The Epistle of 1 Clement, a diplomatic letter from elders in Rome to the Christian community in Corinth seeking to persuade them to return to a more orderly appointment of leadership after a recent internal rebellion of sorts, ultimately didn’t make it into the New Testament canon. But in my professional opinion it is not only the earliest surviving Christian text not to, it is substantially earlier than half the New Testament itself. Nothing else outside the NT can even be established to the first century, much less to the time of Paul. Claims made for the likes of the Didache are pure speculation; whereas the evidence that 1 Clement is as early as I am saying is comparatively solid. I thus allow it to be an early text in my study On the Historicity of Jesus. Though that is not necessary to the conclusions I draw from it, an assurance of its early date would actually strengthen those conclusions’ certainty.
This has now become a problem for historicists. More usually they had before tried arguing that 1 Clement attests to a historical Jesus, and thus were happy for the possibility of its earlier date, as that would bolster their argument—after all, to have someone attesting Jesus’s historicity before the Gospels would be prize evidence. But as soon as it was shown that 1 Clement does not attest to a historical Jesus but in fact so conspicuously lacks any knowledge of one as to actually be evidence against his existence, now an early date for it becomes an alarming problem. “Shit. We can’t have that!” Historicists scramble in desperation. It’s all hands on deck.
Here I will summarize why so many scholars instead doubt “the traditional date” of 1 Clement, and indeed why more than one has concluded it can only date to the 60s. The impact of this letter’s content on the historicity debate either way I won’t query here (you can read about that in On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 8.5). The majority position (for a date in the 90s) is actually a paradigmatic example of an ill-founded consensus. While all other peer-reviewed studies accepting its early date or doubting its traditional date are by historicists; so this isn’t some mythicist ruse. We didn’t make this up. We’re just agreeing with those historicists who already reached this conclusion.
And we side with them because we can tell their arguments hold up; whereas the arguments of their opponents are, honestly, vacuous. They just keep circularly repeating the tradition, quite uncritically, without any sound argument for believing it—a common problem in Jesus studies. As with almost everything to do with Jesus, when you start looking at the facts and pulling at threads, nearly every “traditional” consensus falls apart as unfounded and indefensible. Which is because it’s mostly composed of an accumulated mass of fossilized “faith doctrines” that too few ever think to question. The dating of 1 Clement is a prime example.
How the Case for c. 95 A.D. Falls Apart
There are really only two arguments for the “traditional” date of 1 Clement, both originating with that most disreputable of Christian historians, Eusebius (Church History 3.4.10 and 3.15-17), who in the 4th century declares that “Clement” just happens to be the name of a bishop of Rome serving in some (but not all) accounts during the reign of Emperor Domitian (even though no such office of bishop is ever mentioned as existing in the letter itself); and that 1 Clement 1.1 refers to a recent persecution at Rome, and “therefore” it refers to the persecutions suffered under Domitian, which supposedly ended sometime before his assassination in 96 A.D. This is too many steps of inference; and every one is weak.
The letter itself actually never says it was written by anyone named Clement; much less a specific bishop or elder of that name. The letter was known under such a name by the end of the second century, but we have no evidence anyone actually knew that was its author, rather than that just being someone’s guess. But even if written by a Clement, that tells us nothing of when it was written; the letter does not declare its author (or anyone) yet bishop or even a principal leader (so it could have been written long before that, even by someone who decades later became “bishop of Rome”), and records disagree on when any “bishop” of Clement served his tenure anyway—and none present any source for their information, so none can be confirmed reliable; least of all as the letter of 1 Clement itself makes clear there was no central authority over all or even any of churches to then claim. That was a later invention. The idea didn’t exist yet when the letter was written. So we can’t link its writing to Clement’s later bishopric.
But more problematic still is that there is no evidence the author is referring to a “Domitianic” persecution in the letter. That is purely conjecture. And conjecture in, conjecture out. That makes the date of this letter just a proposal, not an evidenced or even arguable fact. Even worse, that persecution appears to be a myth. It therefore can’t have been a historical event the author of 1 Clement was referring to as recently having happened. As biblical historian Mark Wilson says, in “Alternative Facts: Domitian’s Persecution of Christians,” Bible History Daily (3 May 2022), quoting biblical historian (and expert on the Book of Revelation) Leonard Thompson, “most modern commentators,” including historians of Domitian like Brian Jones, “no longer accept a Domitianic persecution of Christians,” because the evidence for it simply falls apart on inspection. It was another Myth of Persecution. I have noted this before (Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 156-57; OHJ, p. 273 n. 40).
To see how the Domitianic persecution was fabricated, compare Eusebius, Church History 3.19 with the original story as preserved in Cassius Dio, Roman History 67.14 (cf. Suetonius, Domitian 10), where no mention of Christianity is to be found, even though Dio certainly knew by then the difference between Christians and Jews (or atheists for that matter; so did Suetonius). The legend that Christians were involved first appears in Eusebius, a known fourth-century fabricator of first century Christian history. Although he may be getting the idea from a lost work of Hegesippus about a century earlier (he is vague on that point). But Christians were generally fond of rewriting history to place Christians in stories they were not previously in (see The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies). And Hegesippus is known to have been even less reliable on points like this than Eusebius (OHJ, Ch. 8.8).
In fact, Eusebius’s claim that a Clement was bishop of Rome in the 90s also comes from Hegesippus, himself writing up his legends roughly a century after the fact, and evidently constructing this chronology on his own (Eusebius, Church History 4.22.3: διαδοχὴν ἐποιησάμην μέχρις, “I made a list up to” his present time of the bishops at Rome—in other words, not from any stated sources, much less any we can discern to be reliable; it’s a list he was, evidently, first to construct). Conspicuously, Eusebius has no sources to cite anywhere near the time of Clement himself, or even Clement’s entire century, for any of this—whether the dates of Clement, or the reality of any persecution under Domitian, or any facts at all to do with who wrote 1 Clement and when, or any connection between Clement’s reference to recent problems and any persecution at all, much less under Domitian.
And that’s it. There is no other evidence for the traditional dating of 1 Clement. It appears to be at best a fabrication of Hegesippus a century later based on specious inferences and weak assumptions. Modern scholars have noticed.
Even L.L. Welborn tears apart the logic of these arguments in “The Preface to 1 Clement: The Rhetorical Situation and the Traditional Date,” in Encounters with Hellenism: Studies on the First Letter of Clement (edited by C. Breytenbach and L.L. Welborn; published by Brill in 2004; pp. 197–216). He cites there many other scholars who did so before him as well. Welborn himself concludes the letter must still be late, between 80 and 140 A.D., owing solely to his belief that the letter refers in §44 to multiple intervening generations since Paul. It does not; it actually indicates some of those appointed to lead congregations by the original apostles are still living, and only some of those have died and been replaced.
Since Clement is writing thirty years after the mission began, and average life expectancy for adults then was 48 (a fact of which Welborn might not be aware), and most leaders (if not all) will have been appointed already as elders (and thus already near or past average life expectancy thirty years ago), we fully expect deaths among this group to have occurred by then. Paul himself already mentioned a decade earlier that the deaths of converts was becoming a theological problem (1 Cor. 15:6 & 51-52, 1 Thess. 4:13-18); and leaders, as elders, will have been among the first to go. Clement even tells us that Paul and Peter were among those having recently died (and thus been replaced). In fact it is not a given that any apostles were still alive by Clement’s writing. We have no reliable sources attesting otherwise. Yet this does not make Clement late, because average year at death was considerably lower then than now, and leadership (apostles included) will have trended older from the start.
H. Benedict Green, in “Matthew, Clement and Luke: Their Sequence and Relationship,” The Journal of Theological Studies NS 40.1 (April 1989), pp. 1-25, and L. Michael White, in From Jesus to Christianity (pp. 335-40), agree with Welborn that 1 Clement was written in the second century on much the same reasoning: all arguments for the traditional date simply aren’t sound, as just noted (they both demonstrate this persuasively); and yet they incorrectly imagine it speaks of many generations after the deaths of Peter and Paul (Green also advances dubious arguments that 1 Clement used Mark and Matthew as sources and was a source used by Luke—none of which is plausible, as we’ll see shortly). But once you recognize the traditional date is baseless, a pre-war date enters play, and has been argued for over a century (from George Edmundson in 1913 to A. E. Wilhelm-Hooijbergh in 1975). J.A.T. Robinson, for example, in Redating the New Testament (1976; Wipf and Stock 2000; pp. 141-50) argued for the recent “persecution” Clement refers to being that, indeed, of Nero in 64 A.D. The historical reality of that persecution is also doubtful, though it at least has more evidence to commend it than Domitian’s. That means Robinson’s inference is stronger than the traditional; so if even it is unpersuasive, the traditional inference is even more unpersuasive.
The best and most thorough demonstration that 1 Clement in fact had to have been written in the 60s A.D. is Thomas Herron’s 1988 doctoral dissertation at Pontifical Gregorian University. A summary of its argument was then published as “The Most Probable Date of the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians” in Studia Patristica 21 (1989): 106-121. The full dissertation was then published as Clement and the Early Church of Rome: On the Dating of Clement’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (Saint Paul Center for Biblical Theology, 1989; now under its imprint Emmaus Road, 2010). So his thesis passed peer review three separate times; and indeed after winning acclaim for it, Herron was praised as a scholar by none other than Pope Ratzinger himself. His work on this point has since persuaded Clayton Jefford to endorse this redating of 1 Clement in Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament (Baker Academic; pp. 15–19) and Andrew Gregory agrees this should now be included in the range of possible dates in “Disturbing Trajectories: 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Development of Early Roman Christianity” in Rome, The Bible and the Early Church, ed. P. Oakes (Paternoster, 2002; pp. 142–166) as well as in “I Clement: An Introduction” in The Expository Times 117.6 (2006; pp. 223–230).
How the Case for c. 65 A.D. Holds Up
It’s important to note that 1 Clement isn’t strictly speaking an Epistle, but a kind of Homily: it was a speech intended to be read aloud to the congregation, making an argument for a shift in internal politics. It is classified as an Epistle only because it was sent by messenger across the sea from Italy to Greece. But its genre (and thus its length and structure and aim) has more in common with ancient speechwriting (such as we find in Lysias or Cicero). The New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews appears to have served the same function and belongs to the same genre of composition. The two can be productively compared (and contrasted with the other Epistles). They also most likely date to the same decade (OHJ, Ch. 11.5), and scholars have long noted some evidence exists that one may have been aware of the other (the 3rd century scholar Origen even declared they had the same author). But I won’t explore that here.
