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The Death of “Jewish Christianity” in the Afterlife of the Clementine Recognitions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2024

Warren Campbell
Warren Campbell*
Affiliation:
Wabash College; [email protected]
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Abstract

The editorial history of the two Pseudo-Clementine narratives known as the Recognitions and the Homilies is intricate, to say the least. From an ever-elusive “basic writing” spring two novelistic stories with extensive translation histories, subjected to significant editorial interventions, and anthologized alongside other late ancient and medieval texts. This article focuses on the addition of pseudonymous epistles as prefatory material for these Pseudo-Clementines and follows one of these letters in particular, the Epistula Clementis (Ep. Clem.). The Epistula Clementis accompanies the Latin Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions in a host of medieval anthologies concerned with Petrine hagiography and ecclesial succession, as well as histories, dialogues, and epistolary texts with anti-Judaic resonances. I argue that the Epistula Clementis, as a prefatory text, was integral to the success of the Recognitions in these later anthologies, highlighting the transformative power of the preface upon its associated text as well as the hermeneutical force of the anthology itself.

Keywords

Pseudo-ClementineRecognitionsJewish Christianitypseudepigraphyreception
Type
Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 117 , Issue 3 , July 2024 , pp. 456 - 474
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Introduction

The Pseudo-Clementines are two distinct literary texts from the third and fourth centuries CE, known as the Homilies/Klementia (Hom.) and the Recognition(s) (Rec.).Footnote 1 These novelistic texts concern the travels of Clement of Rome and the apostle Peter, who together engage various antagonists: Simon Magus, Apion, and Anoubion.Footnote 2 Both texts are recipients of major editorial intervention in that two pseudonymous letters addressed to James (the Just, brother of Jesus) were variously attached to the longer narrative as introductory epistles.Footnote 3 One, the Epistle of Peter to James (Ep. Pet.), features Peter’s appeal to James not to disseminate his teaching (found in the novel) to the Gentiles, “for some from among the Gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching (κήρυγμα), having accepted a certain lawless and foolish teaching (διδασκαλίαν) of the man who is my enemy” (Ep. Pet. 2.3).Footnote 4 After this letter, a brief interlude (the Contestatio or Diamartyria) explains how James appropriated the “books of Peter” in Jerusalem and vowed to protect them. The other letter, the Epistula Clementis (Ep. Clem.), announces the death of Peter and the ordination of Clement as the sole successor of the Petrine cathedra. The letter then records Peter’s testamentary (and rather lengthy) reflections on the nature of ecclesial management (ecclesiasticas dispositiones, ecclesiae gubernacula) with its various positions and their particular responsibilities (episcopus, presbyter, diaconus, catechizans).Footnote 5

These two narrative texts (Hom. and Rec.), together with the prefatory epistles, lie at the crux of twentieth-century discourses surrounding Judenchristentum for two reasons: the apparent anti-Paulinism woven into the narratives and in the Epistle of Peter to James,Footnote 6 and the rather capacious framework within which relations between non-Christian Jews, Christian Jews, and non-Jewish Christians are conceived.Footnote 7 Channeling this tradition in pursuit of new directions, Annette Yoshiko Reed and Stanley Jones accent the counter-historical posture of these novels vis-à-vis the Acts of the ApostlesFootnote 8 and Eusebian visions of Christian origins.Footnote 9 In continuity with these lines of scholarship, and with appreciation for the disrupting historiography which the Pseudo-Clementines witness, this article considers these texts from an alternative vantage, namely their ongoing material history.

The philological diversity and sheer quantity of the extant Clementine materials reflects their wide distribution and a sense of their ongoing utility.Footnote 10 A parchment fragment of Rec. 3 was found, for example, as the cover of a notebook used for the study of Latin in the 1580s by Own Vaughan of Llwydiarth.Footnote 11 In the Latin manuscript tradition alone, there are numerous copies of the Recognitions together with the Epistula Clementis, often as one unified piece in a larger anthology of texts. Yet the significance of this editorial intervention for the subsequent collection and arrangement of the Pseudo-Clementine material remains a desideratum.Footnote 12 Why the voluminous afterlife of these texts, especially in the Latin anthologies?

The Latin anthologies that feature the Recognitions together with the Epistula Clementis reveal a striking migration from this third-century historiographical intervention. The Latin version of the Recognitions is collected alongside texts concerned with Peter’s legacy in the papacy as well as a variety of anti-Judaic histories, dialogues, and epistolary texts. This article engages the apparent disparity between origins and transmission: the disparity between our contemporary descriptions of texts generally referred to as “Jewish Christian” and the later, markedly non-Jewish, contexts of transmission. What can we say about the subsequent function of this literature if we read the process of anthologization as an indication of how this material was read and otherwise used? This article traces the history of the Epistula Clementis from the editorial discussion in Rufinus and Photius to the editorial impulses at work in the various modes of collection of the letter together with the Recognitions in several Latin anthologies. As an epistolary preface, the Epistula Clementis exerts considerable commentarial force upon the novel, guiding the Recognitions into a manuscript context concerned with medieval ecclesiology, peppered as well with anti-Judaic resonances.

Rufinus and Photius on the Pseudonymous Letters to James

Walter Ullmann suggests we see the author of the Epistula Clementis less as a forger of historical fiction than as a creative synthesizer of elements considered to be historical, namely, that there was a Petrine commission (Matt 16:19 is used in Ep. Clem. 2), that Clement was an early authority in Rome, and that Clement’s appointment was uniquely authorizing.Footnote 13 For Ullmann, the Epistula Clementis unites these elements into a single moment of “explicit juristic transfer of power” housed within a Petrine “testamentary disposition” that would become the “title-deed” (Rechtstitel) mobilized in debates over succession later in the fifth century under Leo I.Footnote 14 Indeed, both the Epistula Clementis and the Recognitions were translated from Greek into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia around the turn of the fifth century (Ep. Clem. around 397–405 and Rec. around 407).Footnote 15

Exploring the historical contexts of Rufinus’s interest in this Clementine letter, Bronwen Neil recalls that, at the outset of the fifth century, Roman bishops Siricius, Anastasius I, and Innocent I increasingly saw their own institution as a legal authority over a more “universal” ecclesia, encompassing churches in the eastern provinces of the late Roman Empire; a view matched by the production of the earliest papal decretals during this time.Footnote 16 For Neil, the translation of the Epistula Clementis reflects Rufinus’s active participation in this political climate, specifically, his interest in producing textual support for the authority of Innocent as a Roman bishop to rehabilitate the Antiochene John Chrysostom, who was condemned at the Synod of Oak in 403, in part for his support of Origenist monks.Footnote 17 Despite activating the Epistula Clementis for a Latin audience through translation, Rufinus did not include this letter in the edition of the Latin Recognitions. In the Prologus to his translation, Rufinus explains this decision:

There is a letter in which this same Clement writing to James the Lord’s brother, gives an account of the death of Peter, and says that he has left him as his successor, as ruler and teacher of the church, and further, [Peter] incorporates a whole scheme of ecclesiastical government. I have not prefixed this [letter] to the work, both because it is later in time, and because it has been previously translated and published by me.Footnote 18

Rufinus goes on to note another reason for omitting the Epistula Clementis. If a Latin translation of this letter were to be included with the Recognitions, it would gainsay another, well-known order of succession, which featured Linus and Anecletus as successors of Peter prior to Clement. Yet Rufinus reasons that since these Roman bishops were appointed while Peter was still alive, and thus still occupying the “office of apostleship” (apostolatus officium), it was Peter’s “teaching seat” (docendi cathedram) that was given to Clement at Peter’s death.Footnote 19 In this construal, Peter’s authority passes uniquely to Clement without disrupting the memory of Linus and Anecletus as Roman bishops during Peter’s tenure.Footnote 20 In light of this rather tidy harmonization, one that Rufinus channels from tradition, his hesitation to include the Epistula Clementis with the translation of Recognitions is curious. Even if it was understood to be a later addition, the letter was, for Rufinus, a genuine addition by Clement of Rome, and the ecclesiastical confusion is “solved” quickly in the Prologus. Why then avoid the letter? Is it simply that Rufinus has already translated it?

