaking church of the early-to-mid second century and then, at some point in the transmission of the texts, bound to the genuine letter of Clement and carried along under his name. To set the record straight is not to diminish the work but to recover it: only when the false label is removed does the document stand forth as what it really is, a window onto Christian preaching a generation or two after the apostolic age.

What the Manuscripts Transmit

2 Clement survives because the same manuscripts that preserved 1 Clement preserved it as well, copied immediately after the genuine letter. The two great witnesses are the same for both works. The first is Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century), the celebrated biblical uncial that appends 1 Clement and 2 Clement after the New Testament; but in Alexandrinus the text of 2 Clement is incomplete, breaking off in the middle of chapter 12 (at 12.5a), because a leaf or leaves of the codex were lost. For more than a millennium this truncated text was all that was known. The second witness changed that. The Jerusalem Codex (Codex Hierosolymitanus 54), written in AD 1056, contains both letters complete, and it was from this manuscript that Philotheos Bryennios published the full text of both 1 and 2 Clement in 1875 — the same codex from which, four years later, he would publish the Didache. Bryennios’s editio princeps of the complete 2 Clement gave scholarship for the first time the ending of the work, including the explicit self-description in chapter 19 that settled the question of its genre (see The Manuscript Tradition).

The conventional title — “Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians” — is thus a product of the transmission, not of the document itself. The work has no title within its own text and nothing that ties it to Clement or to Corinth except its position in the manuscripts, copied second after the letter that is addressed to Corinth. The name is, in the strict sense, a scribal and editorial convenience that hardened into a tradition.

It Is Not a Letter

The first thing the text itself tells us, once it is read on its own terms, is that it is not a letter at all. It has none of the marks of the epistolary genre as the early church practiced it: no opening salutation naming sender and recipient (contrast the formal “the church of God that sojourns in Rome to the church of God that sojourns in Corinth” of 1 Clement), no epistolary thanksgiving, no closing greetings, no commendation of bearers, no farewell. Where 1 Clement is unmistakably a letter from beginning to end, 2 Clement simply begins with direct exhortation and ends with a doxology.

More decisively, the work announces its own genre from within. Near its close the speaker says: “So then, brothers and sisters, after the God of truth I am reading you an exhortation (enteuxin) to give heed to that which is written, that you may save both yourselves and the one who reads in your midst” (2 Clement 19.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The speaker is reading aloud a prepared address — an enteuxis, an appeal or exhortation — and he distinguishes himself (“the one who reads in your midst”) from the assembled hearers, whom he addresses repeatedly and directly as “brothers and sisters.” He refers to “that which is written” (the Scripture lesson) as something already read, after which his own exhortation follows. This is the situation of the homily: the Scripture is read, and then a sermon of application is delivered. The reference at 19.1 to reading the exhortation after “the God of truth” (i.e., after the reading concerning God) points to exactly this liturgical sequence — lesson, then homily.

The scholarly consensus, accordingly, is that 2 Clement is a sermon or homily, the text of an address read aloud in the Christian assembly after the reading of Scripture. This makes it the earliest surviving Christian sermon outside the New Testament — the oldest specimen we possess of how Christians preached in the gathered congregation in the period after the apostles. The point was argued at length by Karl Paul Donfried, whose study fixed the setting of the work as a homily delivered in a concrete liturgical and communal context, and it is the position of the standard commentaries and editions (Donfried 1974; Tuckett 2012; Holmes 2007; Ehrman 2003).

It Is Not by Clement

That the work is not by the author of 1 Clement is not a matter of dispute among scholars; it is consensus, and it rests on convergent grounds. The style is different — 1 Clement is a long, periodic, rhetorically sophisticated composition in the manner of Greco-Roman deliberative oratory, while 2 Clement is simpler, more paratactic, the diction of popular preaching rather than of a trained rhetorician. The theology is different — the developed argument from order and succession that is the spine of 1 Clement is wholly absent, and 2 Clement‘s preoccupations (the resurrection of the flesh, the pre-existent Church, the agrapha of Jesus) are not those of the genuine letter. And the work makes no claim whatever to Clementine authorship: it names no author, claims no office, and offers nothing that would identify its speaker with Clement of Rome. The attribution is, in short, a clear case of pseudonymity-by-association: a work acquired Clement’s name solely because it traveled in the manuscripts behind Clement’s letter.

The ancient church itself never confidently received it as Clement’s. Eusebius, surveying the writings attributed to Clement, registers exactly the doubt that the modern judgment confirms. After describing the genuine letter, he adds: “But it must be observed also that there is said to be a second epistle of Clement. But we do not know that this is recognized like the former, for we do not find that the ancients have made any use of it” (Eusebius, HE 3.38 [NPNF II/1]). Eusebius thus knows of a “second epistle” circulating under Clement’s name, but he notes pointedly that, unlike the first, it was not publicly read in the churches and that the ancient writers do not cite it. The genuine 1 Clement was read aloud in the Corinthian assembly and quoted by Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria; the so-called second was not. Eusebius’s caution — preserving the attribution while distancing himself from it — is the earliest surviving registration of the very problem the work poses, and it tells against, not for, Clementine authorship.

Two genuine questions do remain open, but they are questions of date and place, not of Clement. On date, most scholars place the homily in the mid-second century, somewhere in the range of c. 120–160; it is later than 1 Clement (c. 96) and reflects a more developed stage of preaching and of contested doctrine (the polemic against deniers of the resurrection of the flesh in chapter 9 suits the controversies of that period). On provenance, the question is genuinely unsettled. [Disputed: The place of origin of 2 Clement is undetermined. Lightfoot argued for Corinth, on the strength of the manuscript association with the Corinthian letter and certain internal indications; others have proposed Rome; and still others, noting the homily’s affinities with material known from Egyptian sources (its agraphon parallels the Gospel of the Egyptians), have argued for Egypt or Alexandria. No proposal commands consensus (Corinth: Lightfoot 1890; Rome; Egypt/Alexandria: others — see Donfried 1974; Tuckett 2012).] These are real scholarly disagreements; the non-Clementine authorship is not among them.