What’s relevant at present are the arguments this speech employs to have its intended effect, of ending a sort of coup at Corinth, where some younger men were attempting to replace the appointed elders and take over the church there, prompting those elders to send an embassy to the church in Rome for advice, resulting in this letter. 1 Clement is written in the first person plural, and addressed as from the congregation of Rome, not a bishop or apostle or elder, or appointee or representative of any of those, or any other specific authority. That no such authority is asserted, entails none existed when it was written. Nor did any exist at Corinth. The only office in contention was presbyter, “elder,” and in fact plural not singular (elders), a bishopric not having been invented yet, nor any singular office of authority, at either Corinth or Rome; nor of Rome over Corinth. For the letter is an act of persuasion; it never asserts any kind of hierarchical authority the Corinthians are expected to obey. Hence the most they could do is make an appeal to their sister church.
What the usurpers’ actual grievances were are never addressed in this appeal; its argument is solely one of maintaining (and thus returning to) the established order. The letter was delivered by messengers instructed to wait around to see its effect before reporting back. These messengers are named (Claudius Ephebus, Valerius Bito, and Fortunatus) but the authors are not. Written as a joint letter from the community at Rome (which no doubt meant in practice the elders at Rome—defending their counterparts, the elders at Corinth) it would appear to be a letter composed essentially by committee. It probably had no name attached to it originally (just as Hebrews does not); the name “Clement” may have been assigned to it at some later point; or may have been the secretary identified as transcribing it, in any accompanying cover-letter now lost (which also would have preserved its actual date).
It is in this context that the arguments made in this letter are that the will of the apostles (in selecting leaders, and in how to select leaders) should not be disrespected; whatever grievances there may be should be simply endured patiently in emulation of their Biblical and contemporary heroes; and that examples from then to now show that rebellion (and any kind of envying power or primacy) is always bad. At Corinth everything was wonderful and perfect before they started this trouble; now everything is terrible; therefore they should go back to the way things were. Betrayal is bad. Obedience to tradition is good. And to make this case, they literally start by arguing from the example of Cain and Abel, then reference the ills that came from similar impolitic envy throughout the stories of Esau, Joseph, Moses, and David. Heck, they argue, even Dathan and Abiram were literally swallowed by hell for daring to rebel against the authority of Moses! Take note, young’uns!
At this point (§5.1) they declare, “But not to dwell upon ancient examples, let us come to the most recent spiritual heroes. Let us take the noble examples furnished in our own generation,” and literally they say “happening most recently” (tous eggista genomenous) in “our own generation” (tēs geneas hēmōn), and then they reference the murders of Peter and Paul, which are not narrated, but are ascribed to “envy” and thus are used as examples of the bad shit that results from it. Notably, the letter does not mention the execution of James (so either he didn’t exist, or wasn’t yet killed) nor does it say either Peter or Paul were killed in Rome, which strongly suggests they were thought to have died somewhere else at this point; indeed, they specifically indicate Paul died in Spain (see Was Paul Actually Killed in Rome? and my ensuing grammatical analysis), and had Peter died in Rome, the authors surely would make note of it (some scholars thus suspect now that Peter died in Jerusalem; although there is no better evidence for that conclusion than any other).
This means that later legends of Peter and Paul dying in Rome (which also don’t refer to the particular Neronian persecution described in Tacitus; which itself might not have actually involved Christians) would appear to be fabrications. The true accounts of what happened to them were lost even to Christians a generation later; but were in some way known to the authors of 1 Clement and their Corinthian audience, well enough to reference without further description. Since it is generally agreed both Peter and Paul died after Paul’s letters conclude but before the Jewish War commenced (and hence between roughly 59 and 66 A.D.), 1 Clement can date no earlier than that window of time. But a date in the 90s would be almost a lifetime later, thirty some years; that’s not likely to make Peter and Paul “the most recent” martyrs to cite. They’d be a whole generation ago, not of the same generation as the young men this letter is speaking to and attempting to persuade.
1 Clement goes on to mention “a great many of the elect” and certain “women” suffering martyrdom in recent times as well, but does not specify when or where, or even whether at the same time. The grammar suggests not, but rather that these are miscellaneous separate events, albeit known to the Corinthians well enough to reference, and also again recent. The authors then turn to eternal examples from everyday life: “Envy has alienated wives from their husbands” and “Envy and strife have overthrown great cities, and rooted up mighty nations.” These complete a series of increasingly generic examples after all their specific examples were exhausted: moving from there to martyrs generally, then marriages generally, then world history generally.
So the opportunity here to mention the greatest example of all—the destruction of the entire Judean nation and the very temple and holy city of the Jews, reflecting the fate of rebellious men acting through envy against God’s appointed world order—is conspicuously missed. If “through pride and sedition” we ought not “rashly yield ourselves to the inclinations of men who aim at exciting strife and tumults” because the outcome will be disastrous (§14), if peace and obedience over ambition and rebellion is what we must be persuaded to pursue at all costs (§15, 19, 20), then what better example could there have been of their very point? Yet they can only appeal to the example of the fate of Pharaoh’s armies against Moses (§51); no event more recent, not to mention as poignant, as the Jewish War itself. These authors clearly had never heard of any such event to use as an example. And the most likely reason is—it hadn’t happened yet.
It is especially impossible to imagine the authors could be writing after the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed, and the liturgical rites no longer performed there—and yet still use these as an extant example for the Corinthians to follow (§40–41). God, they say, “has enjoined offerings and service to be performed” at “the appointed times and hours,” “fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things, being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him,” and therefore “those who present their offerings at the appointed times are accepted and blessed.” Indeed, “Not in every place, brethren,” the letter says, “are these daily sacrifices offered,” but “in Jerusalem only,” and “even there they are not offered in any place, but only at the altar before the temple” and “by the high priest,” such that, by contrast, “those who do anything beyond that which is agreeable to His will are punished with death.”
That argument would drop like a lead balloon if God had literally just destroyed those priests and eradicated that very temple, and its service was no longer going on anywhere, much less “Jerusalem” (which in 95 A.D. was an uninhabited ruin). At the very least the authors of 1 Clement would have to apologetically modify their argument to address (and maybe capitalize) on the opposite having happened: the fact that God crushed and ended this temple service, rather than continually willed and blessed it; that indeed death did not come to those who stopped doing it, but those who had been faithfully doing it. At the very least they would have had to change their present into the past tense. But most likely of all, the authors would have converted their analogy into a lesson about the perils of envy—how the rebellious failures of the Jews and their priesthood resulted in ending their congregation and temple service once and for all. Instead, the authors advance an argument that only works, one that is only persuasive (rather than self-defeating), if the temple cult still exists and is actively supported by God. Which is impossible. Unless the War had not yet occurred. That requires a date before 70 at the very least; though an active war in Judea would still create problems for this argument, so it seems composed assuredly before 66. No way in 95.
Finally, 1 Clement knows nothing in the Gospels—evidently, those stories hadn’t been invented yet. So unless you are going to push all the Gospels into the second century, to give time for them to be written “after” 1 Clement is published in the 90s A.D., you again have to accept that it was most likely written before the 70s A.D. (the most likely, and the earliest plausible, date for Mark). This concurs with the previous information pointing to exactly the same conclusion, so we have two separate points of evidence converging on the same conclusion. It’s hard to escape the weight of that.
1 Clement “never once places Jesus in history or ever tells any stories about him, never uses his stories as an example for anything (despite the letter being a long series of arguments by example), nor ever quotes anything Jesus says in the Gospels” even when it would clinch several of its arguments (OHJ, p. 309). Indeed, “of all the dozens of stories Clement summarizes as examples for Christians to follow, all come from” the Old Testament and recent martyrology, “none from any Gospel or anything in the life of Jesus” (Ibid., p. 314). Even when Jesus appearing to the Apostles is mentioned in §42 (and like Paul, the authors of 1 Clement never call them Disciples; they, too, had never heard of such a thing):
There is no mention here of Jesus being born, preaching a ministry in Galilee, teaching the gospel to thousands (as opposed to only the apostles having received it), performing miracles or signs that proved who he was, being executed by Pilate or any detail at all that would connect Jesus to a historical narrative. Instead, Jesus is sent directly from God only to the apostles. And the apostles are the only ones who could tell us about it.
I list many specific examples of Clement’s ignorance of the Gospels in OHJ (Ch. 8.5):
- None of the parables of Jesus are brought to bear to illustrate any of their lessons (the dangers of envy and rebellion; their mission of peace and harmony; the necessity of humility; hewing to the ministry over selfish interests).
- Despite it being a powerful, exactly-on-point analogy for the entire purpose of the letter (to persuade the Corinthians that betrayal and rebellion out of envy or sin leads to disaster), and despite their using a long list of other examples to make this point by (§4-6), the authors never think to offer the example of Judas.
- When they say that everyone should accept their place and serve one another and not try to be exalted (§37-38), they don’t think to tell the story about how Jesus admonished James and John on that very same point (Mk. 10:35-35).
- They cannot even adduce any story of Jesus’ humility and submission to include among their examples admonishing the Corinthians to be humble and submissive (§14-15); they can only assure them that the Old Testament says Jesus was humble and submissive (§16).
- In §16 they say “the Holy Spirit” tells us that Christ “did not come in the pomp of pride or arrogance . . . but in a lowly condition,” and then cite Isaiah 53. Not any actual story about or witness to Jesus.
- In §43 they can only muster the example of Moses dictating to his disciples their executive authority over the church and resolving their rivalries. Not a single example of this from the Gospels (like Mt. 19:28 or 16:18-19; or the Great Commission; or, again, Mk. 10:35-35).
- In §45 they can only muster examples from the Old Testament (e.g. Daniel in the Lion’s Den) to teach that the righteous do not persecute, only the wicked, and that the hero endures it and is vindicated. Nothing from the Passion Narrative of Jesus, a more obvious example.
- Apostles are mentioned, but never any of Jesus’s biological brothers, despite later legend imagining them as top-ranking leaders of the movement (and neither is the martyrdom of any of them mentioned, despite those legends placing such around the same time as Peter and Paul).
- Sayings of Jesus are quoted, but never anything from the Gospels; rather they simply quote the Old Testament (see The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus), as in §8, §22, §24-26, §30, §45, or otherwise unknown sayings.
- For example, Clement once quotes Jesus’s commandments not matching any Gospel (§13)—and even though each commandment on his list is expanded into more elaborate teachings, parables and stories in the Gospels, Clement never uses or references any of them.
- Clement also quotes the line from the Psalms as about Jesus, “Thou art my Son, today have I begotten Thee” (§36, §59), yet he has no evident knowledge this comes from a story of his Baptism; he only knows of it from the Psalms.
- Even the lone exception evinces no knowledge of the Gospels: the “Woe to that man!” saying Clement has no idea of ever being connected to Judas (§46), but instead knows only as a preface to the “millstone” prophecy, which the Gospels relocate to an entirely different place and story, which Clement also exhibits no knowledge of (OHJ, pp. 311–12).