Taking up this question, Ernst Bammel frames the hesitation of Rufinus as a strategy to avoid certain unintentional consequences.Footnote 21 Rufinus had traveled from Jerusalem to Rome in 397 and translated this letter a few years after being forced to leave Rome in 399 during the bishopric of Anastasius I. While the Epistula Clementis would gain support for Rufinus in Rome by accenting the high status of Clement and the city of Rome, it does, after all, present Jerusalem as the not-so-implicitly superior ecclesial body over Rome. For Bammel, Rufinus need not risk unsettling Roman authorities by including the letter, which, again, was already translated.Footnote 22 The minimization of risk might also help explain the overt and ostentatious emphasis of the “East” returning to the “West” in the Prologus, as well as the ultimate selection of the Recognitions over against other Clementine material. After all, Rufinus refers to the textual plurality of these materials later in the Prologus. There are, Rufinus notes, “two Greek editions of this work of Clement, his Recognitions … which in some few cases differ from each other though the bulk of the narrative is the same.”Footnote 23 Rufinus then provides an example of this difference: “For instance, the last part of the work, that which gives an account of the transformation of Simon Magus, exists in one of these, while in the other it is entirely absent.”Footnote 24 Eduard Schwartz sees here a reference to what we call the Homilies, although Bernhard Rehm suggests that Rufinus might have a version of the Recognitions and a Clementine epitome that is inclusive of material found in the Homilies.Footnote 25 In any case, Rufinus opts for the version of the Recognitions that, incidentally, has Peter ordain Zacchaeus in Caesarea as a bishop and not, like the Homilies, as a successor without restriction.Footnote 26

If Rufinus was in contact with a variety of Clementine material, his silence regarding the Epistle of Peter to James, together with the narrative of James’s reception of the letter sent from Peter, is noteworthy. Generally, the Epistle of Peter to James is seen as an integral piece of the “basic-writing,” or the letter is thought to be a prefatory addition by whoever was responsible for editing a version of the text much closer to what we call the Clementine Homilies.Footnote 27 Either way, the Petrine epistle typically enters into the tradition prior to the Epistula Clementis. It is possible that Rufinus simply ignored these other Clementine texts, or that they were already dropped from the Greek copies that Rufinus took from the eastern provinces back to Italy in 397.Footnote 28 In any case, these texts were clearly in flux, and what Rufinus possessed and translated is but one moment in an evolving tradition. No less than a decade after Rufinus, a Syriac version of the Clementines found in a manuscript dated to 411 in Edessa contains no prefatory letters at all, and the text itself is a combination of Rec. 1–4.1.4 and Hom. 10–12.24, 13–14.12.Footnote 29 The ongoing textual fluidity of the tradition is accented even more in a discussion of Clementine texts four centuries later.

Shifting from the fifth to the late ninth century, Photius reflects on both pseudonymous letters addressed to James. In the Bibliotheca, Photius discusses a Clementine work in which the title “Recognition of Clement of Rome” (Κλήμεντος τοῦ Ῥωμαίου ἀναγνωρισμός) is sometimes inscribed (ἐπιγράφεται).Footnote 30 Photius then comments on the prefatory letters sometimes affiliated with this book:

Now in some [of the books], as we said, a letter is prefaced as if to James, the brother of God, but it is not the same [in all books] nor is it authored by the same person. Rather, in some of the books it is sent as if from Peter the apostle to James, while in others, as if from Clement to James, each different, as we were saying before.Footnote 31

In these comments, Photius describes four textual scenarios found within the Clementine books that are sometimes titled Κλήμεντος τοῦ Ῥωμαίου ἀναγνωρισμός: the Epistle of Peter to James was a preface, the Epistula Clementis was a preface, there were no editions known to Photius with both letters, and some books had no prefatory letters. Scholars have variously interpreted Photius’s comments and the accuracy of these textual situations, no doubt because they are not all replicated in our extant manuscripts.Footnote 32 The two manuscripts of the Greek Homilies contain the full cohort of prefatory material, the Epistle of Peter to James, the Contestatio, and then the Epistula Clementis. Footnote 33 On the other hand, the Epistula Clementis is the sole prefatory epistle accompanying Rufinus’s Latin translation, and we lack material evidence of the Epistle of Peter to James prefacing the Latin Recognitions. Photius, on the other hand, appears to have copies of a book of Clement, which either have a letter from Peter to James (ἐπὶ μέν τινων βιβλίων) or a letter from Clement to James (ἐφ’ ἑτέρων). So Photius presents us with a configuration of the Clementines not replicated within the extant material remains of these texts, namely, that the Epistle of Peter to James prefaced the Greek Recognitions.

Here one may decide to follow Photius without the support of manuscript attestation or doubt aspects of the report in light of the material tradition. To be sure, Photius believes that the longer narrative account of Peter and Clement that follows these different prefatory epistles is the same, since he checked “not a few” number of books and that after the “various letters and titles,” he found the same treatise beginning with “I, Clement” and similar “following material.”Footnote 34 It is often pointed out, however, that both the Homilies and the Recognitions have parallel opening material, and that Photius’s claim to find the Recognitions in the language of “I, Clement” behind various letter introductions is not necessarily an indication of the Recognitions over against the Homilies.Footnote 35 There is room, then, to wonder if Photius is in possession of both the Greek Homilies and the Greek Recognitions—after all, the copies of his books are not uniformly titled—and if the Epistle of Peter to James is attached to the Homilies and the Epistula Clementis to the Recognitions. In this case, Photius would be describing a textual situation we are more familiar with, even though he presumes all the books observed were the Greek Recognitions.

These terse discussions of the Clementines in Photius and Rufinus leave us with a lot of questions, but it does seem clear that the Pseudo-Clementine novels continued to be a site of competing epistolary prefaces up into the ninth century and beyond. If we take Photius at his word, however cautiously, that he possessed copies of the Recognitions that included the Epistle of Peter to James and some without the Epistula Clementis (but we do not), then the triumph of the Epistula Clementis as the sole pseudonymous letter attached to the Latin Recognitions is notable.Footnote 36 Photius goes on to infer from the different historical situations described in the Epistle of Peter to James and the Epistula Clementis that there were competing editions of the Acts of Peter, and that “the one of Clement prevailed.”Footnote 37 Granted, Photius might be thinking of the reference in the Epistula Clementis to earlier material written and sent to James (Ep. Clem. 20, cf. Rec. 3.75), but his sense that there are competing versions of this novel coheres with our own sense of the Clementine textual history.Footnote 38 Further, the Epistula Clementis enters and leaves the Recognitions throughout its manuscript afterlife. The earliest manuscript without the Epistula Clementis comes from the turn of the tenth century (Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek 264), “replaced” by Rufinus’s prologue (fols. 1v–2r), while a sixth-century palimpsest (Milan, Bibl. Ambros. C 77 sup) contains a version of the Epistula Clementis as a preface to the Recognitions. The two epistolary fictions “competed,” so to speak, and the Epistula Clementis prevailed.

