πάνυ your θαυµασίως 6 Πέτρος 6 µακάριος γυναῖκας, φησίν, ὥσαυτως μὴ ev πλέγμασιν ἢ χρυσῷ ἢ µαργαρίταις ἢ ἱματισμῷ πολυτελεῖ, ἀλλ ὃ πρεπει γυναιξὶν ἐπαγγελλομέναις θεοσέβειαν, δι ἔργων ἀγαθῶν σφᾶς αὐτὰς κοσ- μούσων.
The fact of the matter is that even Clement used, at any rate in his Paedagogus, manuals of extracts from Scripture classified according to their subjects. His Paedagogus or instructor is the distinguished successor of a line of humbler books of the same kind. The Christian catechist had his armoury of appropriate texts just as the missionary to the Jews had his. The extracts were arranged under headings: sayings of Moses, the Prophet, the Psalmist, the Sage, the Lord and the Apostle followed each other in various. orders and with different degrees of precision in attribution. The inevitable results were that the extracts were affected by their new neighbours in respect of their text, and that their proper ascrip- tion was lost sight of. As the learning and the security of the Church increased, these results were corrected. Complete Bibles in the Church chests superseded the manuals, and Origen (for ex- ample) laboured to restore the purity of the text. The new state of things is reflected in the Stromateis of Clement: there Jesus Son of Sirach receives credit for his wisdom, which in the Paedagogus is ascribed to wisdom, the Paedagogue, or Solomon; and the text of the extracts conforms to the standard of the uncial manuscripts. But the literature which preceded Clement was popular rather than scholarly, and the phenomena presented by his use of Scripture in the Paedagogus contribute to confirm the conclusion that the argument based upon the silence of his. predecessors is fallacious, and that their silence can fairly be construed as a denial of the Petrine origin or authorship of 1 Peter.
These examples of the use of 1 Peter made by Irenzus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria have been given in full to show what the raw material of the evidence really is. Samples only as they are, they suffice to show that 1 Peter was recognised as St. Peter’s Epistle about Α.Ρ. 200 in Gaul, Africa, and Alexandria. By a stretch of the imagination it might be supposed that Tertullian was dependent upon Clement for this knowledge; but Irenzeus and Clement represent a tradition which they inherited independently from a distant past. Now Clement was the earliest Christian scholar, whose works have come down to us, and Irenzus is linked to the apostolic age by his. connexion with Polycarp.
In his Epistle to the Philippians, Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna,.