Saint Clement of Rome

fl. c. 96 · 1st c. · 2 works

Clement of Rome is reckoned among the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Christian writers after the New Testament era. He served as a bishop of Rome at the close of the first century, and tradition counts him among the successors of the Apostle Peter, naming him the third or fourth to hold the see after Linus and Anacletus.

Little is firmly known of his life. Early tradition links him to the apostles, holding that he was consecrated by Peter and was their companion and disciple; he has sometimes been identified with the Clement named in Paul's Letter to the Philippians. According to later accounts he was exiled under the emperor Trajan and martyred, drowned in the sea with an anchor fastened to him.

His principal surviving work is the Letter to the Corinthians (1 Clement), written about the year 96 to quell a schism in the church at Corinth. It is the earliest Christian document outside the New Testament and an important witness to early church order and ministry. A second work long ascribed to him, the so-called 2 Clement, is now generally regarded as not his.

He is venerated as a holy hieromartyr, the anchor being his enduring symbol. In the Orthodox Church his memory is kept on 25 November. Tradition holds that his relics, recovered near Cherson in the Crimea, were brought to Constantinople and Rome by Saints Cyril and Methodius.

Sources: Orthodox Church in America — Hieromartyr Clement, Pope of Rome · Encyclopædia Britannica — St. Clement I