It is not necessary for our purpose to go into any analysis of the character of the Clementines. It will suffice to say that they almost entirely consist of discussions between the Apostle Peter and Simon the Magician regarding the identity of the true Mosaic and Christian religions. Peter follows the Magician from city to city for the purpose of exposing and refuting him, the one, in fact, representing Apostolic doctrine and the other heresy, and in the course of these discussions occur the very numerous quotations of sayings of Jesus and of Christian history which we have to examine.
The Clementine Recognitions, as we have already remarked, are only known to us through the Latin translation of Rufinus; and from a comparison of the evangelical quotations occurring in that work with the same in the Homilies, it is evident that Rufinus has assimilated them in the course of translation to the parallel passages of our Gospels. It is admitted, therefore, that no argument regarding the source of the quotations can rightly be based upon the Recognitions, and that work may, consequently, be entirely set aside,(1) and the Clementine Homilies alone need occupy our attention.
We need scarcely remark that, unless the date at which these Homilies were composed can be ascertained, their value as testimony for the existence of our Synoptic Gospels is seriously affected. The difficulty of arriving at a correct conclusion regarding this point, great under almost any circumstances, is of course increased by the fact that the work is altogether apocryphal, and most certainly not held by any one to have
been written by the person whose name it bears. There is in fact nothing but internal evidence by which to fix the date, and that internal evidence is of a character which admits of very wide extension down the course of time, although a sharp limit is set beyond which it cannot mount upwards. Of external evidence there is almost none, and what little exists does not warrant an early date. Origen, it is true, mentions [———],(1) which, it is conjectured, may either be the same work as the [———], or Recognitions, translated by Rufinus, or related to it, and Epiphanius and others refer to [———];(2) but our Clementine Homilies are not mentioned by any writer before pseudo-Athanasius.(3) The work, therefore, can at the best afford no substantial testimony to the antiquity and apostolic origin of our Gospels. Hilgenfeld, following in the steps of Baur, arrives at the conclusion that the Homilies are directed against the Gnosticism of Marcion (and also, as we shall hereafter see, against the Apostle Paul), and he, therefore, necessarily assigns to them a date subsequent to a.d. 160. As Reuss, however, inquires: upon this ground, why should a still later date not be named, since even Tertullian wrote vehemently against the same Gnosis.(4) There can be little doubt that the author was a representative of Ebionitic Gnosticism, which had once been the purest form of primitive Christianity, but later, through its own development, though still more through the rapid growth around it of Paulinian doctrine, had
assumed a position closely verging upon heresy. It is not necessary for us, however, to enter upon any exhaustive discussion of the date at which the Clementines were written; it is sufficient to show that there is no certain ground upon which a decision can be based, and that even an approximate conjecture can scarcely be reasonably advanced. Critics variously date the composition of the original Recognitions from about the middle of the second century to the end of the third, though the majority are agreed in placing them at least in the latter century.(1) They assign to the Homilies an origin at different dates within a period commencing about the middle of the second century, and extending to a century later.2
In the Homilies there are very numerous quotations
of sayings of Jesus and of Gospel history, which are generally placed in the mouth of Peter, or introduced with such formulae as: "The teacher said," "Jesus said," "He said," "The prophet said," but in no case does the author name the source from which these sayings and quotations are derived. That he does, however, quote from a written source, and not from tradition, is clear from the use of such expressions as "in another place [———](1) he has said," which refer not to other localities or circumstances, but another part of a written history.(2) There are in the Clementine Homilies upwards of a hundred quotations of sayings of Jesus or references to his history, too many by far for us to examine in detail here; but, notwithstanding the number of these passages, so systematically do they vary, more or less, from the parallels in our canonical Gospels, that, as in the case of Justin, Apologists are obliged to have recourse to the elastic explanation, already worn so threadbare, of "free quotation from memory" and "blending of passages" to account for the remarkable phenomena presented. It must, however, be evident that the necessity for such an apology at all shows the insufficiency of the evidence furnished by these quotations. De Wette says: "The quotations of evangelical works and histories in the pseudo-Clementine writings, from their nature free and inaccurate, permit only an uncertain conclusion to be