[1204] Funk gives a list of quotations and parallel passages, Patr. Apost. I. 566-570. From this it appears that 157 are from the O. T., including the Apocrypha and (apparently) the Assumption of Moses, 158 from the N. T., but only three of the latter are strict quotations (ch. 46 from Matt. 26:24, and Luke 17:2; ch. 2 and 61 from Tit. 3:1). Clement mentions by name only one book of the N. T., epistole tou makariou Paulou, with evident reference to I Cor. 1;10 sqq. Comp. also the lists of Scripture quotations in the ed. of Bryennios (p. 159-165), and G. and H. p. 144-155.
[1205] "When we remember," says Lightfoot, p. 268 sq., "that this prayer issued from the fiery furnace of persecution after experience of a cruel and capricious tyrant like Domitian, it will appear truly sublime--sublime in its utterances and still more sublime in its silence. Who would have grudged the Church, of Rome her primacy, if she had always spoken thus?" Ropes (l. c, p. 343): The sublimity of this prayer gains a peculiar sIgnificance when we remember that it was Domitian in whose behalf it was offered."
[1206] Renan (p. 314) call, .; his epistle "un beau morceau neutre, dont les disciples de Pierre et ceux de Paul durent se contenter également. Ilest probale qu'il fut un des agents les plus énergetiques de la grande OEuvre qué etait en train de s' accomplir, je veux dire, de la réconciliation posthume de Pierre et de Paul de la fusior des deux partis, sans l'union desquels l'OEuvre du Christ ne pouvait que périr."
[1207] Ch. 32. An echo of Paul's teaching is found in Polycarp, Ad Phil. c.1, where he refers to "the firm root of their faith, preached to them from olden times, which remains to this day, and bears fruit in our Lord Jesus Christ."
[1208] Ch. 49.
[1209] Ch. 46. Comp. Eph. 4:3 sqq.
[1210] 3 Ch. 20: Okeanos anthropois aperantos kai hoi met' auton kosmoi tais autais tagais tou despotou dieuthunontai. Lightfoot (p. 84) remarks on this passage: "Clement may possibly be referring to some known, but hardly accessible land, lying without the pillars of Hercules. But more probably he contemplated some unknown land in the far west beyond the ocean, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, or the real America of modern discovery." Lightfoot goes on to say that this passage was thus understood by Irenaeus (II. 28, 2), Clement of Alexandria (Strom. V. 12), and Origen ) De Princ. II.6; In Ezech. VIII. 3), but that, at a later date, this opinion was condemned by Tertullian (De Pall. 2 Hermog. 25), Lactantius (Inst. II. 24), and Augustin )De Civit. Dei XVI. 9). For centuries the idea of Cosmas Indicopleustes that the earth was a plain surface and a parallelogram, prevailed in Christian literature.
[1211] See especially chs. 56, 58, 59, 63, of the Constantinopolitan and Syrian text.
[1212] Clement, Ad Cor. c. 25. Contrast with this account the fifteenth chapter of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians.
[1213] Tertullian )De Resurrect. 13), Origen (C. Cels. IV. 72), Ambrose (Hexaëm. V. 23, 79), Epiphanius, Rufinus, and other patristic writers. The Phoenix was a favorite symbol of renovation and resurrection, and even of Christ himself, among the early Christians, and appears frequently on coins, medals, rings, cups, and tombstones. But in this point they were no more superstitious than the most intelligent heathen contemporaries. Herodotus heard the marvelous story of the burial of the parent bird by the offspring from Egyptian priests, II. 73. Ovid and other Latin poets refer to it, and Claudian devotes a poem to it. Tacitus (Ann. VI. 28), Pliny ) H. Nat. X. 2), and Dion Cassius LVIII. 27) record that the Phoenix actually reappeared in Egypt, a.d. 34, after In interval of 250 years. According to Pliny the bird was also brought to Rome by a decree of Claudius, and exhibited in the comitium, in the year of the city 800 (A. D. 47). This, of course, was a fraud, but many, and among them probably Clement, who may have seen the wonderful bird from Egypt at the time, took it for genuine. But an inspired writer like Paul would never have made use of such a heathen fable as an argument for a Christian truth. "It is now known," says Lightfoot."that the story owes its origin to the symbolic and pictorial representations of astronomy. The appearance of the phoenix is the recurrence of a period marked by the heliacal rising of some prominent star or constellation." See on the whole subject Henrichsen, De Phoenicis Fabula (Havn. 1825), Cowper, Gebhardt and Harnack, Funk, and Lightfoot on ch. 25 of the Clementine Ep., Piper, Mythologie und Symbolik der christl. Kunst (1847) I. 446 sqq., and Lepsius, Chronologie der Aegypter (1849) 180 sq.
[1214] Ch. 1. The usual reading is: genomenas, which refers to past calamities. So Cod. C. The Alex. MS. is here defective, probably [genom]enas .Lightfoot reads with the Syrian version ginomenas, " which are befalling us" (267 and 399), and refers the passage to the continued perils of the church under Domitian.
[1215] bebaiotaten kai archaian, c. 47.
[1216] The later date (93-97) is assIgned to the Epistle by Cotelier, Tillemont, Lardner, Möhler, Schliemann, Bunsen, Ritschl, Lipsius, Hilgenfeld, Donaldson, Bryennios, Harnack, Uhlhorn, Lightfoot (who puts the letter soon after the martyrdom of Flavius Clement, a.d. 95), Funk (who puts it after the death of Domitian, 96). But other writers, including Hugo Grotius, Grabe, Hefele, Wieseler, B. H. Cowper, assIgn the Epistle to an earlier date, and infer from ch. 41 that it must have been written before 70, when the temple service in Jerusalem was still celebrated. "Not everywhere, brethren," says Clement, "are the daily sacrifices offered (prospherontai thusiai), or the vows, or the sin-offerings, or the trespass-offerings, but in Jerusalem only; and even there they are not offered prospheretai) in every place, but only at the altar before the sanctuary, after the victim to be offered has been examined by the high-priest and the ministers already mentioned." This argument is very plausible, but not conclusive, since Josephus wrote a.d. 93 in a similar way of the sacrifices of the temple, using the praesens historicum, as if it still existed, Ant. III. 10. In ch. 6 Clement seems to refer to the destruction of Jerusalem when he says that "jealousy and strife have overthrown great cities and uprooted great nations." Cowper (l.c. p. 16) mentions the absence of any allusion to the Gospel of John as another argument. But the Synoptic Gospels are not named either, although the influence of all the Gospels and nearly all the Epistles can be clearly traced in Clement.