The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians is a letter sent from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth around AD 96, and it is the earliest Christian writing we possess outside the New Testament. Its occasion is painfully ordinary: the Corinthian congregation had deposed its faithful elders, a younger faction had pushed out men of blameless conduct, and word of the split reached Rome. The Roman church wrote back — not to issue orders, but to plead, from Scripture, for an end to the quarrel. If you have come looking for a summary of what people call First Clement or 1 Clement, here it is in one line: it is a pastoral letter about how a divided church can become one again, through humility, order, and love. You can read the whole of it free at Ochorus in The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians; this guide is a companion for reading it well.
What the letter is, and why it matters
Set the scene. It is roughly sixty years after the resurrection. Some of the men and women who had walked with Peter and Paul are still alive; others have just been killed in Rome. The apostles are gone, or going, and the churches they planted are learning, for the first time, how to be Christian without an apostle in the room to settle an argument. Into that moment a letter travels the six hundred miles from Rome to Corinth. That is why it matters far beyond its immediate errand: it is the earliest window we have into how the second generation of the church actually thought, prayed, and quarrelled.
The letter names no author. It is sent in the plural voice of a congregation — the church of God sojourning at Rome to the church of God sojourning at Corinth. It was the Corinthians themselves, and later writers, who attached the name of Clement, traditionally remembered as one of the earliest leaders of the Roman church and sometimes identified with the fellow worker Paul names in Philippians 4:3. You can read more about the man, and how little of him is certain, on the page for Clement of Rome. What is not in doubt is the crisis he is writing into, and the tenderness with which he begins:
Moreover, ye were all distinguished by humility, and were in no respect puffed up with pride, but yielded obedience rather than extorted it, and were more willing to give than to receive.
Clement of Rome
He remembers them at their best before he ever names their worst. That is the temper of the whole letter.
How the letter unfolds
Clement does not open with a rebuke. He opens with praise, and only then names the disease — which he calls jealousy, or envy. He traces it through the whole of Scripture like a physician following an infection: Cain rising against Abel (Genesis 4:8), Esau against Jacob, Joseph sold by his brothers, Saul hunting David. Then he turns, terribly, to his own generation, and gives the earliest account outside the New Testament of the deaths of Peter and Paul — men brought down, he says, by the same envy, in a city that has just watched Christians die.
His remedy is repentance and then imitation. He calls the Corinthians to wash and be clean in the words of Isaiah 1:18, and then parades the great examples of humility before them. Christ himself, who came in lowliness and not in pride, is read through the suffering-servant song where by his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). Abraham, who believed God and had it counted to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6), yet called himself dust and ashes. David, to whom God bore such witness, still cried out for a clean heart (Psalm 51:10). Clement piles them up until humility looks less like weakness and more like the native air of every great servant of God.
From there the letter widens out. Clement points to the ordered peace of the created world — the sun and moon keeping their courses, the seasons giving place to one another, the sea that never passes the bounds set for it — and argues that a church torn by faction has fallen out of step with the very grammar of creation. He argues, at length and with evident delight, for the resurrection, reasoning from day following night, from the buried seed that dissolves before it rises, and from the legend of the phoenix, a bird he plainly believed lived in Arabia. That last argument has embarrassed readers for nineteen centuries, and it is worth leaving in plain view: the earliest Christian letter outside the New Testament reasons from natural history that was simply wrong, in the service of a hope that was not. The man is not infallible. He is faithful.
Then, near the end, the prose lifts into the famous praise of love, echoing Paul’s own hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13:4:
The height to which love exalts is unspeakable. Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love beareth all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no seditions: love does all things in harmony.
Clement of Rome
And having praised love, he asks the men at the centre of the quarrel to do the single hardest thing in the letter — to step down, for the peace of the whole:
If on my account sedition and disagreement and schisms have arisen, I will depart, I will go away whithersoever ye desire, and I will do whatever the majority commands; only let the flock of Christ live on terms of peace with the presbyters set over it.
Clement of Rome
The letter closes on its knees. Clement prays for the sick, the fallen, the fainthearted, the hungry, the imprisoned — and then, astonishingly for a Christian writing while Rome was killing Christians, he prays at length for the emperor and the governing authorities. That closing intercession is one of the oldest Christian prayers we possess; for centuries it was lost, because a whole leaf had fallen out of the only manuscript Europe knew, and it was recovered only in 1873. Older translations, including the one Ochorus hosts, still carry the gap where the leaf went missing.