The Recognitions in Latin Anthologies

In his critical edition of the Recognitions, Bernhard Rehm describes five groups of Latin parchment manuscripts.Footnote 39 Throughout each of these regional groups, the Epistula Clementis accompanies the Recognitions.Footnote 40 While Rehm describes several manuscripts that preserve a version of the Latin Recognitions without the Epistula Clementis,Footnote 41 the letter is typically placed either at the end of the RecognitionsFootnote 42 or at the beginning of the novel, sometimes separated by a prologue or a list of contents.Footnote 43

With Peter as the pivotal and uniquely authoritative figure in the novel, the Recognitions is understandably collected with other texts representative of Petrine hagiography.Footnote 44 The main Latin witness to the Acts of Peter (or Actus Vercellenses), for example, is bound together with the Recognitions and the Epistula Clementis.Footnote 45 Apart from sharing an interest in Peter, both texts feature material on Simon Magus. A striking anthology of Petrine related hagiography is found in the second volume of a three-volume manuscript, Brussels, Königliche Bibliothek 3132, where material from the Recognitions and the full Epistula Clementis functions as bookends for other Petrine texts. The collection begins with the Acts of Peter and Paul (fols. 25r–28r, Pseudo-Marcellus, BHL 6657/58), followed by Petrine portions of the Apostolic Histories (fols. 28r–36v, Pseudo-Abdias, BHL 6663/64), which is comprised of material from Rec. 1–4 and 6–7, followed by the Martyrdom of the Blessed Apostle Paul (fols. 36v–38v, Pseudo-Linus BHL 6570), and then closed with the Epistula Clementis (fols. 38v–41r).Footnote 46 Here, the text of the Recognitions has quite literally disappeared and a new work comprised of a collection of texts emerges. In addition to these Petrine collections, with their concern to collect narrative depictions of Peter’s travels and exemplary authority, the Recognitions is also found in anthologies with more explicit concerns for ecclesial normativity and even juxtaposed with certain anti-Judaic texts.

Several manuscripts organize the Epistula Clementis with the Recognitions alongside other pseudonymous letters with ecclesial interests. One of these letters is an additional pseudonymous Clementine letter from the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, a collection of ninth-century forged papal letters spanning from Clement to Gregory the Great, which, among other things, recasts the past in accordance with later questions of papal succession and praxis.Footnote 47 In this letter, Clement (the praesul of the Roman Church) writes to James (the episcopus of Jerusalem) in order to relay Peter’s instructions concerning sacraments and sacred vestments.Footnote 48 Other manuscripts contain a pseudonymous letter from Isidore of Seville to Massona, which attempts to regulate the restoration of lapsed clerics.Footnote 49 An epistle known as the Epistola Leonis de translatione beati Iacobi in Gallecium, which attempts to justify claims of apostolic succession on the basis of the location of the physical remains of James, can also be found alongside the Recognitions together with the Pseudo-Isidorian letter.Footnote 50

These anthologies are more overt in their attempt to retrofit the distant past with updated ecclesial interests. The Recognitions is utilized as a literary contribution toward establishing lines of ecclesial succession as well as reifying the authority of first-century apostolic figures. Along these lines, Rome, Bibl. Vat. Reg. lat. 563 begins with Rufinus’s Latin translation of Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica (fols. 1r–79r), followed by excerpts of the Recognitions and an account of Peter’s death (fols. 80r–105r).Footnote 51 More forcefully, Budapest, Széchényi-Nationalbibliothek 203 preserves a copy of Thomas of Tuscus’s thirteenth-century Gesta imperatorum et pontificum (MGH SS 22), which is then followed by the Epistula Clementis, the Isidorian letter, and Recognitions books 1 and 10.Footnote 52

Other anthologies collect the Epistula Clementis and the Recognitions with literary pieces advancing miscellaneous ecclesial issues. For example, Siena, Bibl. Comunale F. V. 16 includes Aquinas’s Quaestiones de quodlibet, pertaining to clerics.Footnote 53 A number of other manuscripts include letters of Cyprian,Footnote 54 excerpts from both Gregory the GreatFootnote 55 and Bernard Clairvaux,Footnote 56 Chrysostom’s De sacerdotio, and the Venerable Bede’s eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Footnote 57 One particularly striking anthology (München, Staatsbibliothek lat. 52) opens (fols. 1r–9v) with excerpts from Isidore (Epistula ad Massonam), Augustine, and Jerome, then material from Rec. 4.2.2 in which Peter enters the house of Maro but refrains from hospitality until his companions are also properly welcomed.Footnote 58 This selection is followed by excerpts from Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis. The apparent miscellaneous quality of these anthologies reflects the degree to which the Recognitions arrived, and continued to thrive, in a distinctly medieval afterlife.

The Latin manuscript tradition also reveals a proclivity for anthologizing the Recognitions alongside texts with anti-Judaic resonances. Paris, Bibl. Mazarine lat. 1638 (544) begins with the Ecclesiastica historia of Eusebius, followed by excerpts from Recognitions 10, the Epistula Clementis, and the Report of Pilate to the Emperor Claudius. This pseudonymous letter, found in a variety of textual traditions, details Pontius Pilate’s denunciation of the Jews, who are rendered responsible for killing Jesus, as well as their corresponding punishment.Footnote 59 In Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 5063, the ten books of the Recognitions are collected with the five books of Pseudo-Hegesippus’s De excidio urbis Hierosolymitanae (PL 15, 2062–2310), an interpretive reworking of Josephus’s Jewish War (both of which were reworked in the Sefer Yosipon).Footnote 60 Steven Bowman describes the “anonymous author of Pseudo-Hegesippus” as one who “heavily annotated his treatise with Christian exempla and filled it with homespun speeches to argue that the Jews deserved the loss of Temple and capital and perpetual exile for their role in the death of Jesus the Christ.”Footnote 61 Pairing the Recognitions with Pseudo-Hegesippus was likely invited by the latter’s discussion of Peter and Simon Magus in book 3.

In Douai, BM 199 (12 cent.), the Recognitions is linked with Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogi contra Iudaeos (PL 157. 535–672). This dialogue features a discussion between Moses and Peter, who are projections of Alfonsi’s own Jewish past and Christian present, respectively. The reception of this dialogue for anti-Jewish purposes in the medieval period is notable.Footnote 62 Similarly, a portion of the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a seventh-century dialogue-like text featuring a discussion among Jews forced to undergo baptism,Footnote 63 is collected beside a Clementine-affiliated text concerning a ceremony for the baptism of “Hebrews” in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana fonds principal M 088 sup.Footnote 64

While the granular logic of the collection of these anthologies is perhaps irrecoverable, thematic vestiges suggest some root commonality that indicates a mode of reading. A deeply ecclesial Peter emerges from the anthologies featuring the Epistula Clementis and the Recognitions. What began as a narration of Judaism as the true history of Christianity has now become a medieval resource for a distinctly papal history.Footnote 65 The process of collection has resulted in the transformative appropriation and, perhaps equally, the subversion of this ancient novel.Footnote 66

The Commentarial Effect of the Epistula Clementis

Gérard Genette’s Paratexts is now cited as frequently as Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte, and rightly so.Footnote 67 Many are now accustomed to seeing the mise-en-page—the marginalia, ornamentation, headings, preface, critical sigla, metrical arrangement—as that which navigates the reader into meaning. Genette describes the preface as just one possibility of “front matter” that might include “every type of introductory (preludial or postludial) text, authorial or allographic, consisting of a discourse produced on the subject of the text that follows or precedes it.”Footnote 68 Even though the Epistula Clementis oscillates between preface or postface positions, it is “prefatory” insofar as the letter functions as an occasion to articulate why and how an associated text should be read.Footnote 69 Over time, as Genette notes, such paratextual features can lose their pragmatic function and are melded into the larger work, solidifying the association and masking the secondary order of the accompanying text.Footnote 70 This process enshrines the preface as an “advanced commentary on a text that the reader has not yet become familiar with.”Footnote 71 To see the Epistula Clementis as a “prefatory comment” is to claim that it has a hermeneutical significance.

