Church Structure and Apostolic Authority
First Clement
is one of the earliest extant Christian documents, outside of the New Testament
texts themselves. It is a short letter that St. Clement wrote on behalf of the
Christian community in Rome to the Christian community in Corinth. At this
point in history, the Roman church did not have a strong, central bishop but
rather a number of presbyters, some of them carrying a sort of senior status
that allowed them to represent the entire community to others. From roughly AD
88 to 99, St. Clement was that leader. His title as “Bishop of Rome” is
retroactive, based on the structures that solidified there in the mid-second
century.
The fact that
the magisterial episcopacy developed from the mid-second century, at different
rates in different parts of the Church, is in no way a critique of its
validity. A bishop was a successor to the apostles upon their departure from
this life. We see, within the pages of the Scriptures, St. Paul making St.
Timothy such a bishop from Crete by sending him there and enjoining him to
ordain presbyters and deacons. At the same time, when Paul stops in Ephesus on
his way to Jerusalem, a group of presbyters governs the church there. Ephesus
still enjoyed the active ministry of an apostle: not only St. Paul but also St.
John the Theologian, as well as the Theotokos and St. Mary Magdalene in the
second half of the first century. Rome, as the capital of the empire, was in a
similar situation. It is for this reason that St. Clement seems in his epistle
to use the terms “bishop” and “presbyter” interchangeably; different Christian communities
at this point had somewhat different structures.
Saint Clement
writes to the church at Corinth not from the perspective of a leader in that
far distant community, nor from the perspective of having a special office that
entitles him to do so. He writes the letter from the Roman church to the
Corinthian church as a brother. Clement appeals again and again not to his own
authority, or even the authority of Rome, but rather to the authority of the
apostles, in particular St. Paul. He reminds the members of the church at
Corinth of the letters that St. Paul wrote to them (Clem. 47:1). He quotes
again and again from the Epistles of St. Paul, including Hebrews. His approach
is therefore as an associate of the apostles, to bring the authority of the apostles
to bear. Saint Paul is the apostle of Corinth, who founded the community there
and wrote at least four letters to the Corinthian church, and so it is to St. Paul
that St. Clement repeatedly and directly appeals.
Saint Clement
also represents an early testimony to several events in the latter part of the first
century known from sources outside Scripture. First Clement refers directly to
the martyrdoms of Ss. Peter and Paul without expressly naming their location as
Rome, though he wrote the epistle from there (Clem. 5). Clement presents both
martyrdoms as the result of jealousy and envy, and the epistle goes on to
record the names of other martyrs in this early period at Rome. In describing
the martyrdom of St. Paul in particular, St. Clement refers to Paul as having
journeyed to the extreme points of the West—an apparent confirmation of the
success of the apostle’s intention to voyage to Spain. (Stephen De Young, Apocrypha:
An Introduction to Extra-Biblical Literature [Chesterton, Ind.: Ancient Faith
Publishing, 2023], 287-89)