May God, who seeth all things, and who is the Ruler of all spirits and the Lord of all flesh—who chose our Lord Jesus Christ and us through Him to be a peculiar people—grant to every soul that calleth upon His glorious and holy Name, faith, fear, peace, patience, long-suffering, self-control, purity, and sobriety, to the well-pleasing of His Name, through our High Priest and Protector, Jesus Christ, by whom be to Him glory, and majesty, and power, and honour, both now and for evermore. Amen.
Clement of Rome
The themes at the heart of it
Humility
Everything in the letter grows from a single root: the conviction, quoted straight from Proverbs 3:34, that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. The Corinthian collapse is, for Clement, simply pride wearing the mask of principle. His cure is not to argue the factions into submission but to set humility before their eyes until they are ashamed of the smallness of what they are fighting over.
Order and submission
Clement holds a strikingly high view of order. He points to the ranks of an army and the members of a body, where the great cannot do without the small nor the small without the great, and he argues that the ministry of the church was appointed in an orderly way — Christ sent by God, the apostles by Christ, and after them approved men to serve the flock. To depose faithful elders who have served blamelessly is therefore not a matter of local politics but a tearing of the fabric God himself wove. This is one of the earliest Christian reflections on church order anywhere, and readers of every tradition have argued over it ever since.
Love
Order without love would be mere administration, and Clement knows it. His chapter on love is the summit of the letter, and it flows directly into the plea for reconciliation and confession. He reminds the Corinthians, in the words of Psalm 32:1, that blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven and whose sins are covered — the same covering love does among a divided people.
The resurrection and the reward
Underneath the appeal for peace runs a steady confidence in the world to come. Clement wants the Corinthians to lift their eyes from the quarrel to the reward, quoting the promise Paul also cites, that eye has not seen nor ear heard the things God has prepared for those who wait for him (1 Corinthians 2:9). A church that truly believed in the resurrection, he implies, would not waste itself on such a fight.
Who should read it
Read it if you have ever watched a church quarrel and wondered whether the gospel could survive the people who preach it. Clement did not treat the Corinthian collapse as a scandal that disqualified the faith; he treated it as an illness with a known cause and a known cure, and he wrote as a man who fully expected the cure to work. Read it if you are an elder or a leader, and need to hear an ancient voice say plainly that faithful service should not be lightly thrown off. Read it if you love the Scriptures, for the letter is stitched through with the Old Testament the way a life is stitched through with habit — Clement thinks in Scripture by reflex, teaching the fear of the Lord in the very words of Psalm 34:11, and asserting that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof from Psalm 24:1. And read it if you simply want to hear the church’s own voice from within living memory of the apostles, unhurried, pastoral, and unafraid.
How to read it today
It is short — fifty-nine brief chapters, an easy single sitting. The best companion for it is Paul’s own letter to the same city: read 1 Corinthians alongside it and you will hear Clement writing into a wound Paul had already probed, when he named the parties gathering behind himself, Cephas, and Apollos (1 Corinthians 1:12). Do not stumble over the phoenix or over the missing leaf; read past the flawed argument to the faithful man behind it, and notice what he does when he has finished arguing — he prays. Then let the letter open a door into the wider world of the early church. Its closest neighbour is The Epistles of Ignatius by Ignatius of Antioch, written barely a decade later by another leader facing death with the same concern for the unity of the church. From there, Athanasius’ great fourth-century classic On the Incarnation carries the same faith forward into its first full flowering of thought. All of them are free to read in full at Ochorus.
For reflection
- Clement names the Corinthian split as envy dressed up as principle. Where, in a conflict you know, might the real root be different from the reason people give for it?
- He asks the leaders of the faction to step down for the sake of the whole flock. When have you seen someone lay down a position they could have defended — and what did it cost, and win?
- The letter treats a church’s failure not as proof against the gospel but as an illness with a cure. How does that change the way you pray about a church in trouble?
- Clement ends by praying for the very rulers who were killing Christians. Who are the people it is hardest for you to pray for, and what would it mean to begin?
- He remembers the Corinthians at their best before he names their worst. How might you speak to someone you are at odds with if you started there?