- Likewise, when the authors of 1 Clement say God promised that Jesus would sit at his right hand (§36), they don’t seem to know that Jesus also said this (Mk. 14:62) or that a witness saw Jesus seated there (Acts 7:55).
- When they want to prove that all things are obedient to God (§27), not a single instance of Jesus exorcising demons or doing miracles is mentioned as evidence, nor any of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels that made the same point; not even the Gethsemane Scene.
- When they need examples of men of honor being killed by unjust authorities (§45–46), Jesus doesn’t make the list; nor the beheading of John the Baptist or the stoning of Stephen.
More examples are surveyed by Herron. So there is no possible way to validly argue that 1 Clement had ever heard of any of the Gospels or any of the particular content of any of the Gospels. Which for the entire church congregation at Rome is impossible in the 90s A.D. It is only possible before the 70s A.D. In fact not even the oral lore that the Gospels are supposed to be based on was apparently known to any Christian then. Clearly, it was all invented later. But that can’t be after the 90s.
Concurring with all this, 1 Clement mentions that some of the elders who were deposed in the recent coup had been appointed by the very apostles themselves (§42-44); which would mean in this case, by Paul, as he founded the Corinthian congregation sometime around 50 A.D. If Clement was written before 66, then Paul’s appointments at Corinth would have been about sixteen years earlier, quite a long time by ancient life-standards. “We are of the opinion,” the letter says, “that those appointed by them,” meaning the Apostles, “or afterwards by other eminent men,” meaning by men the Apostles appointed, “cannot be justly dismissed from the ministry.” The use of “or” here indicates some of those the apostles themselves appointed are still around, and are even among those deposed in this rebellion (whatever it had actually been about), and are thus being defended here for reinstatement. Not many persons appointed by Paul to such an office would even still be alive in the mid-to-late 90s. If any were as young as thirty when designated an elder in 50 A.D. (and they could hardly have been younger, and were more likely older), they’d have to be in their 70s by the mid-90s, at a survival odds of around 1 in 33. Which, sure, is possible. But the situation the letter is describing fits the 60s A.D. at better odds, by which time only a third to a half of men in their 30s ten to fifteen years prior will have died.
The same goes for 1 Clement’s remark in §47 that some of the young men who deposed the elders at Corinth were themselves alive when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians (“even then you” picked sides), which is described as happening at their founding (“at the beginning of” Paul’s ministry). That is literally impossible for the 90s (no such person could then be described as young—they’d be quite aged by then) but exactly fits the 60s. Men in their teens in 50 A.D. would be in their twenties in the 60s; and men in their twenties, then in their thirties. 1 Clement does not describe this as a long past tradition among the Corinthians that they should recollect and apply to their present time; it quite clearly imagines them as having been there, and thus capable of being admonished for what Paul had then chided them for. As Herron puts it, the authors do “not say ‘your fathers made themselves partisans’ or ‘in the past factionalism took hold'” of your church. The authors actually aver that they did that.
Can Anything Be Said against This?
There is no argument capable of overcoming the enormous weight of all that evidence. You will find in the literature some attempts nevertheless. For example, Clement refers to “sudden and repeated misfortunes and setbacks” (tas aiphnidious kai epallēlous . . . sumphoras kai periptōseis) in the church at Rome that have delayed his writing to them (§1). But as several of the scholars I cited above have pointed out, that’s hopelessly vague, and completely indeterminate. Indeed the literal meaning is “events and occurrences,” not disasters and calamities. Calling them “misfortunes and setbacks” is a remotely possible meaning but typically requires context to assert, and here that context is being imported by modern assumptions; it does not exist in the text of 1 Clement itself. And since we have no detailed history of the church after 60 A.D., we literally don’t know what all events or incidents it could be referring to. Indeed, it could mean internal dissensions such as those at Corinth (indeed, the letter even implies this in §7), or natural deaths of important church leaders, sporadic persecutions, financial difficulties, famine. And since the letter’s phrasing means several unexpected “events,” not a singular catastrophic disaster, it’s unlikely it can mean Nero’s purported “great persecution” in 64 A.D. Too many other words exist in Greek to have been used were that the case; no one would call that a mere event or occurrence, nor simply skip past it so casually. So no argument can proceed from there. But even if we were to insist these words must still refer to “misfortunes and setbacks,” despite there being no clear reason to, just the Roman fire alone would suffice to meet that description, as that would have been a calamitous disaster for them without any persecution required.
It is sometimes claimed that when Clement calls the Corinthian church “ancient” that this must mean he is writing a very long time after its founding. But, again, as several of the scholars I cited above have pointed out, the term archaios does not carry exactly the same meaning as the English word; it as readily referred to more recent things than we employ the word to mean (except in jest, as when we call a co-worker “ancient” for having worked there twenty years). As I wrote in OHJ (p. 272 n. 39):
[That word] frequently just means venerable, early-begun, or original: for instance, in Acts 21.16, Mnason, who accompanied an embassy, is called an archaios mathētēs, an ‘early disciple’, which doesn’t even imply he was old (much less ‘ancient’), just that he was with the movement from very early on (and even insofar as he was old, the Corinthian church was in the same sense ‘old’ by the 60s.
Likewise in Acts 15:7, where Christians use the same word to refer to the beginning of their movement barely twenty years prior, when in fact many of those present then are still themselves around to say this. The word thus means more usually in such contexts just “early,” “from the beginning,” not “ancient.”
The same goes for when the authors of 1 Clement in §63 mention sending to the Corinthians an embassy of elderly Christians (gêrous, “old,” typically of 50-70 years age) who had lived ‘blamelessly among us’ since their youth (neotēs):
That meant the period after childhood up to the age of thirty; but he does not say they were converted to Christianity in their youth, only that they were known personally to members of the church at Rome since their youth and in all that time had lived morally upright lives. This is fully consistent with a time period of the 60s.
So these arguments don’t carry water either. In the same fashion, if you look through the cited scholarship, you won’t find any other argument that carries, against what has already been demonstrated. There just isn’t any plausible way to maintain 1 Clement was written after the 60s.
Conclusion
In my study I took a neutral position. “I will not rely on this,” I wrote, but instead “treat it as if it were written either in the early 60s (as I think is most probable) or in the mid 90s (as is traditional and most generally assumed)” (OHJ, p. 273). But there really is no basis for continuing to accept the traditional date of 1 Clement of 95 A.D. That is based on late, unsourced, and implausible legends; indeed legends based on factually false claims about the context of its writing (there was no Domitianic persecution that it could be reacting to; there was no bishopric when 1 Clement was written) and unprovable conjectures (we don’t reliably know anyone named Clement wrote it, much less a specific Clement in a specific decade). By contrast, 1 Clement’s complete ignorance of the contents of the Gospels and the Jewish War and its outcomes unquestionably dates it prior to both; while its mention of Paul’s recent death ensures it post-dates his authentic letters, which were completed by the end of the 50s, leaving the early 60s as the only possible date of 1 Clement’s writing.
The author may or may not have been named Clement; but they were certainly among the leaders of the Christian movement in Rome, and concerned about the administration of distant churches even though incapable of commanding their obedience. And this means accepting an early date for 1 Clement creates two problems for historicists, one obvious, and one less so. The obvious problem is that 1 Clement shows us a version of Christianity before the invention of any historical narratives about Jesus (on which point see, again, Chapter 8.5 of OHJ). This challenges historicity and bolsters the thesis that the religion began in dreams and visions, not with a Galilean Rabbi. Clement himself mentions “teachings” and “sayings” of Jesus coming only from revelations and pre-Christian scriptures, and imagines only apostles knew of him to teach of him (Ibid.). So if Jesus the Galilean Rabbi is a later invention—to reify and market the religion’s teachings and align it with all other savior cults who worshiped mythical, revelatory heroes nevertheless also written up as historical men—it perfectly explains all the odd silences and statements of 1 Clement; whereas by comparison any hypothesis of Jesus’s existence does quite a poor job at that, especially any that requires it be the case that any oral lore about the life and times of Jesus existed to be recorded by the authors of the Gospels—for they could not have had access to such a thing; and Clement and the Elders of Rome, not.
The less obvious problem an early date for 1 Clement creates is that it means we have no records concerning what happened in the Christian movement not just for thirty years but nearly half a century between the time of Paul and the first time Christians are reliably mentioned outside the Bible—which then would be in correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan around 112 A.D. (on this “mini-dark-age” in Christian history see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 20, pp. 148-52; cf. How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? and its expansion in Jesus from Outer Space). That Josephus mentioned Christians in the 90s A.D. is not believable anyway; but even the passages he would offer give us no information about Christianity from this period either. Apart from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and the Book of Revelation (and maybe the forgeries of Colossians and Ephesians; everything else is either pre-War or more likely second century), none of which explicitly discuss events of their day (we can only try to infer or guess at their motivating contexts and other data of their own time), we don’t have anything reliably dated in between Pliny the Younger in 112 A.D. and 1 Clement and Hebrews (which both for the same reasons can date no later than 66 A.D., per OHJ, Ch. 11.5), which is a span of 46 years, then almost an average human lifetime (Element 22, Ibid.).
So we have no idea what Christians were saying about these new Gospels, or any disputes over doctrine or claims about their own history, or anything else usable for reconstructing the very decades in which a historical Jesus is being invented. Indeed, from later sources (like Papias: OHJ, Ch. 8.7; and Eusebius: How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity), it is clear Christians had lost access to all documentation, all reliable information, from this period themselves. Which collapses a lot of arguments against doubting the historicity of Jesus, keeping a doubt of it well within the realm of the plausible (again, see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?, which was expanded in Jesus from Outer Space). Of course, “the evidence of ecclesial events for the whole three or four decades after 95 is not what one would characterize as robust, either” (OHJ, p. 148). It’s pretty crappy. But there is at least something. Still, significant documentation and history for Christianity only really picks up toward the end of the second century. Whereas in the prior period, there is essentially nothing, “a thirty-year black box in which we can’t reconstruct what happened,” beyond the vaguest or most minimal of things (like, Jewish Christianity still existed and was futilely arguing against the legitimacy of its Gentile branch). But that’s if 1 Clement’s traditional date is correct. If it’s not, then it’s not a thirty year black box, but a nearly fifty year black box. Half a century.
Why was an entire lifetime of Christian history erased from the record, precisely when a historical Jesus and all the novel myths and tall tales about him were first being decidedly promoted? And even if it was all just lost from happenstance, how can we make claims about what “didn’t” happen in that lifetime? The evidence we would need to rule anything out—is gone. Even the Christians of the second century had lost access to it. Even they could not speak authoritatively about their own history. So they fabricated one. This leaves the door wide open to many possible sequences of events. Including sequences known to be routine for all savior cults of the era, in which a revelatory gospel is transformed into a pseudohistorical tale of each founding hero.
