The Pseudo-Clementine Literature

Beneath the genuine 1 Clement and the misnamed 2 Clement lies a third and far larger body of writing bearing Clement’s name: the Pseudo-Clementine literature, a fourth-century apostolic romance surviving in two recensions — the Greek Homilies (20 books) and the Recognitions (10 books, the Greek lost, surviving in Rufinus of Aquileia’s early-fifth-century Latin and partly in Syriac). Narrated in the first person by “Clement of Rome,” it tells of his search for truth, his meeting with the Apostle Peter, their travels through Syria and Phoenicia, Peter’s long disputations with Simon Magus, and the “recognition” (reunion) of Clement’s scattered family. Both recensions descend from a lost common source, the Grundschrift, of the early-to-mid third century, itself drawing on earlier Jewish-Christian materials. The work is emphatically not by Clement and not history: it is a window onto third- and fourth-century Syrian Jewish-Christianity, valuable to historians precisely as fiction, and is firmly classed among the New Testament apocrypha.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The works circulated under Clement’s name in late antiquity were several, and only one is his. The Pseudo-Clementines are the largest and most elaborate of the spuria — not a letter at all but a full-scale early Christian novel, the most substantial surviving specimen of the apostolic-romance genre. This file sets out what the literature is, the two recensions in which it survives, the scholarly stratigraphy that reconstructs a lost common source behind them, its distinctive Jewish-Christian theology and its famous (and contested) anti-Pauline strand, its relation — which is to say its non-relation in authorship — to the historical Clement, and its reception and value. Per the repository methodology, the point throughout is to label the work clearly as spurious and much later, and to distinguish it cleanly from the one authentic letter.

What the Literature Is

The Pseudo-Clementines are a theological romance in the form of a first-person memoir. The narrator and hero is Clement, presented as a well-born young Roman tormented by questions the philosophical schools cannot answer — the immortality of the soul, the origin of the world, the certainty of truth. Dissatisfied, he hears a rumor of one preaching in Judaea the will of “the invisible God,” and sets out for the East. There he meets the Apostle Peter, becomes his disciple and travelling companion, and accompanies him through the cities of the Syrian and Phoenician coast — Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, Tripolis, Laodicea, Antioch among them. The narrative frame is Peter’s missionary progress, and within it the bulk of the work is taken up with Peter’s preaching and, above all, his repeated and lengthy public disputations with the arch-heretic and magician Simon Magus, whom Peter pursues from city to city and refutes point by point. Interwoven with this is the family plot from which the Recognitions takes its name: Clement’s mother, twin brothers, and father, separated by shipwreck and misfortune years before, are one by one discovered among Peter’s company and converts and “recognized” — a classic novelistic device of loss and reunion (anagnōrisis) borrowed from the Hellenistic romance.

The literature survives in two main recensions, parallel in plot and large stretches of wording but differing in arrangement, in their dialogues, and in points of doctrine:

The Homilies (Klēmentia), 20 books in Greek, preceded by two prefatory letters. The first is the Epistula Petri, a letter of Peter to James the Lord’s brother at Jerusalem, transmitting Peter’s preaching with a stern warning that it be guarded from the lawless and handed only to the worthy; appended to it is a short Diamartyria or Contestatio, James’s account of the oath under which the books are to be received. The second is the Epistula Clementis, a letter of Clement to James, important in its own right as a source for the legend of Clement’s ordination: it narrates Peter, at the point of death at Rome, laying hands on Clement and appointing him his successor in the Roman teaching-chair, and instructing him to report the succession to James. This prefatory matter sets the whole work under the authority of James and the Jerusalem church.
The Recognitions (Recognitiones), 10 books. The Greek original is lost; the work survives complete in the Latin translation made early in the fifth century by Rufinus of Aquileia, who in his preface candidly notes that he has smoothed over certain doctrinally objectionable passages, and partly in a Syriac version (the Syriac manuscript British Library Add. 12150, dated AD 411, in fact transmits portions of both recensions and is the oldest dated witness). The title refers to the family “recognitions” that resolve the plot.

The relation between the two is not that one copied the other but that both are independent reworkings of a lost common original (see below). Citation in this file follows work and division — for example Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 1.1, Recognitions 1.7 (trans. ANF Vol. 8), Epistula Clementis 2.

Date and the Source-Stratigraphy

In their present form both recensions are fourth-century. The standard reconstruction, associated with Bernhard Rehm’s critical edition and the studies of Georg Strecker and F. Stanley Jones, dates the Homilies and the Recognitions as we have them to roughly the first half of the fourth century (c. 300–350 and after), with the Recognitions perhaps slightly the earlier of the two redactions. Behind both, however, the close verbal agreement across long parallel passages requires a lost common source. This source is conventionally called the Grundschrift (“basic writing”), and it is usually placed in the early-to-mid third century. The Grundschrift is not itself preserved; it is a reconstruction inferred from what the two recensions share.

