The Apostolic Fathers Vol. 1: Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Didache

I. CLEMENT

century. It is therefore probably not much later than 100 A.D. If it be assumed that chapter 1, which speaks of trouble and perhaps of persecution The author of the letter mentions sudden and repeated misfortunes, often interpreted as the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Domitian., refers to the time of Domitian Roman Emperor from 81 to 96 A.D., it can probably be dated as circa 96 A.D.; but we know very little about the alleged persecution in the time of Domitian, and it would not be prudent to decide that the epistle cannot be another ten or fifteen years later. It is safest to say that it must be dated between 75 and 110 A.D.; but within these limits there is a general agreement among critics to regard as most probable the last decade of the first century.

The evidence for the text of the epistle is as follows:—

The Codex Alexandrinus One of the most important early manuscripts of the Greek Bible, named after Alexandria, where it was kept for centuries before being given to King Charles I of England., a Greek uncial uncial A style of manuscript writing using large, rounded capital letters, used primarily between the 4th and 8th centuries. of the fifth century in the British Museum, contains the whole text with the exception of one page. It can be consulted in the photographic edition of the whole codex published by the Trustees of the British Museum.

The Codex Constantinopolitanus A famous manuscript found in the library of the Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul (Constantinople)., a Greek minuscule minuscule A script developed in the 9th century using smaller, lower-case letters, which allowed for faster and more compact copying of texts. written by Leo the Notary in 1056 A.D. and discovered by Bryennius Philotheos Bryennios, a Greek Orthodox bishop and scholar who found the manuscript in 1875. in Constantinople in 1875; it also contains the second epistle of Clement, the epistle of Barnabas, the Didache The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, an early Christian treatise., and the interpolated altered by the insertion of new or foreign matter text (see pp. 167 ff.) of the epistles of Ignatius. A photographic edition of the text is given in Lightfoot's Joseph Barber Lightfoot, a prominent 19th-century theologian and scholar of the Apostolic Fathers. edition of Clement.

The Syriac version A translation into the Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic that was a major literary language for Middle Eastern Christians., extant in only one manuscript written in 1169 A.D. and now in the Library of Cambridge University (MS. add. 1700); the date of this version is unknown, but it is probably not early, and may perhaps best be placed in the eighth century. A collation collation A systematic comparison of different manuscripts to identify variations or errors in the text. is given in Lightfoot's edition, and the text