Finally caught Richard making a rare mistake. Your title should read “60’sCE” not “AD.” C’mon Richard.
Oh, you must not know. I despise the C.E. / B.C.E. notation and never use it unless my publishers mandate I do. It’s the stupidest thing ever invented and should go straight into the trash of bad ideas. I went full Carlin on it years ago: see B.C.A.D.C.E.B.C.E. (reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ).
How does Marcion fit in to this picture?
He doesn’t.
(See other comment.)
This is significant research with very important implications! May it be read wide and far!
I see that Marcion is never mentioned in your article, not even when Roger Parvus wrote:
I think Joseph Turmel is right that 1 Clement was written in the 140s and has an anti-Marcionite purpose. It is a letter that ostensibly meanders, but its meanderings have a funny way of countering, one after another, doctrines held by the Marcionites. It undercuts Marcion without even taking explicit notice of him, for its tactic is to make it look like the subapostolic Roman and Corinthian churches were both on the same page as Paul and clearly proto-orthodox in belief. Just as the author of Acts succeeded for so long in convincing people that he wrote in the 60s, the author of 1 Clement has been largely successful in pulling off the same thing for the 90s. For some of my other thoughts on 1 Clement, see my comment to Neil’s 2011-04-06 post “Reasons to assign Paul’s letters to the first century (distilled from Doherty)”
https://vridar.org/2014/11/16/ten-elements-of-christian-origin/#comment-68826
In general, I see that Marcion is never mentioned in your posts, despite of the fact that many past mythicists gave much weight to the incipit of the Evangelion (a descent of Jesus already adult from above) as evidence that Jesus was considered a divine being even in the first story that had him walking on the earth (the baptism by John being introduced by Mark in order to humanize Jesus, against Marcion). I am expecting that you examine a day the case of the marcionite priority (as held currently by prof Markus Vinzent, for an example) but from a mythicist POV.
I have found that Marcion is way too late and has nothing really to contribute to our understanding of the origins and early development of Christianity. Despite fanciful conjectures, I have never seen any use for Marcionism in that respect. It was a late heresy that built on the historicizing gospel movement. It’s thus several steps removed from the original revelatory religion found in Paul. Little even can be argued from the few quotations we have of his “New Testament” as they are too few to build anything reliable on, and compromised by being related to us only by dishonest polemicists. There may have once been something useful there; but it’s lost now.
Generally, I have so far found that all theories about Marcion’s connection to our NT or earlier Christianity have to be built on towers of conjectures and suppositions and possibiliter fallacies. And that just gets us GIGO.
As for 1 Clement, I don’t see anything particularly anti-Marcionite in it, any more than what’s already in Paul. In its first thirty years Christianity already was “counter” Marcionite, because it embraced entirely contrary teachings (Jesus created the universe, not some evil demiurge; the Old Testament is still authoritative; Christians aim to become the adopted sons of Yahweh, not rebels seeking escape from his influence; etc.) so anything written then will sound “anti” Marcionite.
Moreover, by 140, the Bar Kochba revolt was through, and even anti-Marcionite Christianity had thoroughly chucked unqualified reverence for Judaism, adopting instead the “they got what they deserved” storyline explaining the destruction of the temple and the God-ordained obsolescence of their temple cult. So Clement would be far too peculiar in its appeal to that cult as a positive example. That’s not an anti-Marcionite position. It’s a pre-Marcionite position. It’s also self-defeating: if the author knew the temple cult was obliterated by God, he could not use the argument he gives without some apologetic rescuing it from so obvious a rebuttal.
Additionally, when we see forgeries that late, like 3 Corinthians, they are rife with riffs on the Gospels and contemporary teachings about Jesus’s mission and resurrection. They stand out. Whoever wrote 1 Clement had never read a single Gospel and knew not a single story in any Gospel. No way an anti-Marcionite tract is going to do that, at all much less consistently across tens of thousands of words.
Likewise, 1 Clement is conspicuously lacking any appeal to episcopal hierarchy, and never even mentions any heresy to condemn (there is nothing in it about people following false teachings; contrast this with the 2nd century forgery of 2 Peter). The issue is solely a matter of administrative politics, and entirely diplomatic: the author has no idea of a bishopric that can assert rank over a satellite church; in fact, so far as this author (or these authors) know is that all churches are run independently of any other church by a local committee of elders. This is not at all the position an anti-Marcionite would dare take in the mid-2nd century (contrast with how Tertullian argues against Marcionitism).
I think Parvus had a great theory about the Ignatian letters being the lost writings of Peregrinus; unprovable, but plausible enough to keep in mind. But I don’t think anything else he has come up with holds as much water. It’s all too speculative, and too often disregards better alternative explanations of the same evidence.
Hi Dr. Carrier, a curiosity:
If you have to choose only between Dennis MacDonald’s Q+ and the Marcion’s Evangelion, what do you think would be, among them, the more probable candidate for the Earliest Story that euhemerized Jesus on the earth?
Thanks in advance for any answer,
Giuseppe
As you probably know, I actually think neither. Mark appears the earliest. There is no evidence of any earlier one. I am sympathetic to a Matthew-first model, but the balance of evidence doesn’t support it, so I’d put that second on the forced-rank list (whereby Matthew did it first, Mark is a “rewrite,” and Luke a revision of both).
Then, third on that list, I’d put the MacDonald thesis, except I don’t accept his dating of it. He is simply wrong about the Sermon on the Mount being pre-war. It is most definitely post-war. But with that change, MacDonald’s thesis can survive as the third most likely, wherein Q-Plus is first, then Mark/Matthew, then Luke-Acts.
I am not persuaded by any argument yet that Marcion’s Luke was a proto-gospel. I am fairly certain it was his own redaction of Luke, scrubbed to clear it of anything too damning of his theology.
Slightly off-topic, but this also seems to be pretty strong evidence against the zealot hypothesis. If it was well-accepted that any kind of revolt was bad, such that this could be assumed as a premise for an argument between churches, and this was true by the 60s, it is exceedingly unlikely that there ever was a rabble-rousing faction among the Christians. It would have seen internal mention. Maybe the church eliminated that evidence in Orwellian fashion, which does happen sometimes in cults… when they have leadership that isn’t actively in the process of being challenged.
To be fair to the zealot thesis (which I agree is remotely plausible but for many other reasons is quite improbable), it is unlikely any of the original militant faction would ever had any contact with the Roman and Corinthian churches. Those were established by diaspora missionaries (Paul and, in legend, Peter, but possibly others) who were already pushing the pacifist gospel. There isn’t anything in 1 Clement deviating from Paul’s appeasement doctrine of nonviolence and obeying the authorities (e.g. Romans 13), and the Corinthians are his converts (and the Roman Christians would be the same audience as received, presumably, Paul’s letter to the Romans).
Remember, also, that these are mostly Gentiles (who thus have no interest in fighting a war in Judea) and non-Palestinian Jewish Christians whose first language is probably Greek and who are invested in their Roman communities thousands of miles away from any zealot fury in Palestine (notice even the messengers “Clement” sends are Roman citizens or freedmen). I doubt even they had much passion for war in some province they’d long abandoned or had never even been to, or visited but rarely as tourists. There was some such passion in Rome (as the Chrestus riots suggest) but there is no evidence it infiltrated the Christian movement.
That makes sense, but it does still seem fairly unlikely that a movement that began with an explicitly violent leader fighting a nationalist war would so quickly lose all of that value system such that its new churches had no trace of it left. After all, if Peter really did establish churches, that’d literally have been the revolutionary’s right hand guy who had created a church that would have roundly rejected the actual original founder. It’s true that cults can restructure pretty dramatically and rapidly, but I’ve never heard of a transformation that utterly antithetical to the supposed founder. It’d be like Malcolm X’s followers immediately becoming reformist pacifists instantaneously after his death and all of the movement having no interest whatsoever in any more confrontational politics.
The speed with which the Quakers adopted pacifism as a, if not the central tenet, is suggestive. Also, a theurgic messiah executing for promising miraculous victories against Rome in the Thirties being turned into a theurgic messiah falsely executed for promising miraculous victories against Rome in the Sixties doesn’t strike me as either instantaneous nor quite the opposite, unlike the Malcolm X example. And this is multiply true when thinking about how stories true and false circulate in that historical epoch.
Temperamentally I’m inclined to wish for Red Jesus but in trying to be objective about the evidence I’ve concluded the real “argument” for such a Jesus—by the way, “zealot” Jesus is too narrow a political definition I think—the criterion of embarrassment: The traces of political messianism must be embarrassing, against interest, therefore genuinely historical. But I don’t believe in the criterion of embarrassment and think it should be an embarrassment for those who cite it, not an argument to accept. The real “argument’ for historicity is a gut feeling that just making it all up was too extreme. Maybe I’m cynical about religious believers but I don’t think that’s true at all.
I think in practice the number one form of embarrassment is, silence. Thus you can argue the silence of Paul and Clement about what a real man said can be due to embarrassment at his now decidedly unsafe and irrelevant politics. The thing there is, of course, that this can be read more simply as, Paul and Clement just made it up, along with any teachers or other influences they accepted. AT best this is a wash for historicity I think.
Even worse for historicity of a militant Jesus, there is a relatively contemporary source that is not likely to be embarrassed by any such historical Jesus and was interested in Roman political abuses. Philo, of any surviving source, should be interested in mentioning a historical Jesus executed by the Romans, if only as another item in a checklist
Therefore I think his silence, his absence of evidence is a case where this serves as evidence of absence.
Some people appear to reject all arguments that absence of evidence=evidence of absence on principle. For my part such categorical epistemological skepticism is incorrect, but that’s me.
Unless Peter was the whitewasher. That’s my point. The gospel (“he died for your sins and rose on the third day so you may too”) by all accounts began a pacifist doctrine (the entire point of it is to replace military messianism, cf. OHJ Elements 23-29). So there was no other being preached thousands of miles away in Rome or Corinth. So we can’t even establish they would ever have even heard of the warrior Jesus; and even if they did, they were instructed to declare alternative Jesus’s anathema, false teaching to be shunned (e.g. Galatians 1).
