On the view that 1 Clement does not teach a mono-episcopacy in the first century:
This impression is greatly
strengthened by the Shepherd of Hermas, a visionary text written around
the year 120. The crucial passage here is that in which the seer is instructed
to write down his visions and give “one copy to Clement and one to Grapte. So
Clement shall send it to the cities outside, for this is his appointed role,
while Grapte shall instruct the widows and orphans. But you shall read it to
this city along with the presbyters who preside over the church”. [Hermas
V.2.41 Jones indulges in a great deal of strained reading of this (from his
point of view rather unpromising) text. He wants to insist that Clement is in
fact the presbyter who presides as monobishop over the Church of Rome, and not
rather as the text seems to imply, the presbyter in charge of foreign
correspondence. His chief argument here appears to be that the passage would
read perfectly naturally if we substitute the word “bishop” for Clement’s name.
This is an entertaining argument, with a great many possibilities for creative
elaboration, since by the same token the passage will read equally naturally if
we substitute the word “postman”. In fact, however, the natural reading of the
passage is surely that three distinct types of functionary are being described:
Clement, whose job is to send letters abroad, Grapte whose job is to teach the
women and children, and the presbyters, “who preside over the Church.
The role ascribed to Clement in
the Shepherd of Hermas is therefore strikingly consistent with the role
actually exercised by the author of I Clement. Even if we accept that the man
who wrote I Clement was the same Clement (not a rare name) referred to thirty
years later by Hermas, neither of these, the earliest and most important
non-biblical texts to emanate from the Church of Rome, contains so much as a
hint that Clement was the presiding bishop of Rome, or indeed that there
existed at that stage any such creature. In referring to Church order, and in
marked contrast to Ignatius, they always speak of bishops, presbyters and
deacons in the plural. In the face of all this, Fr Jones’s valiant insistence
that nevertheless, Clement might have been the presiding bishop of Rome, which
he then modulates into the claim that it is just as likely as not that he was,
looks like historical fideism, assertion unencumbered by the need for evidence.
But while the fact that one of these two early “Clementine” documents
should fail to mention that Clement was the pope might indeed be considered a
misfortune, the failure of either to do so begins to look like carelessness-or
like evidence the other way. And in this context, Ignatius’s otherwise puzzling
silence about the role of the Roman bishop begins to seem more intelligible. (Eamon Duffy, “Was
there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?,” New Blackfriars 80, no.
940 [June 1999]: 304-5, italics in original; the article is a response to David
Albert Jones, “Was
there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?,” New Blackfriars 80,
no. 937 [March 1999]: 128-43)
