Clement Among the Apostolic Fathers

Clement of Rome belongs to a small company of writers the whole Church has long regarded as standing closest to the apostolic generation: the Apostolic Fathers. Beside Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna he forms the core of that corpus — three named bishop-figures from Rome, Antioch, and Smyrna, the three great apostolic sees. Reading 1 Clement alongside the letters of Ignatius and the letter of Polycarp sets it in its proper world: a shared concern for ordered ministry, for the witness of the martyrs, for the apostolic deposit against division, and for the Scriptures. It also throws into relief what is distinctive in Clement — the long, polished, corporate voice of the Roman church writing to another church about its internal affairs.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

What the “Apostolic Fathers” Are

The phrase “Apostolic Fathers” denotes a small, conventionally fixed group of early Christian writings — and their named or anonymous authors — traditionally regarded as standing nearest to the apostolic generation, roughly the period c. 90–150. They are not Scripture, and the Church has never received them as such; nor are they, with the partial exception of Irenaeus’s masters, the great theological synthesizers of the later second century. They occupy the ground between: the first Christian writings after the New Testament, by men who in several cases had known the apostles or their immediate hearers. As a group they are the Church’s primary uninspired witnesses to the faith and order of the generation that received the apostolic preaching firsthand.

The corpus is a matter of scholarly convention rather than ancient definition, and its membership has varied slightly over time. By the usual modern reckoning it comprises: 1 Clement (and the homily conventionally called 2 Clement); the seven authentic letters of Ignatius of Antioch; the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians (together with the Martyrdom of Polycarp); the Didache; the Epistle of Barnabas; the Shepherd of Hermas; the Epistle to Diognetus; and the surviving fragments of Papias of Hierapolis. Holmes’s standard edition gathers precisely these texts (Holmes 2007), as does Ehrman’s Loeb (Ehrman 2003); Jefford surveys the same body of writings (Jefford 2012). Some of these works circulated for a time on the fringes of the canon — 1 Clement and the Shepherd both appear in or near early canonical lists and in major biblical manuscripts — which is part of why they are grouped together as standing so close to the apostolic age.

The label itself is comparatively late. “Apostolic Fathers” (Latin patres apostolici) is a seventeenth-century scholarly coinage. It is generally traced to the 1672 edition of these texts by the French patristic scholar Jean-Baptiste Cotelier (Cotelerius), who collected the writings he judged to belong to men of the apostolic period; the convenient class-name and its fixed membership were then consolidated by later editors. The term is therefore a modern organizing category, not an ancient title these writers claimed for themselves. It is nonetheless a useful one, because it marks a real historical layer of the tradition: the documents that bridge the New Testament and the mature second-century fathers such as Irenaeus.

Within this corpus three figures stand out as the named, datable, bishop-associated authors at its core: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna. The Didache, Barnabas, the Shepherd, Diognetus, and the Papias fragments are anonymous, pseudonymous, or survive only in pieces; but Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp give us three named churchmen, securely located in three of the greatest sees of the apostolic Church, writing within roughly two generations of the apostles. They are the three pillars of the Apostolic Fathers, and it is among them that Clement is most naturally read.

Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp — The Three Pillars

The three are best taken in their chronological order, which is also roughly their geographical order from west to east and back. Clement is the earliest. 1 Clement, the letter of the Roman church to the church at Corinth, is conventionally dated c. 96, in the closing years of the emperor Domitian (see The Letter to the Corinthians). It is thus very probably the oldest Christian writing outside the New Testament whose date and provenance can be fixed with reasonable confidence, and it stands at the Roman, western end of the apostolic chain.

Ignatius of Antioch follows about a decade or so later. Bishop of the Syrian metropolis of Antioch, he was condemned and sent under guard to Rome to be killed in the arena, and on the journey he wrote seven letters — to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans, and a personal letter to Polycarp. His martyrdom is conventionally placed in the reign of Trajan, c. 107–117. (The authenticity and dating of the Ignatian corpus have been among the most disputed questions in patristics; the now-standard view accepts the seven letters in their “middle recension” as genuine and early, against a longer interpolated recension and a shorter Syriac epitome — a critical settlement largely owed to J. B. Lightfoot. [Disputed: the precise dating of Ignatius — whether the traditional Trajanic c. 110 or a date a generation later — remains contested in modern scholarship; the file follows the conventional early dating.]) Ignatius writes from Antioch, the eastern, Syrian end of the chain.

