The First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians

The letter names no author. It opens as a message from “the church of God which sojourns at Rome” to the church at Corinth. The link with Clement comes from the later second century: Dionysius of Corinth, in a letter that Eusebius quotes, speaks of it as written “through Clement”, and Irenaeus says that the church of Rome sent it in the time of Clement, whom he counts third in the succession of bishops there. Its occasion is a dispute at Corinth in which presbyters had been put out of their office, and it calls on those responsible to submit to the presbyters.

The usual date, about AD 96, is an inference. The opening words speak of sudden and repeated misfortunes that delayed the letter, and these are commonly taken to be a persecution under Domitian; the text does not say so, and both earlier and later dates have been proposed. Chapter 5 holds up Peter and Paul as examples “furnished in our own generation” who suffered and died, without saying where or how. Chapters 42 and 44 say that the apostles appointed bishops and deacons and arranged that others should succeed them. Older translations lack part of the ending, because the complete Greek text was first published in 1875.