Now, supposing that he was sixty-five years old when he wrote his Epistle, he was born about the time of our Lord's Death: he was consequently a contemporary of the generation that had witnessed the Death and Resurrection of Christ and the founding of the Church. If he had ever been in Jerusalem before its destruction, he must have fallen in with multitudes of surviving Christians of the 5,000 who were converted on and just after the day of Pentecost.
His Christian reminiscences, then, must have extended far into the age of the contemporaries of Christ. A man who was twenty-five years old at the time of the Resurrection of Christ would scarcely be reckoned an old man at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Clement consequently might have spent twenty of the best years of his life in the company of persons who were old enough to have seen the Lord in the Flesh. [193:1]
So that his knowledge of the Death and Resurrection of Christ, and the founding of the Church, even if he had never seen St. Paul or any other Apostle, must have been derived from a generation of men, all the older members of which wore Christians of the Pentecostal period.
Now when we come to compare the Epistle of Clement with the only remaining Christian literature of the earliest period, i.e. the earlier Epistles of St. Paul, we find both the account of Christ and the Theology built upon that account, to be the same in the one and in the other.
The supernatural fact respecting Christ to which the earliest Epistles of St. Paul most prominently refer, was His Resurrection as the pledge of ours, and this is the fact respecting Christ which is put most prominently forward by Clement, and for the same purpose. The First Epistle to the Corinthians is referred to by Clement in the words:—
"Take up the Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Paul. What did he write
to you at the time when the Gospel first began to be preached?
Truly, under the inspiration of the Spirit ([Greek: pneumatikôs]) he
wrote to you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even
then parties had been formed among you." (Ch. xlvii.)
The other reproductions of the language of St. Paul's Epistles are numerous, and I give them in a note. [194:1] The reader will see at a glance that the Theology or Christology of Clement was that of the earliest writings of the Church of which we have any remains, and to these he himself frequently and unmistakably refers.
The earlier Epistles of St. Paul, as those to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are acknowledged on all hands, even by advanced German Rationalists, to be the genuine works of the Apostle Paul; indeed one might as well deny that such a man ever existed as question their authenticity. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, which is the longest and most dogmatic of the earlier ones, cannot have been written after the year 58. In a considerable number of chronological tables to which I have referred, the earliest date is the year 52, and the latest 58.
To the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, which is undoubtedly the earliest of all, the earliest date assigned is 47, and the latest 53.
Now it is ever to be remembered that in each of these—the First to the Thessalonians and the First to the Corinthians—we have enunciations of the great crowning supernatural event of Scripture—the Resurrection of Christ and our Resurrection as depending upon it, which are unsurpassed in the rest of Scripture.