Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and tenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the Clementine romance. This volume holds the twenty Clementine Homilies, the ten books of the Clementine Recognitions, the Syriac texts from Mount Sinai and the two Epistles on Virginity.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The translations are those of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, as collected in the Writings-Database, and a transcription error may remain. Footnotes are left out. The headings of the twenty Homilies and the ten Books were not in the source, and they have been added.
In this volume
The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions are two forms of one long Christian romance. Clement of Rome, a young man in search of the truth, meets Peter, travels with him, hears him dispute with Simon Magus, and at last finds his lost family. Between the stories the apostle teaches on God, the prophets, the law, and the false prophet who comes before the true.
Scholars date the work to the third or fourth century and think it came from a Jewish-Christian circle in Syria. The Homilies survive in Greek, and the Recognitions in the Latin of Rufinus. The volume prints both in the Ante-Nicene translation, with the Syriac Texts from Mount Sinai and the two letters that were written in Clement’s name on virginity.
Dates and authorship
None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The Clementine writings are a fourth-century romance that uses an older lost source; Clement of Rome did not write them.