Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Jonathan Bernier on 1 Clement 40-44 as Evidence for Pre-70 Authorship of the Letter

  

Once Again, 70 (1 Clem. 40-44)

 

In 1 Clement 40-44 the author invokes the temple administration in order to demonstrate a divine preference for liturgical and institutional order. In this text, 1 Clement uses the present tense to describe the temple administration. As always, this is not sufficient to demonstrate that the temple still stood at the time of writing. The text’s rhetoric nonetheless poses some difficulties for a post-70 date. According to 1 Clement, just as God ordained the temple order (40-41), so too did God ordain the emergent ecclesiastical order (42-44.3). Thus, it is unjust to remove from ministry those appointed by the apostles and their successors (44.3-6). If written after 70, the audience could quite reasonably object that if this earlier divine temple order was overturned by human agents, then too could be the current ecclesial one. While his readers knew that the temple had in recent memory been destroyed violently, how plausibly could 1 Clement 40.4, in the midst of speaking of the temple administration, declare that “those, therefore, who make their offsprings at the appointed times are acceptable and blessed, for those who follow the instructions of the Master cannot go wrong”? (1 Clem. 40.4). Such explicit declaration, that just as the temple administration is blessed because it abides by divine ordinances so too are ecclesiastical administrations, makes much greater sense before rather than after 70. Although this datum cannot exclude a post-70 date, we should probably be inclined to favor a pre-70 one. (Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Composition [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], 245-46, italics in original; Bernier places the authorship of this letter to 64-70)

 

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