Others, too, have registered how the prefatory letter functions as a preface with a commentarial force. Victoria E. Pagán describes the tantalizing dynamic of the preface as an afterword turned into a foreword that “predisposes the reader toward the work by delineating its pedigree, by situating it within a larger body of literature, so as to point out its heritage as well as its distinctiveness.”Footnote 72 Clementine scholars such as Frédéric Amsler and Patricia Duncan have also rightly noted the guiding function of the prefatory epistles.Footnote 73 While the Epistula Clementis is not engaging in the technical form of commentary, it is situated as a “sending letter” with the explicit aim of contextualizing the lengthy novel.Footnote 74 In Ep. Clem. 22, Clement is presented as the one who wrote out the content of the novel, who gives the text a title, and who sends the novel to James. Occupying a position before and after content from the Recognitions,Footnote 75 the Epistula Clementis privileges ecclesial succession as the overarching context and signifiance of the antecedent narrative text. Not only does Peter appoint Clement with this “teaching seat” in Ep. Clem. 2.2, as we’ve seen, but Peter later conveys to Clement the authority “to bind and to loose” in Ep. Clem. 2.4.Footnote 76 Furthermore, the content of the Recognitions is not without interest in ecclesial succession: Rec. 3.66 records the ordination of Zacchaeus; Rec. 6.15 describes how Peter ordained Maro as bishop, along with twelve presbyters and deacons, and “instituted the order of widows, and arranged all the services of the Church”;Footnote 77 and Rec. 10.48 mentions how Peter ordained a bishop and presbyters and baptized multitudes in Laodicea.Footnote 78 Werner Heintze points specifically to the ordination of Zacchaeus in Rec. 3 as the model for the Epistula Clementis, finding a number of meaningful parallels.Footnote 79

As an introductory letter to the Recognitions, the Epistula Clementis draws out a particular thread in the novel and fronts it as its most central line and, in this sense, engages in a commentarial practice on the value of the Recognitions. “Commentary presents itself,” according to Martin Irvine, “not as a dependent or non-self-sufficient work, but as the writing of a reading, the object text-as-read, a text validated in its claim to reveal the truth of another text.”Footnote 80 As a preface, and a kind of commentary, the Epistula Clementis presents the Recognition as a read-text, but again, as Irvine emphasizes, commentary has “no final closure” as though it is able to rewrite its object-text without “its own rhetoric and temporality.”Footnote 81 For Irvine, “the interpreter’s prefatory remark, the exegete’s refrain, must always be ‘in other words.’ ”Footnote 82 Michel Foucault likewise accents this phenomenon of commentary as a tireless repetition: “commentary’s only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down. It must—and the paradox is everchanging yet inescapable—say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said.”Footnote 83

Behind the masquerade of simple repetition of original meaning, commentary continually repeats its enunciation and, in so doing, generates a set of new discourses and meanings, yet as though they were present in the text all along. Again, as Foucault claims, “Commentary … gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself which is uttered and, in some ways, finalized.”Footnote 84 Seen in this light, the commentarial effect of the Epistula Clementis is elusive, shaping its object, the Recognitions, into something “else,” all the while claiming that it was always “as such.” Both Irvine’s and Foucault’s emphasis on commentary as a perpetual, and allegorical, supplement masked as a final disclosure of meaning helps us account for the strong association between the Epistula Clementis and the Recognitions and the seemingly permanence of the association.Footnote 85 In the medieval afterlife, the Recognitions “requires” this interpretive supplement again and again.

Conclusion

The Recognitions and the attached Epistula Clementis have a voluminous presence in Latin anthologies that have norming ecclesial interests and even anti-Jewish concerns. The Epistula Clementis was integral to the success of these travels insofar as it reconfigures this text for later audiences by providing a contextualizing preface that accents the theme of ecclesial succession. Attuned to the significance and theological pressure of the preface, the Epistula Clementis is one of the leading mechanisms by which the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions travel from fourth-century Syria to fifteenth-century continental Europe; from a counter-history to a text in support of medieval ecclesiology and as a supplement to forms of anti-Judaism.Footnote 86

Recent scholarship has stressed that the material configurations of texts are equally part of the history of its readerly reception and ongoing transformation. The Epistula Clementis together with the Recognitions “arrived” in medieval anthologies because of the guiding power of the prefatory epistle as an expression of the novel’s “meaning.” It is important, however, that the power of this transformation is dependent upon a particular strategy of textual organization in which the perception of the novel was directly influenced by an accompanied pseudonymous letter. Since anthologies organize knowledge in ways that create unexpected literary associations, new possibilities of reading, and otherwise transform texts through thematic juxtaposition, facets of a text’s value for later reading communities might only be observable through the anthological tendencies showcased in transmission history.Footnote 87 Attending to these practices allows us to see how the interpretive and theological potential of a text is determined and extended by its mode of transmission.

Footnotes

*

For their insight and critical feedback on earlier versions of this article, I want to thank Jeremiah Coogan, Greg Fewster, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Paul Wheatley, Alex Pierce, Robert Edwards, Kacie Klamm, and Raleigh Heth. Special thanks are due to Blake Leyerle and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive engagement.

References

1 In many reconstructions, the hypothetical “basic writing” (Grundschrift) arose ca. 220–260 CE, and is typically thought to be composed of sources reaching back to the second century. The Homilies and the Recognitions arise in the first half of the fourth century (Homilies in ca. 300–324 CE and Recognitions in ca. 325–350 CE) and are thought to be dependent on this earlier iteration of the narrative. Several scholars consider the Recognitions a reconstituted version of the Homilies. In addition to strong introductory chapters in Pseudo-Clementine monographs, see the erudite overview of Pseudo-Clementine scholarship in F. Stanley Jones’s two-part essay, “The Pseudo-Clementines: A History of Research,” The Second Century 2 (1982) 1–33, 63–96, reprinted in Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana (OLA 203; Leuven: Peeters, 2012) 50–113.

2 For critical evaluations of the Pseudo-Clementines as novels, see Mark J. Edwards, “The Clementina: A Christian Response to the Pagan Novel,” ClQ 42 (1992) 459–74, who points to the conspicuous absence of notable novelistic themes in these texts, and instead draws our attention to the function of the narrative fiction as a container for what amounts to a “library of doctrine” (74). Further, István Czachesz, “The Clement Romance: Is it a Novel?” in The Pseudo-Clementines (ed. Jan N. Bremmer; Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 10; Leuven: Peeters, 2010) 24–35, points to the biographical and philosophical elements woven into these texts, which, again, are not commonplace features of Greek novels.

3 There are manuscripts which preserve the Epistula Clementis independently of other Pseudo-Clementine material (Monê Barlaam, fonds principal 016; Paris, BNF gr. 1379 [fragments]). Similarly, the Epistle of Peter to James appears independently of the Pseudo-Clementine narratives in BNF, arabe 150, fols. 290r–299v; Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 1357, fol. 10r–10v; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. hist. gr. 7, fol. 13v.

4 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Greek text in Die Pseudoklementinen I. Homilien (ed. Georg Strecker and Bernhard Rehm; 2nd ed.; GCS 42; Berlin: Akademie, 1992) 2: τινὲς γὰρ τῶν ἀπὸ ἐθνῶν τὸ δι’ ἐμοῦ νόμιμον ἀπεδοκίμασαν κήρυγμα, τοῦ ἐχθροῦ ἀνθρώπου ἄνομόν τινα καὶ φλυαρώδη προσηκάμενοι διδασκαλίαν (Ep. Pet. 2.3).

5 The Latin text of the Epistula Clementis is found in O. F. Fritzsche, Epistola Clementis ad Jacobum ex Rufini Interpretatione (Zürich: Typis Zürcheri et Furreri, 1873) 6–18, reprinted in, among other editions, Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen in Rufins Übersetzung (ed. Bernhard Rehm and Franz Paschke; GCS 51; Berlin: Akademie, 1965) 375–87.