Steven: I don’t know about quite the opposite, but I do think that the comparison is apt. If Jesus were a zealot, he’d be a violent nationalistic revolutionary. Maybe he was a particularly idealistic one (though if the Gospels do attest at all to his character then he seemed to have been firmly willing to be nationalistic) who had a universalistic moral bent, though that would be pretty remarkable, but he still would have been fomenting for local action. Someone like that is going to have a worldview and tactics that are not about decrying any kind of revolt as being inherently unnatural and harmful, indeed the fundamental sin of his people. The comparison to Malcolm X in terms of being potentially idealistic but both tactically and ideologically willing to justify violence against injustice and colonial oppression seems to be what the zealot hypothesis would be suggesting. And then his movement suddenly became not only King-like in tactics but also apparently radically conservative, not even attempting to accomplish internal or external social change and retreating to utopian communities.
Peter being the whitewasher would have to be the case, but that just seems so vastly implausible to me. People who follow violent revolutionaries don’t suddenly become pacifists, even tactically pacifistic, overnight. The idea that he’d be able to bring the other Pillars all on board and keep enough of the core of the original following is a massive stretch. That’s the kind of thing that produces massive schisms in churches. Paul doesn’t seem to need to attest to any such group, and there’s no need for them to condemn as heretical a specific violent messianic version of the cult even though we can see internal policing already. The idea that it so drastically left the religion with the only remnants being vague allusions to Jewish nationalist sentiment that would be held by most Jews seems silly to me, and I think Clement testifies to this being something that is doctrinally assumed (such that the writers of Clement don’t seem to need to argue against some kind of pro-revolutionary thought strand within the movement).
Meanwhile, if there was a mythical Jesus, then various degrees of cooptation of zealot-like feeling would make a lot of sense. Can’t contradict a mouthpiece that didn’t exist.
I agree with these points; they are the reason I doubt the zealot hypothesis is probable: (1) such a 180 without any evidence is inherently unlikely (it is thus a poor predictor of the evidence we have), whereas, by contrast, a nonmilitarism-from-the-start model fits the context and evidence perfectly (see OHJ, Ch. 5, Elements 23-29) and (2) no Gospel author would just randomly put latent militarist statements into their story; they would either scrub them (as is their stated intent; hence, it is the most probable outcome, hence the contrary is the most improbable outcome) or include them only to a pacifist purpose, which negates our ability to know they come from a militarist milieu even had they done (since the reason the authors have to include them for a pacifist purpose, is also sufficient reason to invent them for a pacifist purpose; i.e. the probability of their presence is the same on both models and thus these statements can never be evidence for any past militarism).
-:-
I do think the most probable historicity model is that Jesus was a Josephan-style Christ who deliberately tried to get himself killed to unlock the apocalypse (see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 4 and Ch. 6.5; and my Wichita talk). But if so, he appears to have done this without preaching militarism but something the opposite (like an expectation that he would return with angelic armies after he died), which may be why, unlike the others, his movement survived his death.
Of course, I think it even more likely this all started in the imagination of Peter, who just dreamed a Jesus who did all this in a mythic realm and not on Earth, to market a new social movement based on Peter’s own innovative ideas (that prophets who want to reform society tended to claim God sent them to do so is a well-known anthropological model I discuss in Ch. 10 of Not the Impossible Faith). And it is this social reform aspect that attracted Paul (causing him to make the same necessary claims to be accepted as a leader of it). This can be subconscious (their brains give them the experiences they needed; and they believe them) or conscious (they just lie and claim to have had these experiences, because that was understood to be what you had to do to be taken seriously); we can’t tell which in this case (both models exist in the anthropological record: see OHJ, Ch. 4, Element 15).
Agreed. I like the zealot hypothesis for emotional reasons (Reza Aslan’s presentation of it is really beautiful), but it just doesn’t seem to make much sense. I think the error that may be being made is that people are assuming that the only method that a person would choose at the time to resist a foreign military power would be that of direct violence, and that seems both anachronistic and even false in the modern context. So they look at the fact that Jesus does seem to have some radical criticisms of both Roman occupation and society in general and then assume that radicalism must have meant violent radicalism. The more conventional apocalypticist martyr does seem more sensible. And, of course, mythicism has the advantage that Peter and other leaders could craft whatever appeals they wanted, so they could appeal to those with a zealot-like preference in whatever stories or teachings would work for those while still keeping the cult in total safe from persecution. After all, the Romans would be much less likely to punish a cult for some mythical angel founder making some social criticism than the actual living leader.
The only thing I can say for the zealot hypothesis is that you yourself argue that the teachings of Jesus were clearly viewed as freely violable, mythical or not. If there was a zealot founder, the more violent followers would probably be killed, and everyone like Peter would have a vested interest in immediate whitewashing and Orwellian rewrites. But, again, from my experience and study of cults, they’re not actually that easy to swing ideologically.
Thanks for this analysis. I already leaned toward 1 Clement being written before the Jewish War from reading the (translated) work myself after reading Earl Doherty, then from OHJ later. This post zeros in on detailed arguments and nails it more firmly for me.
Showing 1 Clement was almost certainly dated before 70 CE strengthens the argument for a non-corporeal Christ for exactly the reasons you mention. Added to the silence of Paul and, if also dated before the War, Hebrews’ lack of awareness of an earthly ministry, it becomes obvious, imo, that early Christians were unaware of an itinerant rabbi wandering around Galilee in the 30s and getting himself killed by the Romans.
Clement in particular also highlights the lack of knowledge of an oral tradition about said rabbi and his deeds and teachings, especially as it’s after Paul died because any oral stories would have had more time to circulate and morph into taller tales.
Do you think there’s evidence that Mark knew Clement?
I haven’t seen any evidence of Mark knowing Clement. Unless he used Clement to peel apart the Woe-Millstone saying into two different events and contexts; but I think it more likely Mark and Clement are working from a common source (some lost scripture or pesher).
Because one thing Clement also does is confirm my analysis of Paul only being aware of sayings and teachings about Jesus coming from (1) scripture and (2) revelation. I document this in OHJ. But Clement has no knowledge of oral lore, certainly no narrative lore. He seems to assume if the OT says Jesus did or said something, then he did or said it (and only cites the OT as evidence thereof). And he often refers to revelation as a source of Jesus’s teachings. This is incongruous with the “oral lore” theory of the historical Jesus in the Gospels, and better fits the Doherty thesis.
“Jewish Christianity still existed”
So here’s a possibly-stupid question (sorry if this is too off-topic):
What evidence do we have that Jewish (*) Christianity ever existed?
(*) … by which I mean taking to mean some notion of Christianity practiced by Hebraic Judea-resident Jews (as opposed to the Septuagint-reading Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria/Corinth/Rome/etc that made up Paul’s audience)
Unless I’m missing something, all we really have is Paul’s description of his first (and only in Paul’s writings) meeting with Peter in Jerusalem per Galatians, a meeting that, for all we know, may just have been Peter humoring an annoying but apparently well-off Greek tourist who looked to be a potentially useful source of funding.
Paul comes away from that meeting assuming that he and Peter are roughly on the same page, though this gets quickly proved otherwise at Antioch, where Paul is run out of town by Peter’s followers. In the authentic Pauline epistles we have, there are no further meetings after that. We hear over and over about the collection he’s taking up to get back in Peter’s good graces, but nothing of how that is ultimately resolved (yes, Luke, writing 50+ years later composes a resolution of sorts, but we already know Luke is not above making shit up).
In OHJ you cite Qumran writings as showing that at least some subset of (Hebraic) Jews are ready for some notion of messiah/celestial-high-priest who’s going to show up in the 30 AD time-frame per Daniel. But those writings are very early in the game.
According to Paul, by his own time, there are lots of mutually incompatible movements — a real “Life of Brian” situation — nothing about what they actually say except that most of them need to be shunned because they don’t match up with what Paul himself is teaching. It must have been a fair amount of effort for him to even find someone like Peter.
We never get Peter’s own account. Everything we have that’s labeled from Peter is later Hellenistic-Jewish/Christian forgery. There are no Aramaic/Hebrew sources for Christianity, nothing to tell us who Peter’s messiah/celestial-high-priest actually was, if there was one, and hence whether Peter’s movement really can be genuinely characterized as “Christian” or whether it had any lasting impact on Judaism (clearly the Jews of Babylon four centuries later trying to figure out where this “Jesus” notion came from knew nothing of Peter’s group and hence they came up with the 75BC version)
Am I completely off base here?
The letters of Paul are filled with him arguing against “backsliders” returning to Peter’s Torah-observant Christianity. And Galatians 1-2 is all about this conflict. Paul would not have to defend himself for doing this, if he wasn’t doing it or, even more astonishingly, didn’t have to.
So we can be certain Paul’s removal of Torah requirements for Christian membership was indeed his innovation and therefore the original sect he was deviating from was insisting on Torah observance. In other words, you had to be a Jew or convert to Judaism to be a Christian. Paul admits he is the first to change that requirement, and that he did so years after the movement had already been spreading.
As to the Eastern Chronology, we don’t really know why that was developed. But it didn’t come from the Jews. It came from Jewish Christians, as confirmed by Epiphanius. Why they “moved” the date of the religion’s origin (or even if they did; there is the possibility this is its original milieu) would be the same as why any religion chooses to invent a past for their claims. It doesn’t mean they didn’t originate with Peter’s group. It just means they wished to relocate it in history (assuming that’s what in fact they did).
Dr. Carrier wrote:
Someone that didn’t know any better might assume that you are referring to the “Q” document. But I know better only because you’re on record as saying you don’t believe in the existence of such a document.
But you do believe (or strongly suspect) the existence of such a document, but just not named “Q”?
Please clarify.
“Q” (for Quelle, “source” in German) is a specific reference to a hypothetical document (and not oral lore, but an actual written book) behind both the narrative and speaking additions to Mark found in common between Matthew and Luke (see Why? and Backwards).
The Woe-Millstone sayings are in Mark. So, not Q. Some scholars try to extend Q to include material in Mark (e.g. MacDonald’s “Q-Plus” theory) but it’s still only Q if it extends to the material in Matthew and Luke and not just in Mark. But there is no evidence of that here. This is just some saying exactly identical in Mark and Clement (except Mark does not keep the sayng together but splits it across two entirely different scenes unknown to Clement). There is no basis for assuming it comes from anything meant by Q.
Likewise, because Clement knows nothing in Matthew or Luke (nothing at all), he clearly can’t have known Q (if Q existed), and thus it can’t be the source he is sharing with Mark.
Whether there is a lost pesher is a different question from Q.
A pesher would just be a list of scripture verses (including scriptures not in any extant canon; Clement cites as pre-Christian scripture several things we do not know from any extant scripture, so they were using scriptures we don’t have: see OHJ, Element 9), with possibly some interspersed commentary connecting them. It is not a gospel or a narrative. So, not Q. It is a scripture collection from which one would argue the existence of a hidden gospel or narrative (several peshers were recovered from Qumran that look very similar to what would have been the Christian one).
