The Manuscript Tradition

The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians survives in an unusually rich array of witnesses for a work of the Apostolic Fathers: two Greek manuscripts (the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus and the dated Jerusalem Codex of AD 1056), an early Latin version, a Syriac version of 1170, and Coptic papyrus fragments. The accidents of this transmission — and especially the rediscovery of the complete Greek text by Philotheos Bryennios in 1875 — frame everything modern readers know of the letter. The same manuscripts also carry the document conventionally called 2 Clement, copied immediately after the genuine letter. Above all, the physical handling of these texts — appended to the New Testament in Alexandrinus, inserted among the canonical epistles in the Syriac, read aloud in the Corinthian assembly into the late second century — testifies to a standing on the very border of the canon, even though the Church did not finally receive the letter as Scripture.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The history of how 1 Clement reached the modern world is, in a real sense, two histories: the history of its physical copies and the history of its reputation. The two are intertwined, because the way scribes and churches treated the letter — where they bound it, alongside what, with how much reverence — is itself among the strongest evidence for the regard in which it was held. A letter written from Rome to Corinth around AD 96 was still being read in the Corinthian liturgy three quarters of a century later, was copied at the end of a great biblical codex as a kind of appendix to the New Testament, and was slipped in among the Catholic Epistles in a Syriac New Testament. To trace the manuscript tradition is therefore not merely to catalogue copies; it is to watch a community decide, over centuries, how close to Scripture this voice from the sub-apostolic age really stood.

The Greek Witnesses

For most of the history of printed scholarship, 1 Clement was known from a single Greek manuscript: Codex Alexandrinus (siglum A), the celebrated fifth-century Greek Bible now held in the British Library in London. Alexandrinus is one of the four great uncial codices of the Greek Bible, and its treatment of Clement is significant in itself. After the books of the New Testament — after the Apocalypse — the scribe appended 1 Clement and 2 Clement, as though completing the volume with two further texts judged worthy to stand in the company of the canonical writings. This placement is the first and most eloquent piece of evidence for the letter’s near-canonical standing: a fifth-century scriptorium thought it fitting to bind the letter of the Roman Clement to the close of the New Testament.

But the Alexandrinus text is defective. A leaf has been lost from the codex, and with it a long stretch of 1 Clement — chapters 57.6 through 63 — together with the conclusion of 2 Clement, which breaks off in the middle of chapter 12 (at 12.5a). For centuries, then, the only known Greek text of 1 Clement lacked a substantial portion of its later chapters, including most of the great intercessory prayer, and 2 Clement simply ran out partway through. The text of Alexandrinus was first published by Patrick Young — Patricius Junius, the royal librarian — in 1633, and that editio princeps, with all its lacunae, governed Clementine study for more than two centuries. Every edition down to the later nineteenth century worked, for the Greek, around the hole left by the missing leaf.

That situation was transformed in a single discovery. In the library of the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre at Constantinople — the Jerusalem patriarchate’s house in the imperial city — the metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios found a Greek manuscript, a collection of texts, that has come to be known as the Jerusalem Codex (Codex Hierosolymitanus 54, also styled Codex Constantinopolitanus). The codex bears a scribal date of AD 1056. Among its contents it preserves the complete text of both 1 and 2 Clement. Bryennios published the full 1 and 2 Clement in 1875, in his edition Tou en hagiois patros hēmōn Klēmentos… hai dyo pros Korinthious epistolai (Constantinople, 1875) — the editio princeps of the complete text. Eight years later, in 1883, he published from the very same codex another text that had been lost to the West for a millennium and a half: the Didache.

It is difficult to overstate what this rediscovery meant for Clementine studies. Overnight the missing chapters were restored. The long prayer of chapters 59–61 — one of the earliest and fullest liturgical prayers to survive from the ancient Church, a sustained intercession for rulers, for the sick, for the wandering, and for peace — had been almost entirely absent from the Greek; now it stood complete. Scholars who had built their reconstructions around the Alexandrinus lacuna had to rebuild on firmer ground. J. B. Lightfoot, who had published his first edition of Clement in 1869 on the basis of Alexandrinus and the versions, was able to incorporate the Jerusalem Codex into the magisterial second edition of 1890; the difference between the two editions is, in part, the difference the Bryennios discovery made.

The Versions

Beyond the two Greek manuscripts, 1 Clement is preserved in three ancient versions — Latin, Syriac, and Coptic — an attestation in four languages that is, for an Apostolic Father, remarkably rich. Each version is an independent line of descent, and each helps control the Greek where it is doubtful.

Latin. An early Latin translation of 1 Clement — old enough that it may go back to the second or third century — survives in an eleventh-century manuscript. It was discovered by the Benedictine scholar Germain Morin and published in 1894. Because the translation is so early, it is a witness of unusual value: it reflects a Greek text older than any surviving Greek copy, and it lets scholars test readings against a line of transmission entirely separate from the Greek manuscripts. [Disputed: the precise date and provenance of the underlying Latin translation are not certain; estimates range across the second and third centuries, and the antiquity claimed for it rests on internal and linguistic evidence rather than on any external dating.]

Syriac. A Syriac version of 1 and 2 Clement is preserved in a Syriac New Testament manuscript dated 1170, the so-called Cambridge Syriac manuscript, published by Robert Lubbock Bensly (R. L. Bensly). The handling of the Clementine letters in this manuscript is itself striking testimony to their standing: rather than being relegated to an appendix, the two letters are inserted among the Catholic Epistles — placed between the Catholic and the Pauline epistles — as though they belonged within the apostolic correspondence. Here, as in Alexandrinus, the physical arrangement of a manuscript registers a quasi-canonical estimate of the text: a scribe and his community treated Clement as fit to keep company with the inspired letters.

