Clement I

Clement of Rome, known also as Pope Clement I and in Latin as Clemens Romanus, was a leading figure of the Roman church in the late first century and is counted by Catholic and many other Christian traditions as the fourth Bishop of Rome, after the apostle Peter and the obscure figures Linus and Anacletus (Cletus). The earliest substantial witness to him is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the later second century, who presents Clement as a man who had seen and heard the apostles and who stood in their tradition of teaching. Irenaeus and later Eusebius of Caesarea attribute to him the letter sent by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, a document now called 1 Clement. That letter, composed in Greek and usually dated to the mid-nineties of the first century, is among the oldest Christian writings outside the New Testament. It was occasioned by a dispute at Corinth in which younger members of the community had deposed established presbyters; the Roman church, speaking through Clement, urged repentance, humility, and the restoration of the ousted ministers, appealing to Old Testament examples, to the order of nature, and to the memory of the apostles Peter and Paul, who are said in the letter to have suffered at Rome.

Almost nothing can be established with certainty about Clement's birth, family, or early career. Later Roman tradition, recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, calls him a Roman, son of Faustinus, from the region of the Caelian Hill, but those particulars are late and unverified. Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome identified him with the Clement whom Paul names in the Epistle to the Philippians as a fellow worker whose name is in the book of life; the identification is possible given the chronology but cannot be proved. Another ancient suggestion equated him with Titus Flavius Clemens, consul in 95 and a relative of the emperor Domitian, who was put to death on a charge associated with atheism or Jewish practices; most modern historians treat the consul and the bishop as distinct persons. What the letter itself reveals is a leader steeped in the Greek Bible, familiar with Pauline and Petrine language, and concerned to present the ministry of bishops and deacons as divinely ordered. The Roman community appears already conscious of a pastoral responsibility toward another apostolic church. 1 Clement was read in some congregations as if it were scripture and was included in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus; a so-called Second Letter of Clement is now generally regarded as an anonymous second-century homily, and the extensive Pseudo-Clementine romances (the Recognitions and Homilies) belong to later centuries.

The dates of Clement's episcopate remain uncertain. Ancient catalogues disagree. Eusebius, drawing on earlier lists, places his tenure from about the twelfth year of Domitian to the third year of Trajan, a span of some nine years ending around 100 or 101. Traditional papal lists used in the West have often given 88–97 or 92–99. Whether he died a martyr is likewise unclear. Irenaeus and Eusebius do not describe him as a martyr. From the fourth century, however, he was commemorated as one, and a fully developed legend, known from apocryphal acts that are not earlier than late antiquity and that were further elaborated in the Middle Ages, relates that the emperor Trajan banished him to the Crimean Chersonesus, that he miraculously brought forth water for convicts in the quarries, converted many, and was drowned in the sea with an anchor fastened to his neck. Historians treat this narrative as legendary. In the ninth century Saints Cyril and Methodius were said to have recovered relics believed to be Clement's in the Crimea and to have brought them to Rome, where they were placed in the Basilica of San Clemente near the Lateran, a church whose lower levels preserve earlier Roman and Christian structures and which remains the principal site of his cult in the West.

Clement is numbered among the Apostolic Fathers. His authentic letter is a primary source for the organization, language, and self-understanding of the Roman church at the end of the first century, and for the way that church invoked apostolic memory to settle a conflict abroad. He is venerated as a saint throughout the historic churches. The Roman Catholic Church keeps his feast on 23 November; the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 25 November (and in some calendars also notes the translation of relics). Because of the anchor in his legend he became a patron of mariners, sailors, boatmen, and related trades, as well as of marble workers and stonecutters and of sick children. No contemporary evidence records a wife or children, and nothing reliable is known of a religious profession in the later monastic sense. Whatever the gaps in the record, Clement's name stands at the junction of apostolic tradition and the emerging episcopal church of Rome.