Polycarp of Smyrna is the third, and he reaches furthest into the second century. Bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor, he is reported by Irenaeus to have been a disciple of the Apostle John, so that in his own person he was a living link to the apostolic generation (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4; cf. Eusebius, HE 4.14, 5.20 [NPNF II/1]). His one surviving work is the Letter to the Philippians. He was martyred at a great age at Smyrna, conventionally c. 155/156, and his death is narrated in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the earliest detailed Christian martyr-act outside the New Testament.

The three are not merely contemporaries gathered by editors; they are historically interconnected. Ignatius passed through Smyrna on his way to Rome and there met Polycarp, to whom he addressed one of his seven letters. Polycarp in turn, writing to the Philippians, refers to the letters of Ignatius and tells the Philippians that he is sending them the collection he has gathered (Polycarp, To the Philippians 13; trans. Holmes 2007). It is largely through Polycarp’s act of collecting and forwarding that the Ignatian corpus survived at all — so that the letters of the Antiochene bishop and the letter of the Smyrnaean bishop are bound together in their very transmission. And because Polycarp had heard the Apostle John, and Irenaeus of Lyons had in turn heard Polycarp (Eusebius, HE 5.20), there runs through these men a continuous chain of personal testimony from the apostles into the late second century (see The Chain of Tradition and St. Irenaeus of Lyons). Clement stands at the Roman end of this chain, Ignatius at Antioch, Polycarp at Smyrna: the three great sees of the apostolic Church are each represented by one of the three pillars of the Apostolic Fathers.

Shared Concerns

Read together, the three reveal a common pastoral and theological world, with instructive differences of emphasis.

Church Order and Ministry

All three are deeply concerned with the ordered ministry of the Church, but here lies their most significant and most discussed difference. Ignatius is the great witness to the threefold ministry — one bishop, a college of presbyters, and deacons — and to what is usually called the monarchical episcopate. Again and again he insists that the church gathers around its single bishop as the image of unity: “Let no one do anything that has to do with the church without the bishop” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.1; trans. Holmes 2007); “Be eager to do everything in godly harmony, the bishop presiding in the place of God and the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and the deacons … entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 6.1; trans. Holmes 2007). For Ignatius the threefold order is the visible structure of the one Church.

1 Clement, written perhaps fifteen years earlier and from Rome, presents a strikingly different picture. It speaks of the apostles appointing “bishops and deacons” (1 Clement 42.4; trans. Holmes 2007), and elsewhere of “presbyters,” using episkopos (overseer/bishop) and presbyteros (elder/presbyter) in a way that does not yet distinguish a single bishop from the body of presbyters; it names no individual bishop of Corinth or of Rome, and writes throughout in the corporate voice of a church rather than of one episcopal head. This is a key datum in the history of church order: the fully articulated single-bishop pattern that Ignatius takes for granted in Antioch and Asia c. 110 is not yet visible in the Roman letter to Corinth c. 96. The difference is best presented soberly, as evidence of development in the shape of the ministry between Rome c. 96 and Antioch/Asia c. 110, rather than as contradiction; the underlying concern — that ministry is apostolic in origin and that order must be preserved — is fully shared. The Clementine material is treated at length in Order and the Ministry.

Martyrdom

Martyrdom is central to all three. Ignatius longs for it openly, begging the Roman Christians not to obstruct his death: “Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4.1; trans. Holmes 2007). Polycarp’s death is the prototype martyr-act, narrated in the Martyrdom of Polycarp and consciously patterned on the passion of Christ. And Clement praises the martyr-witness of Peter and Paul as the supreme recent examples of endurance, recalling Peter’s many labors and Paul’s witness “before the rulers” and his departure “to the holy place” (1 Clement 5; trans. Holmes 2007). For all three, the witness unto death is not a peripheral theme but the crown of Christian discipleship (cross-link The Apostles in Rome).

The Rule of Faith and Apostolic Tradition

All three appeal to the apostolic deposit and set concord and unity against division. Clement writes to heal the Corinthian schism, in which a faction had deposed lawful presbyters, and grounds his appeal in the orderly succession the apostles established (1 Clement 42–44). Ignatius warns against both docetists — who denied the reality of Christ’s flesh — and schismatics who separate from the bishop. Polycarp writes against error (he calls anyone who denies the resurrection and the judgment “the firstborn of Satan,” To the Philippians 7; trans. Holmes 2007) and exhorts the Philippians to hold fast to “the word delivered to us from the beginning.” In each case the appeal is to what was received from the apostles, against innovation and faction.