6 This tradition was in large part inaugurated by F. C. Baur, “Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christenthums in der ältesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom,” Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie 4 (1831) 61–206, at 116–27. The Epistle of Peter to James, Hom. 17.13–19, 11.35, Rec. 4.35–36, and 1.27–71 feature heavily in this discussion. See Georg Strecker, Das Judenschristentum in den Pseudoklementinen (2nd ed.; TU 70; Berlin: Akademie, 1981) 187–96; Arnold Stötzel, “Die Darstellung der ältesten Kirchengeschichte nach den Pseudo-Clementinen,” VC 36 (1982) 24–37; Gerd Lüdemann, “Anti-Paulinism in the Pseudo-Clementines,” in Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity (ed. Gerd Lüdemann and Eugene Boring; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) 183–94; Luigi Cirillo, “L’antipaolinismo nelle Pseudoclementine,” RStB 1.2 (1989) 121–37; Dominique Côté, Le thème de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon dans les Pseudo-Clémentines (Collection des Études Augustiniennes, série antiquité 167; Paris: Études augustiniennes, 2001) 21–94; and more recently, Jürgen Wehnert, “Antipaulinismus in den Pseudoklementinen,” in Ancient Perspectives on Paul (ed. T. Nicklas, A. Merkt, J. Verheyden; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) 170–90; Frédéric Amsler, “La construction de l’homme ennemi ou l’anti-paulinisme dans le corpus pseudo-clémentin,” in Receptions of Paul in Early Christianity: The Person of Paul and His Writings through the Eyes of His Early Interpreters (ed. Jens Schröter, Simon Butticaz, and Andreas Dettwiler; BZNW 234; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018) 729–48, esp. 732–34. However, see the warranted critique of certain aspects of this tradition by Markus Bockmuehl, The Remembered Peter: In Ancient Reception and Modern Debate (WUNT 262; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 102: “The dispute between Peter and Simon in the Pseudo-Clementines takes up earlier traditions of their conflict in Petrine Acts and other sources in order to imbue them with the paradigmatic force of a more general antiheretical treatise from a Syrian perspective.” On this conflating dynamic, see A. Salles, “Simon le Mage ou Marcion?” VC 12 (1958) 197–214.

7 Central to these discussions is the rationale for accepting non-Jews in Rec. 1.42 (non-Jews fill up the vast numbers reflected in the Abrahamic promise not by replacing but by joining Jews), and the priority of obedience to God through either Moses or Jesus, rather than insisting on the specificity of allegiance to Christ (Hom. 8.5–7; Rec. 4.5; cf. Acts 4:12). These positions minimize the differentiating power of right messianic “belief” to distinguish non-Christian Jews and non-Jewish Christians. On the details of this dynamic, see Karin Zetterholm, “Jewish Teachings for Gentiles in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies: A Reception of Ideas in Paul and Acts Shaped by a Jewish Milieu?” Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting 6 (2019) 68–87.

8 Stanley Jones claims that not only is Rec. 1.27–71 dependent upon Acts of the Apostles for its portrayal of the apostolic past, but also this section contains explicit departures and inversions of its narrative. For instance, Recognitions presents Paul as the figure responsible for disrupting a would-be successful “mission to the Jews” initiated by James (who was about to baptize the high priest). More provocatively, James, who is positioned as the pivotal leader of early Christianity located in Jerusalem, is murdered by Saul by being thrown from the top of the Temple (Rec. 1.66–70, cf. also Ep. Pet. 2.3–7). See F. Stanley Jones, “An Ancient Jewish Christian Rejoinder to Luke’s Acts of the Apostles: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71,” in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Intertextual Perspectives (ed. Robert F. Stoops, Jr.; Semeia 80; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 239; F. Stanley Jones, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) 141–42; as well as Albert L. A. Hogeterp, “Judaism and Hellenism in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Canonical Acts of the Apostles,” in The Pseudo-Clementines (ed. Bremmer), 59–71.

9 Annette Yoshiko Reed points to the divergent conceptions of succession in Eusebius and the Homilies. The former claims a first-century rupture in Jewish succession as the occasion for the incarnation (Hist. eccl. 1.6.1–8; 10.3), and the latter positions apostolic succession as another step in an ongoing and vibrant Jewish lineage of oral transmission (see Hom. 2.38; 8.6–7); Annette Yoshiko Reed, “‘Jewish Christianity’ as Counter-history? The Apostolic Past in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World (ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) 187–95, esp. 191. The centrality of Jewish tradition for Christ-devotees is reflected in Homilies 4.7, in which Clement has been seduced “by a certain barbarian called Peter to speak and act after the manner of the Jews.” See also James Carleton Paget, “Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 4–6: Rare Evidence of a Jewish Literary Source from the Second Century C.E.,” in his Jews, Christians, and Jewish Christians in Antiquity (WUNT 251; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010) 477–80.

10 Pseudo-Clementine material can be found, for example, in Syriac, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic, Ethiopic, and Latin.

11 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, “A Fragment of the Clementine Recognitions,” Cylchgrawn Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales Journal 23 (1983) 86–87, at 86. See also A. Pertusi and B. Pečarski, “A Few Fragments of a Latin version of the Pseudo-Clement’s ‘Recognitions’ found in Dubrovnik,” Zbornik Radova Vizantološki Instituta 10 (1967) 39–45.

12 Reed anticipates the curiosity of the afterlife of the Pseudo-Clementines: “from the meta-narratives of modern scholarship, we might expect the reception-histories of the Homilies and [Eusebius’s] Ecclesiastical History to have followed different paths. What is surprising, however, is how comparably little—at least in the early period—they seem to differ. Both texts found early audiences among Syrian Christians; both were used by chronographers in the Greek East; and both circulated in the Latin West in redacted forms, mediated by Rufinus. It is not yet possible to reconcile all these pieces of evidence” (Reed, “‘Jewish Christianity’ as Counter-history?,” 212). See also eadem, “Secrecy, Suppression, and the Jewishness of Christian Origins,” in Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism: Collected Essays (TSAJ 171; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018) 282.

13 Walter Ullmann, “The Significance of the Epistola Clementis in the Pseudo-Clementines,” JTS 11 (1960) 297–317, at 306. Michael Mees’s comments are also relevant here: “Above all, one looks for something in Rufinus that he is not willing to give, meticulousness and fidelity to the past. All prejudices against Rufinus are ultimately based on a false historicism that sees in Rufinus’ works faithful testimony to a past that has long since escaped him” (“Vor allem aber sucht man in Rufin etwas, das er nicht bereit ist zu geben, Akribie und Treue zur Vergangcnheit. Alle Vorurteile gegen Rufin gründen letztlich in einem falschen Historismus, der in den Werken Rufins getreue Zeugnisse einer auch für ihn längst entflohenen Vergangenheit”), “Rufin und die Pseudoklementinen,” Antichità altoadriatiche 31 (1987) 207–14, at 208.

