The Letter of the Roman Church to the Corinthian Church from the Era of Domitian: 1 Clement

by Adolf von Harnack, Jacob N. Cerone (Editor), Larry L. Welborn (Foreword)

This farewell gift on 1 Clement to Harnack's students of church history was formative for studies of 1 Clement for several decades after its publication, and it remains an influential work even in contemporary discussions of this ancient letter. Harnack contends that 1 Clement is the most important witness to early Christianity, and that a close study of this work will place the reader upon the right path to better understand its later developments. Also included within this volume are four influential essays that Harnack wrote throughout his career pertaining to 1 Clement as well as a historical introduction and assessment of Harnack's work by Larry Welborn.

280 pages, Hardcover

Published February 4, 2021

About the author

Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack (7 May 1851 – 10 June 1930) was a German Lutheran theologian and prominent church historian. He produced many religious publications from 1873 to 1912 (in which he is sometimes credited as Adolf Harnack).

Harnack traced the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on early Christian writing and called on Christians to question the authenticity of doctrines that arose in the early Christian church. He rejected the historicity of the Gospel of John in favor of the Synoptic Gospels, criticized the Apostles' Creed, and promoted the Social Gospel.

Reviews

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pickwick Publications’ series Classic Studies on the Apostolic Fathers provides the great service of reproducing and/or translating scholarship on early Christian witnesses of the first few years after the apostolic period. This fills an important need, because it is very helpful to get scholarly and critical background regarding these early Christian witnesses and how to best understand them in their context and as witnesses to our shared faith.

In The Letter of the Roman Church to the Corinthian Church from the Era of Domitian: 1 Clement: With a Collection of Articles on 1 Clement by Adolf von Harnack, Jacob Cerone presents translations of a lot of von Harnack’s studies into 1 Clement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, around the very time in which some of the exemplar manuscripts were discovered or re-discovered, and this information was being processed regarding the text in real time.

Adolf von Harnack is a legendary scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity and taught William Wrede among many others. In his material here you will find his translation of 1 Clement and a commentary on the text, essays about the letter, its author, its context, and its purpose, and, as noted, von Harnack’s articles regarding discoveries at the time and his textual critical conclusions regarding them. They remain very helpful to this day, although one will have to be very conversant with Greek to get the most out of it.