Behind the Grundschrift in turn scholars have identified still earlier Jewish-Christian materials that the third-century author worked into the romance. Two are most often named. The first is the Kerygmata Petrou (“Preachings of Peter”), a hypothesized source of Peter’s doctrinal preaching — to be distinguished from the separately attested second-century Kerygma Petrou — carrying the “True Prophet” Christology and the anti-Pauline polemic discussed below. The second is an Ascents of James (Anabathmoi Iakōbou) source, a Jewish-Christian narrative of the Jerusalem church and James’s debates in the Temple, generally located behind Recognitions 1.27–71, the section Jones has edited and studied as an independent early witness. On this view the literature is a layered deposit: fourth-century recensions, over a third-century Grundschrift, over second-century Jewish-Christian sources.

[Disputed: The dating and source-reconstruction of the Grundschrift and its strata. The framework just sketched — a lost Grundschrift of roughly c. 220–260 standing behind both recensions, itself incorporating a Kerygmata Petrou and an Ascents of James — is the dominant model, set out in Bernhard Rehm’s GCS critical edition Die Pseudoklementinen and developed in Georg Strecker, Das Judenchristentum in den Pseudoklementinen (TU 70, 1958/1981), and in F. Stanley Jones, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71 (Scholars Press, 1995). But several elements are debated. The precise date of the Grundschrift is variously given (early third century by some, mid-third by others, with a range of roughly c. 220–260 commonly cited); its provenance is generally Syria (Coele-Syria) but not certain. The very existence and reconstructability of a single Kerygmata Petrou as Strecker delineated it has been questioned by scholars who think the source-criticism over-confident and the strata less cleanly separable than the model implies; Jones, while affirming an early Jewish-Christian source behind Recognitions 1, has cautioned against treating the reconstructed source-documents as if their wording and extent were securely recoverable. The broad picture — fourth-century recensions over a third-century base over earlier Jewish-Christian material — is widely accepted; the fine stratigraphy and absolute dates are not settled.]

Character and Content

The Pseudo-Clementines are a theological romance, not a chronicle, and their interest for the historian lies in the theology the romance carries rather than in any events it reports. That theology is strongly Jewish-Christian, with features that have led many scholars to describe the underlying source-material as Ebionite or Ebionite-tinged.

Several marks of this Jewish-Christianity stand out. At its center is the doctrine of the True Prophet (alēthēs prophētēs): the one figure of the True Prophet appears through history in a series of manifestations — Adam, Moses, and finally Jesus are aligned in a single prophetic succession — and it is he alone who can give certain knowledge of God, over against the guesswork of the philosophers and the deceptions of false prophecy (Homilies 3; Recognitions 1–2, trans. ANF Vol. 8). Coupled with this is an opposition to animal sacrifice: the sacrificial cult is treated as no part of the original divine will but a concession or corruption, and the True Prophet comes in part to abolish it — a position with obvious Jewish-Christian and Ebionite resonance. There is a marked concern with dietary law, ritual washing, and purity, including the avoidance of table-fellowship with the unbaptized, reflecting a community that kept much of the Law. And there is a pronounced primacy of James the Lord’s brother and of the Jerusalem church: the whole literature is placed under James’s authority through the prefatory letters, Peter reports to James, and the Ascents of James material in Recognitions 1 makes James the head of the church and the protagonist of the Temple debates.

The romance also carries a great deal of other polemical and didactic content. There are philosophical dialogues on providence, fate, and the origin of evil; a sustained anti-astrology argument against the claim that the stars determine human action (notably in the long discussion in Recognitions with Clement’s own father Faustus/Faustinianus, an astrologer); and material directed against Marcion and dualist teaching, defending the one God who is both just and good and the goodness of the created order. The family-recognition plot supplies the narrative momentum and the title of the Recognitions.

The most discussed single feature is the figure of Simon Magus, the great antagonist whom Peter pursues and refutes through city after city. Simon is the Samaritan magician of Acts 8:9–24, here developed into the arch-heretic and father of all error. But many scholars have argued that the Simon of the disputations is not only the Simon of Acts: in places his views and his itinerary shadow those of the Apostle Paul, and the polemic against him reads as a coded attack on Pauline Christianity and its Law-free gospel.

[Disputed: Whether “Simon Magus” is in part a cipher for the Apostle Paul. The thesis that the Pseudo-Clementine Simon is partly a polemical caricature of Paul goes back to Ferdinand Christian Baur and the nineteenth-century Tübingen school, who read the literature as a monument of Jewish-Christian (Petrine) hostility to Gentile-Christian (Pauline) faith and saw in the Peter-versus-Simon disputations a veiled Peter-versus-Paul conflict. Supporting evidence is adduced from passages where Simon claims a visionary authority and is rebuked by Peter in terms that echo the language of Galatians — most pointedly Homilies 17.13–19, where Peter disparages knowledge gained by vision and apparition over against instruction received from the Lord in the flesh, which many take as a swipe at Paul’s Damascus-road claim, and the Epistula Petri’s warning against a “lawless and absurd doctrine” of “the man who is my enemy.” Defenders of an anti-Pauline layer (in the underlying Kerygmata Petrou especially) include Strecker and others working on the Jewish-Christian sources. Against this, many critics hold that in the romance as it stands Simon is simply Simon Magus — the heresiarch of Acts and of the wider Simonian legend — and that the supposed anti-Paulinism is overdrawn, confined at most to fragments of an early source and not characteristic of the Grundschrift or the fourth-century recensions; Strecker himself is comparatively cautious, locating the anti-Pauline polemic in a source-stratum rather than in the finished work, and still others reject the Paul-identification altogether. The matter is unresolved: that there is some anti-Pauline sentiment somewhere in the tradition is widely granted; that “Simon = Paul” is the key to the whole is generally regarded as a Tübingen overstatement.]