14 Ullmann, “The Significance of the Epistola Clementis,” 307. Specifically, Ullmann suggests that the Epistula Clementis relies on (a passage in) Irenaeus (preserved by Eusebius) that reserves unique language to describe succession to Clement when recounting the order of Roman bishops (Haer. 3.3.2 in Hist. eccl. 5.6.1, see 295–98). The office was first “handed over” (ἐγχειρίζω) to Anecletus, and then it was succeeded (διαδέχομαι) to Linus, but it is Clement who was “appointed” to the position (298–99; τὴν ἐπισκοπὴν κληροῦται Κλήμης). Ullmann then notes how Eusebius uses the same language for Linus that Irenaeus reserves for Clement (Hist. eccl. 3.2, 3.4.8–9), while Tertullian used ordino solely for Clement (Praescr. 32). The Epistula Clementis centralizes Petrine power, takes a cue from Irenaeus’s use of κληρόω, and describes Clement’s succession as an appointment. Edward C. Brooks, “The Epistula Clementis: A Petrine Infusion at Rome c. AD 385,” StPatr 15 (1984) 212–16, at 213, claims that the Epistula Clementis “caught the imagination and mood” of an ecclesial turn toward Rome ca. 380–410 CE. He wonders further whether “a Eustathian from Antioch probably between A.D 370 and 382, disillusioned with Antioch as the Chair of Peter … but proud of Rome’s alignment with Eustathius, now took the Primary document to Rome, to be worked on by a Clementine-party Scriptorium, possibly the same Scriptorium which produced the Liturgy of Clement 30 years later” (213).

15 The editio princeps of Rufinus’s Latin is found in Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Jacobus Faber Stapulensis), Pro piorum recreatione et in hoc opere contenta (Paris: Ex Officina Bellovisiana, Impensis Ioannis Parvi Bibliopole, 1504). Bronwen Neil, “Rufinus’ Translation of the Epistola Clementis ad Iacobum,” Augustinianum 43 (2003) 25–39, places the translation of the Epistula Clementis in ca. 404–405, whereas Eduard Schwartz suggests that it took place while Rufinus was still living in Rome (ca. 397–399) (“Unzeitgemäße Beobachtungen zu den Clementinen,” ZNW 31 [1932] 151–99, at 166).

16 Neil, “Rufinus’ Translation,” 34. Cf. Schwartz, “Unzeitgemäße Beobachtungen,” 166 (concerning Siricius).

17 Neil, “Rufinus’ Translation,” 34–38.

18 Prologus in Clementis Recognitiones, 12. Latin text in Tyrannii Rufini Opera (ed. Manlius Simonetti; CCSL 20; Turnhout: Brepols, 1961) 282: Epistulam sane, in qua idem Clemens ad Iacobum fratrem Domini scribens, de obitu nuntiat Petri, et quod se reliquerit successorem cathedrae et doctrinae suae, in qua etiam de omni ordine ecclesiastico continetur, ideo nunc huic operi non praemisi, quia et tempore posterior est, et olim a me interpretata atque edita.

19 Tyrannii Rufini Opera (ed. Simonetti), 282.

20 Cf. also Rufinus’s Epilogus to Origen’s Commentary on the Letter to the Romans where Rufinus anticipates the translation of the Recognitions, referring there to Clement as “Romani episcopi apostolorum comitis ac successoris” (Tyrannii Rufini Opera [ed. Simonetti], 277). Rufinus also skips over the reference in Eusebius to the death of Peter before Linus and Anecletus (Hist. eccl. 3.2), a point noted by Ernst Bammel, “Rufins Einleitung zu den Klemens zugeschriebenen Wiedererkennungen,” Antichità Altoadriatiche 39 (1992) 151–69, at 161.

21 Bammel, “Rufins Einleitung,” 151–69.

22 Ibid., 155.

23 Tyrannii Rufini Opera (ed. Simonetti), 281: Puto quod non te lateat Clementis huius in Graeco eiusdem operis, hoc est Recognitionum, duas editiones haberi et duo corpora esse librorum, in aliquantis quidem diuersae, in multis tamen eiusdem narrationis.

24 Ibid., 281: Denique pars ultima huius operis, in qua de transformatione Simonis refertur, in uno corpore habetur, in alio penitus non habetur.

25 Schwartz, “Unzeitgemäße Beobachtungen,” 166–71, especially 170, where Schwartz notes that Rufinus makes a comment in De adulteratione librorum Origenis 3 that the Recognitions contains discussion of the origins of the devil—a detail only found in the Homilies. See also Bernhard Rehm, “Zur Entstehung der pseudoclementinischen Schriften,” ZNW 37 (1938) 77–184, at 81.

26 Bammel, “Rufins Einleitung,” 156–57.

27 For example, see Strecker, Judenschristentum, 97–101; François Bovon, “En tête des homélies clémentines, la Lettre de Pierre à Jacques,” in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines/Plots in the Pseudo-Clementine Romance (ed. Frédéric Amsler et al.; Publications de l’Institut romand des sciences bibliques 6; Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre, 2008) 329–35; George E. Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 24–25. For more on the Epistle of Peter to James in light of the tradition of Petrine epistolography and 2nd-cent. discussions of (the need to control) interpretive variance, see, respectively, Bernard Pouderon, “La Lettre de Pierre à Jacques. Vrai-faux plagiat?” in Le plagiat littéraire (ed. Hélèn Maurel-Indart; Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2002) 13–34, and Matthew Crawford, “Κανών and Scripture according to the Letter of Peter to James,” ZAC 20 (2016) 260–75.

28 See Caroline Bammel, “The Last Ten Years of Rufinus’ Life and the Date of His Move South from Aquileia,” JTS 28 (1977) 372–429.

29 London, British Library Add. 12150. See Wilhelm Frankenberg, Die syrischen Clementinen mit griechischem Paralleltext. Eine Vorarbeit zu dem literargeschichtlichen Problem der Sammlung (TU 48.3; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1937); idem, “Zum syrischen Text der Clementinen,” ZDMG 91 (1937) 577–604; Sebastian Brock and Lukas Van Rompay, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt) (OLA 227; Leuven: Peeters, 2014) 389–92; F. Stanley Jones, “Evaluating the Latin and Syriac Translations of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions,” Apocrypha 3 (1992) 237–57.

30 Photius, Bibliotheca, Codex 112.

31 Ibid., Codices 112–13. Greek text in Immanuel Bekker, Photius Bibliotheca, Tome I (Berolini: Reimeri, 1824) 90: Ἔν τισι δέ, ὡς ἔφημεν, ἐπιστολὴ προτάττεται ὡς πρὸς τὸν ἀδελφόθεον Ἰάκωβον, καὶ αὕτη δὲ οὐχ ἡ αὐτή, οὐδὲ ὡς ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτοῦ προσώπου προενηνεγμένη, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ μέν τινων βιβλίων ὡς ἀπὸ Πέτρου τοῦ ἀποστόλου πρὸς Ἰάκωβον ἐπεσταλμένη, ἐφ’ ἑτέρων δὲ ὡς ἀπὸ Κλήμεντος πρὸς Ἰάκωβον, ἄλλη καὶ ἄλλη, καθὼς προείπομεν. See also Photius, Bibliothèque (ed. René Henry; vol. 2; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960) 94.

32 See especially F. Stanley Jones, “Photius’s Witness to the Pseudo-Clementines,” in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines (ed. Amsler et al.), 93–101, reprinted in Pseudoclementina, 345–55.

33 The two extant Greek manuscripts for the Homilies are Parisinus gr. 930 (“P”; 10th cent.), and Vaticanus gr. Ottobonianus 443 (“O”; 16th cent.). The Epistle of Peter to James, the Contestatio, and the Epistula Clementis appear before the Homilies in these manuscripts. In P, the epistles appear after a preface to the work as a whole, but they are distinguished from the main narrative with their own subheadings.

34 Photius, Bibliotheca, Codices 112–13: “For in all the books that we saw, which were not a few, after those various letters and titles, we invariably found the same treatise that begins with “I Clement” and the following matters.” (Bekker, Photius Bibliotheca, 90: ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς βιβλίοις ἃ εἴδομεν, καίτοι οὐκ ὀλίγων ὄντων, μετὰ τὰς διαφόρους ἐκείνας ἐπιστολὰς καὶ ἐπιγραφὰς τὴν αὐτὴν εὕρομεν ἀπαραλλάκτως πραγματείαν, ἀρχομένην· ‘Ἐγὼ Κλήμης’ καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς ἐνταττόμενα.)