Use of Scripture

All three saturate their writing in the Old Testament in its Greek (Septuagint) form and show clear knowledge of New Testament writings, especially the Pauline letters. Clement, writing to Corinth, naturally recalls Paul’s own First Corinthians (1 Clement 47); he also draws on a wide range of OT texts and is distinctive among the Apostolic Fathers for his heavy use of the Epistle to the Hebrews, on which his Christology of the high priest and his treatment of faith and the heroes of old plainly depend. Ignatius and Polycarp likewise echo Pauline language throughout; Polycarp’s letter is in places a tissue of New Testament allusions. The shared posture is that of men steeped in the apostolic writings, citing them as authoritative even before the New Testament canon was formally closed.

The Distinctive Roman Cast of 1 Clement

Set beside the other two, 1 Clement has a character of its own. The most obvious feature is its length and rhetorical polish. Where Ignatius’s letters are short and urgent and Polycarp’s is modest and brief, 1 Clement is a long, carefully constructed composition that deploys the conventions of Greco-Roman rhetoric — above all the rhetoric of homonoia, “concord” or “like-mindedness,” a well-developed theme in the political oratory of the age. The Roman church writes to Corinth as a city writing to a city about the restoration of civic and ecclesial harmony, marshalling examples from nature, from Scripture, and from history to commend peace over faction.

Its voice is corporate and anonymous. The letter speaks not in the name of an individual bishop — Clement is named nowhere in the text itself; the attribution rests on early and consistent tradition (Eusebius, HE 3.16, 3.38 [NPNF II/1]) — but in the name of “the church of God that sojourns in Rome” addressing “the church of God that sojourns in Corinth.” This is the opposite of Ignatius, whose letters are intensely personal and centered on his own episcopal office and impending death, and different again from Polycarp’s, which speaks pastorally in his own name but without Ignatian self-disclosure.

Its situation is also distinctive: one church writing about another church’s internal affairs. Rome intervenes — with grave courtesy, but unmistakably — in the Corinthian quarrel, urging the restoration of the deposed presbyters. This single fact is the seed of the later primacy question, and it is worth flagging here precisely because it cannot be settled here: whether the letter evidences an early Roman primacy of authority or simply the fraternal admonition of one church to another is a genuine and long-standing scholarly debate, set out in full and from both sides in The Primacy Debate. The present file only notes that the form of the intervention — a church reaching beyond its own borders to order another’s affairs — is part of what makes 1 Clement distinctive among the three.

Finally, the letter’s theological texture is its own. It carries a Stoic-tinged cosmology, dwelling on the harmonious ordering of creation — the ordered procession of the seasons, the sea kept within its bounds, the heavenly bodies in their courses — as a model for the harmony that ought to govern the Church (1 Clement 19–20). And it appeals to the Old Testament priesthood and its appointed orders — the high priest, the priests, the Levites, the layman each in his proper place (1 Clement 40–41) — as a divine pattern of order, in service of its argument that the ministry too has its appointed ranks and may not be overturned by faction. This priestly-cosmic argument for order has no close parallel in Ignatius or Polycarp.

Orthodox Veneration

In the Orthodox Church all three are venerated as holy hieromartyrs and numbered among the Apostolic Fathers. Clement, traditionally martyred under Trajan, is commemorated and is named in the ancient anaphoras and synaxaria of the Church; Ignatius the God-bearer (Theophoros) and Polycarp are likewise honored as bishops who sealed their teaching with their blood. Together they are received not as inspired authors on a level with the apostles, but as the Church’s foremost human witnesses to the faith and order of the generation immediately after the apostles — the men through whom the shape of the post-apostolic Church first comes clearly into view.

That is their abiding significance. The Apostolic Fathers in general, and Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp in particular, form the bridge from the apostles to the great theology of the later second century. The personal chain — John to Polycarp, Polycarp to Irenaeus — runs straight through this company, and it is in Irenaeus of Lyons that their concerns for the rule of faith, the apostolic succession, and the unity of the Church are gathered up into the first sustained theological synthesis of the patristic age (see St. Irenaeus of Lyons and, on the place of the fathers in Orthodox theology, The Church Fathers). To read Clement among the Apostolic Fathers is to see him as the Roman beginning of that bridge.

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. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library 24–25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers. Part I: S. Clement of Rome. Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. London: Macmillan, 1885–1890.
Jefford, Clayton N. Reading the Apostolic Fathers: A Student’s Introduction. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012.