There certainly was such a document (written or oral), as Paul refers to it repeatedly (e.g. in 1 Cor. 15:3-4 and Romans 16:25-26) and 1 Peter is practically constructed from it. Every time Matthew says “so that scripture would be fulfilled” he is referencing it. And several of those instances come from Mark; so Mark is using it (just not calling attention to the fact). For example, Mark’s use of Psalms 22 to construct the crucifixion narrative reflects use of this pesher to construct his narrative. But his narrative is not in that pesher. So, not Q.
Likewise, if Clement is again just quoting some lost Jewish scripture when he quotes the Woe-Millstone saying, then that is his and Mark’s common source. For example, we know there were several more books of Ezekiel and Daniel at Qumran than we had ever heard of, so this could be a passage from, let’s say, 3 Ezekiel or 2 Daniel, which there is Ezekiel or Daniel uttering a prophecy, a thing which later Christians often took as in fact the words of Jesus speaking through the prophets (see Original), as Clement clearly indicates he assumes in several other places (see OHJ, Ch. 8.5).
In that case, it’s not a pesher, but just a collection of Jewish scriptures the Christians believed contained hidden messages from Jesus. Which is a pesher only in concept, not an actual pesher document. Same as when they both assume Isaiah 53 is about Jesus. They are just using Isaiah 53 to mean that, not some pesher that pulls those verses into a list with others. And that definitely is no Q.
Finally, Paul refers repeatedly to special instructions he kept getting from Jesus by revelation (the Eucharist saying itself, which appears in Mark, there turned into a narrative, is an example, though that most likely comes directly from Paul). There had to be some collection of those somewhere (Paul won’t have been the only apostle receiving them, so these sayings from many apostolic sources would be all over the place), whether oral or written.
But that also won’t be Q, because it would literally just be a disparate collection of revelations (more like the Book of Revelation, only more like GThomas is structured, though GThomas isn’t it, because it is derived from the Gospels and not the other way around); which also may or may not have attributed each saying to the apostle claiming to have received it.
Q, by contrast, if it existed at all, has to be a narrative document (e.g. it includes stories about John the Baptist, it links the Great Sermon to the story of the Centurion’s Son, etc.). Even MacDonald agrees with that point (his version has it as a narrative rewrite of Deuteronomy). So, a mere collection of post-mortem private revelations won’t be Q, any more than the Book of Revelation is Q.
But all the more so as almost nothing that is supposed to have been in “Q” actually dates from the apostolic (pre-War) era, e.g. Dale Allison proved the Sermon on the Mount is a post-War construction, and didn’t exist before then. It’s an ad hoc invention (either of Q or Matthew; and Ockham’s Razor says, Matthew), not from any apostolic revelation collection.
Since you mentioned the Didache, I’d be curious to get your take on the debate as to whether it influenced Matthew, or vice versa. Thanks.
I have no strong opinion on that. Since it can’t be dated and doesn’t contain anything pertaining to historicity it was never a target of my research. But my “preliminary” position is that the Didache considerably post-dates Matthew, because its content looks to be quite evolved and altered from what’s in Matthew (e.g. their Eucharist ritual is radically different; yet Matthew’s is closer to the original found in Paul, which means the Didache comes much later than Matthew; and there are other examples of this pattern). But since I haven’t thoroughly examined all the arguments as to this, that’s only my preliminary conclusion.
If it is late, isn’t it surprising, and useful to the mythicist cause, that there is no mention of Jesus talking or doing anything as a person on earth? Instead, people are being told what to do and and not do, without reference to sayings of Jesus.
I am not sure what you are referring to. 1 Clement is full of quotations of Jesus in defense of its ideas, and teachings about Jesus. It is not “without reference” to them.
What is peculiar is that none of those match anything in the Gospels (dating this letter before them and establishing the Gospels are fabricating their content; note the one exception even proves this rule, discussed in the article) and all come from scripture or revelation; they never mention anything being learned from a ministry. And they never mention anything Jesus did as taking place on Earth (as opposed to in some other realm) and never mention any of the particular events invented for Jesus in the Gospels (like the betrayal by Judas or any of his miracles or parables or pertinent discussions with the Disciples and so on; the word “Disciple” is even unknown).
This would all be less useful if it were late as then it has to be fabricating—deliberately ignoring all Gospel content, for example. Which would indicate a deviation from earlier teaching, rather than an earlier teaching, or at best leaving us unable to tell which. Whereas a pre-War document proving none of the Gospels’ content had even been invented yet, and even the idea of Jesus being an Earthly Rabbi hadn’t been invented yet, is only probable if mythicism is true. This corroborates the analysis of Hebrews and Paul (and even 1 Peter): no stories about an Earthly Jesus existed then; and the only sources of information about Jesus known then were revelations and pre-Christian Jewish scriptures. Which renders any other explanation of those less probable as well.
Sorry, we were talking about the Didache so that’s what my comment referenced, not 1 Clement (I agree with your assessment of that document). I am a bit surprised, however, that mythicists rarely mention the Didache, because whether it is late or early, the authors don’t seem especially interested in Jesus, other than the obvious. Christians are told what to do or not do, but not because of anything Jesus supposedly did while on earth, in the form of a human. Do you know of any “major” mythicist who has made this point?
Oh, sorry! I was writing on the backend and it didn’t show me the thread I was in.
For the Didache, though, the same point follows. If it were late, the same issue exists as I mentioned for 1 Clement: it would have to be deliberately ignoring the Gospels; which entails a late development, not an early one, or at best no way to tell them apart.
An early date would not be much more helpful though because the text isn’t concerned with anything about the historical Jesus; it’s just a rules and rituals list. It never argues why. For example, when it covers the Eucharist, it doesn’t even say where it came from, whether an event or a revelation, or why we are to believe what they say is correct—unlike Paul, who says it was revelation: he received it directly from the Lord (and that’s why we should believe it). And yet even in Paul’s case that does not argue against historicity because many scholars agree the Eucharist wasn’t historical; that doesn’t mean Jesus wasn’t. So if that doesn’t count as evidence, the Didache’s text counts even less.
But the main problem is that the Didache is undatable. So we can’t assert an early date for it to argue from. Or a late one. That would be conjecture in, conjecture out.
As to mythicists, I only am concerned with what passes peer review now. And no peer-reviewed mythicist argument has seen any value in the Didache to the debate. I am also not aware of any historicists seeing any such value either (although I haven’t read every book by historicists so I may have missed an example).
Judaism apparently only dates to 150 B.C.
New book:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300254907/the-origins-of-judaism/
That’s not what Adler argues. First, he does not give a precise date like that. Second, Adler’s thesis is that the form of orthodox Judaism we find in the Mishnah and Josephus (and so on) was not normative until the 2nd century B.C., not that it didn’t exist before that, nor that prior forms of Judaism were not Judaism.
Remember, Judaism didn’t have any doctrine of a resurrection, apocalypse, hell, or Satan as enemy of God, either until after Persian influence in the 6th century (and those beliefs do not appear to have been normed for a few more centuries later still). That Judaism changed its doctrines, and different doctrines became normative (which is not the same thing as when those doctrines began), over time does not mean Judaism “didn’t exist” in earlier iterations of it. The most one could say is that Judaism first “comes to exist” when it is regarded as distinct from Canaanite polytheism; but that development predates the specific features Adler is talking about.
Also, Adler’s thesis hasn’t been generally accepted. It only just was proposed. The debate has just begun. Wait ten or twenty years before we can assess whether his position held up, and what parts.
If Judeans didn’t know who Moses was, they weren’t Jews of any kind.
My personal opinion.
Moses may have been invented in the 5th/4th century. But don’t confuse Moses with Torah observance. This is the difference between a religious idea existing, and it becoming normative.
There have long been scholars though who think Judaism as we know it was invented when Persia ended the exile; that’s when most of the stuff we recognize as Judaism started as ideas (and we know there were centuries of struggle to norm them). But there remains some evidence some of it (like Moses) predates that, and only came to be normed after the exile. So it’s still debated.
The new study doesn’t resolve any of that debate. It only examines when certain practices became normed. Not when they first existed or were only just spreading.
I’d have a small question. Your text like “they reference the executions of Peter and Paul” suggests that “Clement” writes about some violent deaths of Peter and Paul. But I think the text does not say this. A Greek friend of mine confirmed to me that by reading the Greek text he would get no idea that the deaths were somehow violent. Can you comment on this, please?
That is a good question and it is well worth asking, because their veiled language can be ambiguous indeed. For example, to be a “witness” (martyr) does not inherently entail dying (much less by violence); it just took on that cognate meaning in Christian discourse.
The reason we can conclude that it means execution or murder is that Clement (or the authors) say they argue these men died as a result of others’ envy, so that entails an active killing. It can’t be “they died of old age” or something. Likewise the letter argues in detail that envy activates violence rather than peace (their examples from the old testament indicate this as well). So they clearly think Peter and Paul died by impolitic violence.
So while what they say is ambiguous by itself, that Peter and Paul were persecuted / prosecuted and “contended / struggled” “unto death,” the context makes clear they mean, by others’ hands. So when they say they “were carried” “in this way” to martyrdom, this clearly means, were killed.
This is explicit with Paul, where the authors say μαρτυρησας επι των ηγουμενων which means “having been martyred in the presence of the leaders,” indicating being killed before prefects or other political authorities. It’s doubtful they mean “just spontaneously dropped dead in front of them,” particularly after all the OT examples immediately preceding this were of murder (attempted or completed).
It is notable they don’t say this of Peter. Possibly Peter was killed by a mob, extrajudicially, and not tried and execution for a crime. Or possibly they are just varying their idiom, since they know the Corinthians already know how Peter died, by whatever envy-triggered violence it was effected.
Is there a known reason why they were so cagey about directly talking about martyrdom? Were they trying to avoid appearing dangerous to authorities during their early phase?
I don’t know. I haven’t looked into the research on that. But I doubt that specific theory holds; there was no real expectation the authorities would read these things, nor would such vocabulary have any effect on those authorities’ reactions (e.g. illegal assembly is still illegal assembly; so they were going to prosecute you or not, no matter what words you used in your illegal assemblies).
But it’s true they are spinning: turning executions and murders into positive defenses of the faith (they are “witnessing,” not just being rejected, convicted, and dying; failure is thus sold as success). This framing also suppresses fear and promotes increased evangelism (death becomes heroism), thus reversing the intended effect of the violence. I note in Not the Impossible Faith that they adopted an entire war vocabulary for this. But scholars may have developed additional or different theories as well.