35 Following Harnack and Preuschen, F. Stanley Jones, “Photius’s Witness to the Pseudo-Clementines,” in Pseudoclementina, 352, notes that Photius does refer to the Κλημέντια elsewhere in his corpus (De spiritus sancti mystagogia 75), which is the traditional title for the Homilies. See also Warren T. Treadgold, Nature of the Bibliotheca of Photius (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 18; Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1980) 71; Schwartz, “Unzeitgemäße Beobachtungen,” 175.

36 Pace Matthew Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter? (WUNT 2.196; Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2005) 123 n. 203, who proposes that the Epistle of Peter to James came to replace the Epistula Clementis at some point in the textual history of the Recognitions, and that the Homilies (here understood as the later work) borrowed from this complex tradition by adopting both letters as introductory materials.

37 Photius, Bibliotheca, Codices 112–13: “Thus, by conjecture one understands that there were two editions of the acts of Peter, but with time the one fell away and the one of Clement prevailed” (Bekker, Photius Bibliotheca, 90: Ἔστιν οὖν εἰκασμῷ διαλαβεῖν ὡς δύο μὲν εἴησαν τῶν Πέτρου πράξεων ἐκδόσεις γεγενημέναι, τῷ δὲ χρόνῳ τῆς ἑτέρας διαρρυείσης ἐπεκράτησεν ἡ τοῦ Κλήμεντος).

38 Rec. 3.75 lists ten books previously sent to James prior to the Recognitions. On this passage, see Strecker, Judenchristentum, 58–62.

39 See Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen (ed. Rehm), xvii–xcvi. Rehm proposes a German (Δ), Italian (Σ, Λ, Ψ), and English (Θ) group, as well as a southern (Π) and northern (Φ) French group. See also Josef Svennung, “Handschriften zu den ps.-klementinischen Recognitiones,” Philologus 88 (1933) 473–76. Much of the groundwork for this edition was carried out by, inter alia, Ernest Cushing Richardson; see Jones, “Evaluating the Latin and Syriac Translations,” 237.

40 Munich, Staatsbibl. lat. 52; Wien, Nationalbibl. lat. 837; Milan, Bibl. Ambros. C 77 sup. (palimpsest); Florence, Bibl. Laur. Pl. 68, cod. 22; Vercelli, Bibl. Cap. 158; Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 9517; Rome, Bibl. Vat. Ottob. lat. 150; Douai 199; London, Brit. Mus. 6 B. XIV (see Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xx, xxv, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvi, liv, lxvii, lxix, lxxvi).

41 Klosterneuburg 203; Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibl. 264; Berlin, Staatsbibl. theol. lat. fol. 177; Berlin, Staatsbibl. theol. lat. fol. 670; Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 12278; Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 3522 A; Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat 14069; Paris, Bibl. Vat. Reg. lat. 568; Troyes, Bibl. municipal 254; Strasbourg, Univ.-Bibl. 81; Tours, Bibl. Municipal 267 (see Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xxiii, xxvi–xxvii, lv, lvii, lxi, lxv–lxvii).

42 Munich, Staatsbibl. lat. 52; Rome, Bibl. Vat. Cap. Si S. Pietro E. 17; Milan, Bibl. Ambros. C 77sup; Orléans 147 (see Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xx, xxxix, xxxi, liii).

43 Vercelli, Bibl. Cap. 158; Badia di Cava, Bibl. Naz. cod. membr. No. 20; Florence, Bibl. Laur. Pl. 68, cod. 22 (see Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xxxvi, xxxiii).

44 This tendency is also applied to Clement of Rome. Turin, Bibl. Naz. 452 includes the Passio s. Clementis after (a version of) the Recognitions and the Epistula Clementis. Namur, Seminarbibl. Nr. 37 includes 1 Clement with the Recognitions. On the “Clementine” trajectory of pseudo-Clementines, see Franz Paschke, Die beiden griechischen Klementinen-Epitomen und ihre Anhänge (TU 90; Berlin: Akademie, 1966) 109–144; Die Pseudoklementinen IV. Die Klemens-Biographie (ed. Franz Xaver Risch; GCS NF 16; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) ix–cxviii.

45 Vercelli, Bibl. Cap. 158.

46 Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique. Tome cinquième: Histoire—Hagiographie (ed. J. Ven den Gheyn; Brussels: Lamertin, 1904) 66. Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 9518 includes the Recognitions and the Epistula Clementis, followed by an extended discussion of Peter and Paul in Rome, which is then followed by the Passion of Peter and Paul on fols. 250v–276v from Pseudo-Hegesippus (BHL 6653).

47 Rehm notes the letter in Salzburg, S. Peter a IX 27; Orléans, Bibl. municipal 147; Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 12117; lat. 9517; lat. 12119; lat. 2964; lat. 15628; lat. 5063; lat. 17340; Oxford, Bodl. Laud. Misc. 25; Leningrad, Öffetl. Staatsbibl. Q.V.I. No. 28; Milan, Bibl. Ambros. S. 51 sup.; Turin, Bibl. Naz. 452 (D III 17); Kopenhagen, Gamle Kgl. Saml. 161; Wien, Nationalbibl. lat. 904; Rouen, Bibl. Muncipale MS 1391. On Isidorian pseudepigraphy, see Horst Fuhrmann, “The Pseudo-Isidorian Forgeries,” in Papal Letters in the Early Medieval Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001) 135, 156; E. Seckel, “Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals and other Forgeries,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (1911) 9.343–44. On the challenges of producing an updated critical edition of these decretals, see Horst Fuhrmann, “Reflections on the Principles of Editing Texts: The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals as an Example,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 11 (1981) 1–6. On the collaborative workshop producing the decretals in the mid-9th cent., see the work of Klaus Zechiel-Eckes, especially “Ein Blick in Pseudoisidors Werkstatt. Studien zum Entstehungsprozeß der Falschen Dekretalen mit einem exemplarischen editorischen Anhang,” Francia 28 (2001) 37–90, as well as Eric Knibbs, “Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals,” Spec 92 (2017) 145–83.

48 Epistola II: ad Jacobum fratrem domini (PG 1, 1857, 483–90).

49 London, Brit. Mus. Add. 18400; Admont 280; München, Staatsbibl. lat. 52 (Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xx–xxii). According to Roger Reynolds, “The ‘Isidorian’ Epistula ad Massonam on Lapsed Clerics: Notes on Its Early Manuscript and Textual Transmission,” in Studies on Medieval Liturgical and Legal Manuscripts from Spain and Southern Italy (ed. Roger E. Reynolds, VCS; Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009) 92, the Epistula ad Massonam presents a “more lenient treatment of lapsed clerics than many of the strict canons of the patristic church.”

50 Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 12119 (Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], lv). On the Epistola Leonis, see Antón M. Pazos, Translating the Relics of St. James: From Jerusalem to Compostela (Compostela International Studies in Pilgrimage History and Culture; Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) 96.

51 The book divisions are marked as excerpts (fols. 80r, 85v, 89r, 92v-93r, 97r, 98r, 99r).

52 Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen (ed. Rehm), xxvi–xxvii.

53 Ibid., lxx.

54 Prague, NK ČR IX E1 includes, among other miscellanies, letters of Cyprian and a tractate of Hus after the Recognitions and the Epistula Clementis (Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xxii).

55 Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 12278 contains Bede’s In Ezram et Neemiam, Chrysostom’s De sacerdotio, excerpts from Gregory the Great, and then Recognitions 1–2; see Charlotte Denoël, “Un catalogue des manuscrits de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés au XIIe siècle,” Scriptorium 60.2 (2006) 186–205 at 189. Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 1617 also features homilies from Gregory the Great and Pseudo-Jerome, Epistula ad Paulam et Eustochium (PL 30, 122–42) after the Recognitions.