Coptic. Finally, 1 Clement survives in Coptic, in two papyrus fragments. One is a Berlin papyrus of the fourth century; the other is a fragment associated with Strasbourg. Both are partial, but both are early, and their dialectal forms (Akhmimic and Sahidic) place them in the early Egyptian transmission of the text. Fragmentary though they are, they extend the geographic and linguistic reach of the witnesses into Coptic Egypt and confirm how widely the letter circulated.

Taken together — Greek in two manuscripts, plus Latin, Syriac, and Coptic — the witnesses to 1 Clement form an unusually broad and early base. For comparison, many of the Apostolic Fathers survive in far thinner attestation; the breadth of the Clementine tradition is itself a measure of how much the early Church valued the letter.

Near-Canonical Early Status

The manuscript evidence does not stand alone. It converges with the testimony of early writers to show a letter that hovered, for a long time, very near the boundary of Scripture without ever finally crossing it.

The most vivid evidence is liturgical. 1 Clement was read aloud in the church of Corinth, in the Sunday assembly, well into the second century. Around AD 170 — roughly a lifetime after the letter was written — Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, wrote to Soter, bishop of Rome, and his words are preserved by Eusebius: “Today we have kept the Lord’s holy day, in which we have read your letter; which we shall ever have to read and be admonished, even as the former one written to us by Clement” (Eusebius, HE 4.23.11 [NPNF II/1]). The Corinthians, in other words, still read Clement’s letter in their worship — read it as they read the new letter from Rome, “to be admonished,” as a text of continuing authority for the community to which it was first addressed. A document was being read liturgically in the very church it had been sent to, generations after its author had died.

The manuscript handling reinforces this picture. As noted, Codex Alexandrinus binds 1 and 2 Clement to the end of the New Testament, and the Syriac inserts them among the canonical epistles. These are not the dispositions of a scribe filing away a merely edifying tract; they are the dispositions of communities that regarded Clement as standing on the threshold of Scripture.

The patristic citations point the same way. Clement of Alexandria quotes 1 Clement repeatedly and with marked reverence, and — most tellingly — he calls its author “the Apostle Clement,” ranking him among the apostolic men whose words carry weight (see, e.g., Stromateis 1.7 and 4.17–18 [ANF Vol. 2]). To style Clement an “apostle” is to place his letter very high indeed. Irenaeus, who preserves the memory of Clement’s place in the Roman succession, and Origen, who knew and valued the letter, likewise treat it as a venerable authority of the sub-apostolic age.

How far did this esteem go toward actual canonicity? The honest answer is: near, but not over the line. In some lists and some regions the letter hovered close to the canon — its appearance in Alexandrinus and in the Syriac is the physical trace of this — and its standing has sometimes been discussed in connection with the antilegomena, the “disputed” books whose canonical status the early Church debated. But the mainstream Church ultimately did not canonize 1 Clement. It came to rest as a revered patristic writing, not as Scripture: read with profit, copied with honor, quoted as an authority, and yet finally distinguished from the inspired books. [Disputed: whether 1 Clement was ever genuinely “canonical” in any local church, as opposed to merely held in the highest esteem and read publicly, is debated; the evidence — liturgical reading at Corinth, binding with the New Testament in Alexandrinus, placement among the epistles in the Syriac — shows borderline handling rather than a settled act of canonization.] The accurate description is one of high and durable esteem: public reading, apostolic-level respect from a writer like Clement of Alexandria, and near-canonical treatment in some quarters, but not final reception into the canon.

The Critical Editions

The entire critical study of 1 Clement rests on the body of evidence sketched above, and the great editions are essentially successive attempts to weigh those witnesses against one another. The monument among them is the edition of J. B. Lightfoot, whose work on Clement appeared first in 1869 and then, transformed by the Bryennios discovery, in the magisterial second edition of 1890 (The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome, 2 vols., Macmillan). Lightfoot’s combination of textual judgment, historical control, and exhaustive annotation has never been wholly superseded.

Alongside and after Lightfoot stand the editions of Gebhardt, Harnack, and Zahn; of Franz Xaver Funk; and the influential text of Karl Bihlmeyer (revising Funk), long a standard for the Apostolic Fathers as a corpus. In the modern English-speaking world the working editions are those of Michael W. Holmes (The Apostolic Fathers, Baker, 2007), whose introduction to 1 Clement lays out the manuscript situation concisely, and Bart D. Ehrman (The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 24, Harvard, 2003), which prints Greek and English on facing pages. All of these rest on the same foundation: Alexandrinus and the Jerusalem Codex for the Greek, controlled by the Latin, Syriac, and Coptic versions — the fourfold attestation that makes 1 Clement, for all the accidents of its survival, one of the better-witnessed texts to come down to us from the age of the Apostolic Fathers.

References

Bryennios, Philotheos. Tou en hagiois patros hēmōn Klēmentos… hai dyo pros Korinthious epistolai. Constantinople, 1875. (The editio princeps of the complete text of 1 and 2 Clement from the Jerusalem Codex.)
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). NPNF, Second Series, Vol. 1. (Cited: HE 4.23.11.)
Clement of Alexandria. Stromateis. ANF Vol. 2. (Cited: Stromateis 1.7; 4.17–18.)
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Introduction to 1 Clement.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part I: S. Clement of Rome. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890. (The monumental critical edition; first edition 1869.)