Interesting. I might need to check out the scholarship on that and see if I can find some theories. The idea that it was internal management of the cult’s expectations makes a lot of sense. I just find it so interesting that this fundamental persecution narrative that we can see even by the late Gospels and certainly becoming a major part of the Christian self-identity quickly was something they were much cagier about even in their internal messaging. But it makes some sense that it’s really easy to talk about how your success is inevitable and your persecution just proves how right you are when you’re building up steam and have political power. It’s much scarier to admit that you’re in danger of being totally crushed when you’re tiny, marginalized and counter-cultural.
Thank you very much for the answer. I wonder if you could still clarify one issue to me. You yourself point to the fact that the original meaning of the Greek word “martus” is “witness”. For instance, we can see the use of this word, as well as the sort of things that Paul witnessed, in https://biblehub.com/text/1_corinthians/15-15.htm.
Despite of this, you translate μαρτυρησας as “being martyred” instead of “giving testimony”. (E.g., J.B. Lightfoot translates “…. and when he had borne his testimony before the rulers, so he departed from the world and went unto the holy place, having been found a notable pattern of patient endurance.)
So I hope you understand that I am a bit confused …
That’s the role of context. Words have to be translated in context. Since the context is envy-induced violence, then that’s what the word means in this context.
In other words, they clearly aren’t saying “these guys tired themselves out so much witnessing that they just dropped dead from it.” They are talking about envy and violence having led to their death. That’s the entire argument they are making. That thus tells us how they are using words here.
The context is even established in the vocabulary, reinforcing the same conclusion:
Peter did not just “witness,” rather, “in this way having witnessed” he died. “In this way” refers to the method of his death. He didn’t just witness and die. He witnessed and in this way died.
Likewise Paul did not just “bear witness before the authorities,” but “in this way” he “was removed” from the world. He didn’t just witness and die. He witnessed and in this way died.
Two aspects of context converge on the same intended meaning. Their words should be translated accordingly. Although I don’t object to the neutral translation of Lightfoot, it can be misleading if you ignore how context is determining the meaning of “witnessed” in both cases here.
Your viewpoint is now clear to me, thank you. I am adding my final remarks that you still might find relevant, hopefully.
First, the (Old Testament) context in “1 Clement” does not necessarily entail envy-based violent deaths: for instance, “4:9 Envy caused Joseph to be persecuted unto death, and to enter into bondage.” (Now I use Charles H. Hoole’s translation.) We know that the author cannot mean that Joseph was killed by others’ hands.
Second, let us look at Hoole’s translation of “Paul’s paragraph”:
In your interpretation, Hoole (as well as my Greek friend) did not understand the use of οὕτως (in this manner, thus, so) correctly, and understood it in the way that I also find reasonable in the context: “you see, the readers, how Paul left this world — in the state (situation) when he had accomplished so many patient activities despite all unjust obstacles, etc.; this is the greatest example of patience.”
But if you claim that the context makes clear that “Clement” by the use of οὕτως signals that Paul was killed by others’ hand, so let it be so.
It doesn’t make that clear, though. You were misled by the neutral translation. So, evidently, the neutral translation is misleading.
And you keep making this mistake, too. That’s evidently how misleading it is! The Joseph case is adequately analogous to death: his persecutors—his brothers even—violently attacked and tried to kill him and only rethought it at the last moment to sell him into slavery in Egypt instead, a common allegorical trope at the time for death. That’s why it is paired with Cain and Abel and the others. Clearly they aren’t saying Paul was sold into slavery by his persecutors. They are saying the same persecution leading to violence occurred in both cases due to the same motive. As also Cain and Abel and so on. There is only one way that plays out in Peter and Paul’s cases as the vocabulary indicates: they outright say in Peter and Paul’s case that it led to death.
The neutral translation is “literally” fine. It just does not adequately convey what these authors are actually saying. And your continued failure to understand what they are actually saying demonstrates that point. So there is clearly a problem with it. But this can be solved with a less neutral translation or a more careful effort to understand the actual meaning of their innuendo. Your choice.
Having given my final remarks already above, I only dare to put one final question, hoping you find it relevant. Taking your perspective, you have shown a very early (probably the earliest?) instance in the extant texts where the word μαρτυρησας, or a related one, is used by the author in the sense of “martyrdom”, and not just “testimony”.(Moreover, here it seems so natural for the author that he is not afraid that the readers might be misled and not to see the violent death in this.)
Please, do you happen to know (or could you quickly find) another instance in ancient texts of a clear use of the word μαρτυρησας, or a related one, in the sense of “martyrdom”?
I think you are confusing two different things. “Witnessed to death” is the contextual meaning, not the lexical meaning, of the word. We only use the lexical meaning to convey the sense in English, because we aren’t living in the context and need help perceiving it. The readers of these texts would not have needed help. They know what is meant by “witnessed” is “witnessed to death” from the context, as indeed shown by the fact that they don’t need it spelled out like we do.
So what you mean to ask is, when did people first start understanding “witnessing to death” as a contextual notion (which would only happen when the word “witnessed” is placed in a context referring to that notion; otherwise it just means “witnessed”).
I think we are catching a glimpse of the beginning of that trend here. The Clementine authors clearly already are operating in a context where this had become a normal way of discussing these deaths. And this letter is the earliest attestation of that in writing. Though it won’t have been the first such usage; they are clearly not inventing it, they are using it.
By about a hundred years later this usage had become so common that the contextual meaning no longer needed to be signaled. Then, you could just use the verb martyrein and any Christian would understand it to mean “unto death” without any context establishing that sense. But at the stage we see in Clement, context was still required.
That’s why it’s fine to translate it as just “witnessed,” as long as you aren’t doing that to conceal or deny the contextualized meaning—the meaning of what saying that in that context meant to these people at that time.
Dr. Carrier, when you write, “The historical reality of that persecution is also doubtful, though it at least has more evidence to commend it than Domitian’s.”
What evidence would you cite to commend the earlier persecution over Domitian’s?
There are many references to a Neronian persecution, which are not of high quality, but are at least clear on the point, unlike any of the references to the Domitianic persecution (there is basically zero evidence of that; and even some evidence against it).
See my discussion of the evidence for this in my peer-reviewed study on the Tacitus passage (which was republished in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ). And that isn’t even comprehensive. See this article for more examples.
In your comments about martyrs, you refer to “envy” as giving the context for the translation. However if one takes this translation for ζῆλος = envy into chapter 5 it would appear that Clement is criticising the apostles for their “envy”. In some cases in this text the translation ζῆλος = zeal seems more appropriate. Does this indicate that the author is playing with words, or is it an indication of more than one author being shoe-horned into one document? There are a number of other non sequitur moments in this sermon which would appear to require investigation as to the unity of 1 Clement as we now have it and as you and Herron discuss it. Whilst you have clearly shown that chapter 40 in its discussion of the temple rituals is pre-70, this dating cannot be applied to the whole document unless its integrity can be demonstrated. Are you aware of any published work that gives serious consideration to the fact that this document reads more like a compilation of ideas from diverse sources rather than the work of a single author?
No, Clement means their killers envied the apostles, just as the youth envied the status of the elders they deposed at Corinth. That is why Cain kills Abel, and why Esau tries to kill Jacob, why Joseph’s brothers try to kill him, and so on. The apostles correspond to the victims in all of Clement’s analogies, not the perps.
Hence follow the transition from the end of 1 Clem. 4 to 1 Clem. 5: “Through envy David suffered jealousy not only of foreigners, but was persecuted also by Saul, king of Israel. But let us pass from ancient examples…Let us take the noble examples of our own generation: through jealousy and envy the greatest and most just pillars of the Church were persecuted.” There is no possible way to change the meaning of zêlon here. The context leaves no other possible sense but envy, and in particular, envy driving the persecutors, not the persecuted.
Hence the phrase zêlon kai phthonon, “envy and jealousy,” a double repetition of the same sin (a common idiom in a “scriptural style” of writing).
I am not aware of anyone ever arguing for a redaction history in 1 Clement. I have never seen any evidence of it either. The letter is superlatively coherent according to the canons of rhetoric at the time, indeed a near perfect set-piece one could use in schools then to teach speech-writing. Compare it to, for example, the speeches of Lysanias (which were used to exactly that purpose).
Dr. Carrier, your response from March 1 in which you wrote “Clement means their killers envied the apostles, just as the youth envied the status of the elders they deposed at Corinth.” has given me an impulse to rekindle my former question (from December 23), and I’d like to kindly ask you to demonstrate your Bayesian analysis leading to the claims that Clement writes about violent deaths of Peter and Paul.
How would you estimate the probability that Clement indeed had violent deaths in mind, despite the fact that even a Greek reader does not see this in Clement’s text?
(One competing hypothesis would be that Clement, in fact, did not know any details of how Peter and Paul died …)
Thank you very much in advance.
The Greek reader does see this in the text. You are twisting the language in bizarre ways to change the plain meaning.
The separate and unrelated question of whether Clement knew any details is moot here. It is clear he believes they were killed out of envy by haters (and didn’t just die of natural causes or random accidents or something). Whether that belief is true cannot be answered by analyzing the language of Clement. All we can prove is what Clement believed; because he doesn’t tell us why or how he believes it.
There is only one feature of his presentation that argues for his belief being true: he makes quite clear that the facts were evidently so widely and well known that readers a thousand miles away would immediately know what he was talking about and not have to have anything about it proved or explained. That is unlikely unless what he was saying happened to be true. As these are events contemporary and recent.
But that’s a separate question from the one you are asking, which is what Clement means to say, not whether it is true.
If you need to see this framed in a Bayesian manner:
Assume we have no prior knowledge (and therefore the prior is 50/50 what Clement would say before we read him). Then the likelihood ratio determines the outcome:
P(e|nonviolent) is low and P(e|violent) is high because “Clement (or the authors) say they argue these men died as a result of others’ envy, so that entails an active killing. It can’t be ‘they died of old age’ or something.”
In other words, it is very improbable this is what Clement would write, or how he would write it, if he meant they just died in their sleep or by an unrelated accident or something likewise trivial.
P(e|nonviolent) is even lower yet P(e|violent) remains as high because, “Likewise the letter argues in detail that envy activates violence rather than peace (their examples from the old testament indicate this as well). So they clearly think Peter and Paul died by impolitic violence.”
In other words, it is very improbable this is what Clement would write, or how he would write it, if he meant they just died in their sleep or by an unrelated accident or something likewise trivial.
Hence in this context (remember, context determines meaning) Clement simply would not say “that Peter and Paul were persecuted / prosecuted and ‘contended / struggled’ ‘unto death’ if he meant they just casually died, through no connection to any of that. He would only say that if he meant it got them killed. Hence the context makes clear they mean, by others’ hands.”
P(e|nonviolent) is still even lower yet P(e|violent) still remains as high because, “This is explicit with Paul, where the authors say μαρτυρησας επι των ηγουμενων which means ‘having [witnessed] in the presence of the leaders'” and houtôs, “thus / in this way” died, indicating being killed before prefects or other political authorities. It’s doubtful they mean ‘just spontaneously dropped dead in front of them’, particularly after all the OT examples immediately preceding this were of murder (attempted or completed).”