Content and Theology

2 Clement is, in substance, a sustained call to repentance, self-control (enkrateia), and good works in view of the coming judgment and the resurrection. Its argument is hortatory throughout: because Christ has redeemed us and will come as judge, the hearers must repent now, keep the flesh pure, and live so as to be saved. Within this homiletic frame several theological features stand out as early and important.

A high Christology. The sermon opens with one of the most striking confessions of the sub-apostolic age: “Brothers and sisters, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ, as of God, as of the judge of the living and the dead. And we ought not to belittle the one who is our salvation” (2 Clement 1.1; trans. Holmes 2007). To think of Christ “as of God” and “as of the judge of the living and the dead” is to confess his divinity and his role in the final judgment in the plainest terms, and to set this confession at the very head of the homily is to make it the foundation of the whole exhortation: precisely because Christ is God and judge, the call to repentance has its urgency.

The resurrection of the flesh. A central concern of the homily is the bodily resurrection, defended against those who denied it. Chapter 9 opens bluntly: “And let none of you say that this flesh is not judged and does not rise again. Understand: in what state were you saved, in what state did you receive your sight, if not while you were in this flesh? We must therefore guard the flesh as a temple of God” (2 Clement 9.1–3; trans. Holmes 2007). The argument is that since salvation came to us in the flesh — in Christ’s incarnate flesh and in our own — the flesh itself will be raised and judged, and must therefore be kept pure now. This insistence places 2 Clement squarely against the docetic and dualist currents of the second century that disparaged the body, and aligns it with the resurrection-faith that 1 Clement had also defended (cf. the resurrection theme treated in The Resurrection and the Phoenix).

The pre-existent, spiritual Church. 2 Clement preserves one of the earliest and boldest statements of a pre-existent ecclesiology. The homilist teaches that the Church is not merely the visible assembly but a spiritual reality created before the world: “I do not suppose you are ignorant that the living Church is the body of Christ… the Church, being spiritual, was manifested in the flesh of Christ… So then, brothers and sisters, if we do the will of God our Father we will belong to the first Church, the spiritual, which was created before the sun and the moon” (2 Clement 14.1–2; trans. Holmes 2007). The Church, in this conception, is pre-existent, spiritual, “created before the sun and moon,” and is bound to Christ as the female to the male — male-and-female interpreted as Christ-and-Church. This is a remarkable and developed ecclesiology for so early a text, and it stands among the most important witnesses to early Christian reflection on the Church as a heavenly and primordial reality.

A loose, early canon. The homily quotes its authorities with a freedom that reveals a “canon” still in formation. It cites Isaiah and other Old Testament texts as Scripture; it quotes sayings of Jesus, sometimes in canonical form and sometimes not; and it draws on apocryphal material side by side with what would become the New Testament, with no sharp line drawn between them. Two instances are especially notable. First, the homilist quotes a saying of Jesus found in no canonical Gospel — an agraphon: “For the Lord himself, being asked by someone when his kingdom would come, said: ‘When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female’” (2 Clement 12.2; trans. Holmes 2007). This saying parallels material attributed to the Gospel of the Egyptians and closely resembles logion 22 of the Gospel of Thomas (“when you make the two one… and the male and the female one and the same”); the homilist treats it as a genuine word of the Lord and expounds it allegorically. Second, 2 Clement cites an apocryphal prophetic passage on the “double-minded” that it shares with 1 Clement: the words about those who doubt, “Wretched are the double-minded, who doubt in their soul and say, ‘These things we heard also in the days of our fathers, and look, we have grown old and none of these things has happened to us’” (2 Clement 11.2–4), correspond to the same apocryphal quotation found at 1 Clement 23.3–4 — a shared dependence on a now-lost prophetic or apocalyptic source (on which see The Resurrection and the Phoenix). Taken together these citations show a preacher drawing on Isaiah, the Gospels, Paul, and apocryphal sayings and prophecies without distinction — a precious snapshot of the canon at a moment before its boundaries had closed.

Its Value, Rightly Named

Once it is correctly identified, 2 Clement is not diminished but illuminated. As the earliest extant Christian homily, it is a witness of the first importance to dimensions of early Christianity that the surviving letters and apologies do not directly show us: the actual texture of preaching in the assembly, the popular theology of an ordinary congregation, the way Scripture was read and applied to the hearers, the living shape of the canon before it was fixed, and the high Christology and pre-existent ecclesiology that were current in the church of the early second century. It shows us a preacher, not a controversialist or a rhetorician — a voice exhorting the gathered faithful to repent, to keep the flesh pure, and to do the will of God in hope of the resurrection and the kingdom. There is nothing else quite like it from so early a date.

The methodological lesson is worth stating plainly, for it applies well beyond this one text. Clearing away a false attribution is not a destructive act but a clarifying one. To say that 2 Clement is neither a second epistle nor Clement’s is not to take something from the church’s heritage; it is to give the heritage back its true contents, correctly described. A document mislabeled is a document half-hidden. Named for what it is — the oldest Christian sermon we possess — 2 Clement takes its proper and honored place among the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (see Church Fathers). The misattribution belongs to the history of its transmission; the value belongs to the work itself.

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Ehrman, Bart D., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers, Volume 1. Loeb Classical Library 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Eusebius. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
Donfried, Karl Paul. The Setting of Second Clement in Early Christianity. Novum Testamentum Supplements 38. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
Tuckett, Christopher. 2 Clement: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Oxford Apostolic Fathers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.