Relation to the Real Clement

In authorship the relation is none. Clement of Rome did not write the Pseudo-Clementines, did not narrate them, and has nothing to do with their composition. He is the pseudonymous narrator and hero, a literary mask. The name was chosen because Clement was already the famous early Roman Christian linked by tradition to Peter — the man whom one strand of the succession-lists (Tertullian, the Apostolic Constitutions) made Peter’s direct ordainee. That association made him the ideal first-person witness for a romance whose whole authority rests on closeness to Peter. The Epistula Clementis exploits precisely this link: its account of Peter, dying at Rome, ordaining Clement as his successor and bidding him report to James is one of the early literary sources for the legend of Clement’s Petrine succession, a legend that fed later Roman and hagiographical tradition (see The Third Bishop of Rome for the succession-list variant the legend serves, and The Historical Clement for the man whose name the romance borrows).

What the literature documents, therefore, is not the church of Clement’s own day around AD 96 but the Jewish-Christianity of Syria in the third and fourth centuries, with its earlier source-layers reaching back into the second. It tells us about the communities that produced and treasured it — their Christology, their attitude to the Law and to sacrifice, their veneration of James, their memory of the Simon-legend — and about the romance-writing of early Christianity. For the historical Clement it is worthless as evidence and was never regarded by careful tradition as his. It belongs among the New Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, alongside the apocryphal Acts whose genre it shares.

Reception and Value

In the matter of authenticity the Pseudo-Clementines were never accepted. Eusebius, cataloguing what was reckoned genuinely Clement’s, lists 1 Clement as the great and acknowledged epistle and registers doubt about the second writing circulated under his name, but the romance is no part of the authentic Clementine corpus he recognizes (cf. Eusebius, HE 3.38 [NPNF II/1], on the writings under Clement’s name). The work’s heterodox, Jewish-Christian colouring kept it on the margins; Rufinus, translating the Recognitions into Latin, felt obliged to excise or soften passages he found doctrinally troubling, and said so. As scripture or as an authentic apostolic document it was rejected.

As a historical source, however, the literature is of considerable value, and modern scholarship treats it as such. It is one of the fullest surviving windows onto Jewish-Christianity after the New Testament — onto a stream of Christian life that left few texts of its own — and the principal literary deposit of the Simon Magus legend, with all that legend’s later influence on the heresiological imagination. It shaped later hagiography and the medieval cult and legend of Clement, and through its prefatory Epistula Clementis it contributed to the developed picture of Clement as Peter’s ordained heir. The romance was also widely diffused: the Latin Recognitions circulated broadly in the West, and the Syriac and other Eastern versions attest its reach.

The clean separation of the genuine Clement from the Clementine spuria is itself an achievement of critical scholarship. The early modern editor Jean-Baptiste Cotelier gathered the Apostolic Fathers and the Clementine materials together but distinguished their character; J. B. Lightfoot, in The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome (Macmillan, 1890), set the authentic 1 Clement firmly apart from the later legend and romance; and Bernhard Rehm’s twentieth-century critical edition put the study of the Homilies and Recognitions on a secure textual footing. The result is the position this repository follows: one genuine letter, and around it a body of later writing — the homily misnamed 2 Clement, the letters On Virginity, the canonical-liturgical compilations, and the great romance of the Pseudo-Clementines — that is not Clement’s at all.

So the methodological conclusion is plain and is stated per the repository standard. The Pseudo-Clementine literature is spurious and much later than its hero: a third-century base elaborated into fourth-century recensions, narrated in the borrowed voice of a first-century Roman whom it does not in fact describe. It is read here not as a witness to Clement but as a witness to the Jewish-Christianity that adopted his name, and it is kept rigorously distinct from the one authentic Letter to the Corinthians by which Clement is genuinely known.

References

The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions of Clement. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886.
Rehm, Bernhard, ed. Die Pseudoklementinen. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS). Vol. 1, Homilien; Vol. 2, Rekognitionen in Rufins Übersetzung. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1969/1994.
Strecker, Georg. Das Judenchristentum in den Pseudoklementinen. Texte und Untersuchungen 70. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958; 2nd ed. 1981.
Jones, F. Stanley. An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71. Texts and Translations 37. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995.
Jones, F. Stanley. Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana: Collected Studies. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 203. Leuven: Peeters, 2012.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica), 3.38. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.