In other words, it is very improbable this is what Clement would write, or how he would write it, if he meant they just died in their sleep or by an unrelated accident or something likewise trivial.
Then the same follows for Peter because Peter is being paralleled and not contrasted with Paul.
In other words, it is very improbable this is what Clement would write, or how he would write it, if he meant Peter, unlike Paul, just died in his sleep or by an unrelated accident or something likewise trivial.
The same can be said of the fact that he immediately gives a third example in parallel, with the same language, of other Christians being killed for their faith. That is simply not probable if Clement meant Peter and Paul died peacefully but these other Christians didn’t. Context makes clear he is describing people who were killed for their efforts.
On this employment of Bayesian reasoning see the logic table on pp. 286–89 in Proving History.
I am afraid that I do not understand where I am “twisting the language in bizarre ways to change the plain meaning.” I also remark that I meant a concrete educated Greek (mentioned by me on December 23) who did not see violent deaths of Peter and Paul in Clement’s text. This is very unexpected for me if you are right when writing “It is clear he [Clement] believes they were killed out of envy by haters (and didn’t just die of natural causes or random accidents or something).” It is clear to you but, unexpectedly, my Greek friend can not see this in the Greek text by Clement.
Also, e.g., if I read (in Lightfoot’s translation) “1Clem 5:4 There was Peter who by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one but many labors, and thus having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory.” then it is very unexpected for me that Clement would write this so mildly when he, in fact, knows that Peter was even killed …
Another thing: Your interpretation, that Clement says that Paul has witnessed in the presence of the leaders and in this way he died, sounds strange (if I ask how a person X died, I would be really confused if the answer is: X has witnessed in the presence of the leaders).
Btw, e.g. Hoole translates: “5:7 and having preached righteousness to the whole world, and having come to the extremity of the West, and having borne witness before rulers, he departed at length out of the world, and went to the holy place, having become the greatest example of patience.”
Hoole thus also seems to have overlooked your interpretation with which you seem to be so sure – with (almost) 100 percent, really?
There is no educated Greek who would not see violent deaths here. That’s what I am explaining to you. The context could not be clearer on this point. This is why we infer “witnessed” had taken on the figurative meaning of being killed for the faith here (it may even be Clement’s rhetorical coinage, but we don’t have any evidence of that).
So I really don’t fathom how you are having such a hard time following this.
I’ve diagrammed all the logic and evidence showing a very high probability of the sense from accumulating likelihoods.
For example, I already pointed out that Hoole has mistranslated the ουτως (“thus, in this way”; not “at length”), which references the last term, bearing witness. In “what way” could this mean Paul died? Similarly Peter, και ουτω μαρτυρησας επορευθη, “and having witnessed in this way [he died].” In what way? How does witnessing a certain way lead to your death? And again, the context begins with all the Old Testament analogies—all for people facing murder or attempted murder: why on Earth those examples, if that wasn’t at issue? And why immediately follow Peter and Paul with more murders as examples? In a long string of examples of being killed (successful or attempted), how can you suddenly think just Peter and Paul are the only ones who died peacefully in their sleep?
There is literally no reason to be mentioning Paul and Peter here in his argument unless Clement is using their deaths and not just their lives as examples. It makes no sense for Clement to argue here, “And look at recent examples, Peter and Paul tried hard and lived long successful lives and died in their sleep.” That would bear no rhetorical function at all and be extremely perplexing to any Greek reader—especially immediately after the OT examples that the examples of Peter and Paul are supposed to prove apt. Particularly as he adds to them the third set of examples, of recent Christians having been tortured and killed (Ch. 6). So, OT examples of murder and attempted murder, then two out of place examples of guys dying peacefully in their sleep, then back to recent murders of Christians? What would Clement’s argument be? Who would even think that’s what he meant?
I really don’t see how you are overlooking this. Context establishes meaning. The context is murder (actual and threatened). There is no other context.
Note that I also agree with David Eastman in “Jealousy, Internal Strife, and the Deaths of Peter and Paul: A Reassessment of 1 Clement,” Journal of Ancient Christianity 18.1 (2014) that, by all his examples, Clement could be talking about fellow Christians (or, I think as likely, Jews) getting Peter and Paul killed, i.e. Christians in strife (with Jews or each other) leveled accusations against their rivals in Roman courts that ended in executions, most likely for reasons not to do with the original strife, but just using legal accusations of convenience to get ideological or social opponents removed.
I only don’t agree with Eastman’s assumption (which even he admits to be weak) that these executions took place in Rome, and his assumption that this can’t have been instigated by Jewish opposition. If anonymous accusations to Pliny could get Christians killed in Bithynia, any Jews inclined to make trouble could get them killed in Rome: all they had to do was declare them not members of any official Synagogue, and immediately they would be in capital violation of the law against unlicensed assembly (the very thing Pliny executes Christians for rather than any of their actual beliefs).
Of course I also don’t agree with Eastman that Suetonius’s discussion of the Chrestus riots had anything to do with Christians (much less any events Clement has in mind). But that’s too distant a point to matter here. Nor relevant, for even if the Chrestus riots were an instance Jewish anti-Christian strife and Claudius could not tell or care about any difference between Jews and Christians at that point, this all still have played out just as Eastman suggests: jealousy leading to strife resulting in deaths.
I really appreciate your effort to explain your viewpoint to me. Unfortunately, I have not learned how sure you are (by a Bayesian analysis) that Clement’s text refers to violent deaths of Peter and Paul; it looks like you are almost 100 percent sure, which keeps me being surprised. Moreover, your strong claim
“There is no educated Greek who would not see violent deaths here.” is also surprising since it is not backed with any data. (I have at least one example of a Greek that violates your strong claim.) You also claim “The context is murder (actual and threatened). There is no other context.” though you yourself wrote “Clement means their killers envied the apostles, just as the youth envied the status of the elders they deposed at Corinth.” So there is a clear context (the unjust behaviour towards the elders at Corinth) where we have no indication of murder(s). You also write “… he adds to them the third set of examples, of recent Christians having been tortured and killed (Ch. 6).” while there is, in fact, again no clear word of killing in Chapter 6. Btw, Doherty in “Jesus Neither God nor Man”, pp. 600-601, characterizes this as “woolly language which fails to speak explicitly of death and execution.”
On the whole, you criticise not only me (writing “You are twisting the language in bizarre ways to change the plain meaning.”), but also Doherty, my Greek colleague, and the English translators who had different understanding (expressed via their translations) than you have … Having read your books, and your methodology, I am surprised that you do not simply admit that we even cannot be sure that Clement had violent deaths of Peter and Paul in mind … That’s all.
Yes, the text says the third set died: in 6.1 it says they were “gathered together with” (aorist, not present, tense) Peter and Paul, as in, they too joined them in death; and to make that clear, it says this again of the women, “they stedfastly finished the course of faith, and received a noble reward, weak in the body though they were” from torture (6.2), which explicitly indicates they died from what they suffered. That the poetic language is florid in no way justifies reading it against the grain of what is actually being said.
All the examples in the first (OT) set are of killing or attempted killing. And both the examples in the Peter-Paul set report their deaths and are said to be analogous to the OT cases precisely because of their deaths (5.1 and 5.2). And the third set explicitly describes women dying from torture and says they and others thus joined Peter and Paul.
This is not at all probable if they died peacefully. You have to assume things not in evidence to get the text to mean the opposite of what it says. Which is arguing in a circle. By contrast I’m arguing from the evidence. All the evidence is of a context of envy motivating (and sometimes causing) death: death of OT figures, deaths of Peter and Paul, deaths of the “multitude” of others and in particular some women tortured to death. The context is death.
There literally is no other context here. Trying to refer to elsewhere in the letter is not how you establish context. The context is what is actually in the material you are contextualizing, which is this three-set argument by example: murder and attempted murder in the OT, Peter and Paul contending unto death, and the others (particularly the women) being tortured to death.
Moreover, none of these examples makes any sense to mention but for their deaths. If Peter and Paul and the women all died peacefully, their examples present no relevant rhetorical point in the letter: they have literally no reason then to even be mentioned. They argue nothing.
To suppose an author just mentioned a bunch of irrelevant examples that argue nothing pertinent to his case is extremely improbable. That an author would set up his key analogy with a list of attempted murders, and not mean anything by that, is extremely improbable. That an author would explicitly relate the fates of Peter and Paul to those examples, and not mean anything by that, is extremely improbable. That an author would say women were tortured until, weak in body, they died, and not mean they died from torture, is extremely improbable. That an author would bracket Peter and Paul with examples of murder, and not mean anything by that, is extremely improbable.
This is why it is you (and evidently Doherty) who are twisting language and leaning on circular assumptions to get a result you (for some reason) want, just like Christian apologists do. Whereas I am just reading the text as written, and applying established principles of rhetoric as ancient authors consistently followed. One of us is doing real scholarship here. And it isn’t you.
Update:
I said above that “The same can be said of the fact that he immediately gives a third example in parallel, with the same language, of other Christians being killed for their faith.”
I am no longer certain those following lines continue the death theme. As the sequence segues into marital conflict (and thus away from executions or murders), the transitional reference to other men and women suffering from others’ envy might not mean killing but just enduring harassment or other indignities (even to one’s natural death, so as to then get the reward).
They also, distinctively and conspicuously, don’t mention “witnessing.”
I’d like to ask you about the four apparent mentions of “bishop” in 1-Clement (three in 42.4-5 and one in 44.1). These seem to suggest that 1-Clement was written at a time when the christian community was beginning to feel the need for some organisation via bishops and deacons (together with some concern that competition for such posts would lead to conflict). Is that right, or is there some mistranslating going on here? If correct, does this add weight to the earlier date, or is it irrelevant?
The word we render as bishop is just “supervisor,” it did not then refer to what we now mean by the word, but was then an inferior office, purely administrative. That’s why Clement never refers to any bishop as an authority. The only office he describes as having authority is presbyter (and, above that, apostle). I discuss that point in the article you are commenting on here. But for the full skinny, see my discussion in Did Paul Write Philemon?
After reading your post, I find it hard to see how anyone can rationally argue for a late date. Have there been any recent serious efforts to argue for a late date?
No.
This is one of those things where institutional inertia and arguments from prestige maintain a fixed belief in the field, utterly resistant to all disproofs.
The only arguments there are for the late date are the ones we have refuted (myself and the other critics here listed). There are no new arguments.
This phenomenon is like what I address in Things Fall Apart Only When You Check: The Main Reason the Historicity of Jesus Continues to Be Believed.