56 Rome, BAV. Ottob. lat. 150.

57 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibl., Cod. 13707.

58 Then the De VI cogitationibus sanctorum (PG 40, 895), which is followed by the full text of the Recognitions, the Epistula Clementis, and Walafrid Strabo’s Homilia in initium evangelii sancti Matthaei (PL 114, 849–62). See Catalogus codicum latinorum Bibliothecae Regiae Monacensis complectens (ed. Karl Felix Halm, Georg von Laubmann, and Wilhelm Meyer; Monachii: Bibliotheca regia, 1892) 12.

59 Alberto D’Anna, “La Lettera di Pilato a Claudio: Uno scitto antigiudaico latino?” Apocrypha 27 (2016) 111–35, argues for the independence of this letter from the associated Acts of Peter and Paul, Descensus Christi ad inferos, and the Passio Petri et Pauli.

60 See especially Saskia Dönitz, Überlieferung und Rezeption des Sepher Yosippon (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

61 Steven Bowman, “Jewish Responses to Byzantine Polemics from the Ninth through the Eleventh Centuries,” Shofar 28 (2010) 103–15, at 105. See also Richard Matthew Pollard, “The De Excidio of ʻHegesippusʼ and the Reception of Josephus in the Early Middle Ages,” Viator 46 (2015) 65–100.

62 See John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

63 See the translation by Vincent Déroche, “Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati,” Travaux et Mémoires 11 (1991) 47–229. See also Andrew Jacobs, “Gender, Conversion, and the End of Empire in the Teaching of Jacob, Newly Baptized,” JECS 29 (2021) 93–120, who draws attention to the feminization of both the Roman Empire and the Jewish voices of resistance to conversion—strategies used to construct a post-Roman, non-Jewish, masculinized Christian eschatology.

64 This text is printed as an appendix to the Recognitions in Andreas Gallandi, Bibliotheca veterum patrum antiquorumque scriptorum ecclesiasticorum graeco-latina (Venice, 1765) 328–36. A similar text can be found in Jacobus Goar, εΥΧΟΛΟΓΙΟΝ sive Rituale Graecorum complectens ritus et ordines divinae liturgiae (Paris: Simeonem Piget, 1647) 344–45. For discussion of baptismal ceremonies for Jews, see Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Empire romain. Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale (Paris: Geuthner, 1914) 1.115–19; and an updated Greek text in Franz Cumont, “Une formule grecque de renonciation au Judaïsme,” Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie 24 (1902) 462–72.

65 One might highlight Jonathan Bourgel’s argument here, that the polemic against sacrifice and the positive link between Judeans and the land of Judea in Rec. 1 is best read alongside the Bar Kokhba conflict and the then failed attempt to reconstitute a sacrificial cult (and resultant Roman occupation of Jerusalem), in “Reconnaissances 1.27–71, ou la réponse d’un groupe judéo-chrétien de Judée au désastre du soulèvement de Bar-Kokhba,” NTS 61 (2015) 30–49.

66 Other anthologies include Leipzig, Univ.-Bibl. 190 (Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xliv), which positions the Epistula Clementis and the Recognitions alongside a letter from the 9th-cent. Frankish monk Ratramnus to a missionary named Rimbert. On this text, see Ian N. Woods, “Where the Wild Things Are,” in Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100 (ed. Walter Pohl, Clemens Ganter, and Richard Payne; New York: Routledge, 2012) 535. Further, Rom. Vat. Palat. lat. 165 contains Julius Firmicus Maternus’s De errore profanarum religionum before material from Rec. 10; and Lisbon, BN cod. Alcobac. 342 (Die Pseudoklementinen II. Rekognitionen [ed. Rehm], xli) prefaces the Recognitions with an epistle of Anastasius Bibliothecarius that attempts to trace 9th-cent. ecclesial practices back into the novel (Epist. 15; Monumenta Germaniae Historica 436). On Alcobac. 342, see Thomas L. Amos and Jonathan Black, The Fundo Alcobaça of the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, vol. 3, Manuscripts 302–456 (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1990) 69–71.

67 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (trans. Jane E. Lewin; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). However, see the challenges posed by Patrick Adrist concerning the appropriation of Genette for manuscript studies, “Towards a Definition of Paratexts and Paratextuality: The Case of Ancient Greek Manuscripts,” in Bible as Notepad: Tracing Annotations and Annotation Practices in Late Antique and Medieval Biblical Manuscripts (ed. Liv Ingeborg Lied and Marilena Maniaci; Manuscripta Biblica 3; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018) 130–49.

68 Genette, Paratexts, 161.

69 Ibid., 197, 238.

70 Ibid., 177. The Clementine and Petrine voice of the Epistula Clementis certainly looms “over” the novel as uniquely authorizing, and the placement of the letter prior to various ordering technologies (tables of contents, borders, etc.) plays on the idea of separation and unification simultaneously as both an integral piece of the text and as a separate and therefore authorizing guide to the narrative.

71 Genette, Paratexts, 237.

72 Victoria E. Pagán, “The Power of the Epistolary Preface from Statius to Pliny,” ClQ 60 (2010) 194–201, at 200–201.

73 Frédéric Amsler, “Les Homélies du pseudo-Clément ou comment justifier l’octroi d’une chaire d’enseignement à un croyant d’origine païenne,” in Analyse narrative et Bible. Deuxième colloque international du RRENAB, Louvain-la-Neuve, avril 2004 (BETL 191; Leuven: Peeters, 2005) 337–50, at 340: “Clement’s letter thus builds a narrative program for the Homilies even before they begin” (La lettre de Clément construit ainsi un programme narratif pour les Homélies avant même que celles-ci ne débutent); Patricia Duncan, Novel Hermeneutics in the Greek Pseudo-Clementine Romance (WUNT 1.395; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017) 1–56, on the prefatory letters as “maps” for the Homilies/Klementia, which set the “spatio-temporal parameters of the narrative” (56).

74 On this point, see Bernard Pouderon, “L’attribution de l’Epistula Petri et la genèse du Roman clémentin,” in Le genre épistolaire dans l’Antiquité. Epistulae antiquae II (ed. L. Nadjo and É. Gavoille; Leuven: Peeters, 2002) 272–73.

75 Genette, Paratexts, 252, notes that postface material can also contribute to “reconstituting the genesis of a work.”

76 Bernard Pouderon draws our attention to these ways in which the Epistula Clementis, as a final layer in a succession of epistolary fictions, seizes on the double authority of Peter and James (cf. Ep. Clem. 20); see especially Pouderon, “L’attribution de l’Epistula Petri,” 259–78.

77 See Jürgen Wehnert, Pseudoklementinische Homilien. Einführung und Übersetzung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014) 47 n. 1.

78 See Georg Strecker, “Exkurs: Die Ordination in den Pseudoklementinen,” in idem, Judenchristentum, 97–116; R. Reuter, “Einige Beobachtungen zu den Ordinationserzählungen der Pseudoklementinen,” in Semiotica Biblica. Eine Freundesgabe für Erhardt Güttgemanns (ed. Wolfgang Schenk and Rainer Reuter; THEOS—Studienreihe Theologische Forschungsergebnisse 31; Hamburg: Kovač, 1999) 155–180. The Homilies also record several ordinations (see Hom. 3.60–73, 7.5, 7.8, 7.12, 11.36, 20.23).

79 Ep. Clem. 3.4–9/Rec. 3.65.13–15; Ep. Clem. 7.14/Rec. 3.67.26; Ep. Clem. 12.34/Rec. 3.67.27; Ep. Clem. 10.14–16/ Rec. 3.67.30–32; Ep. Clem. 7.14–17/Rec. 3.68.32–34; Ep. Clem. 9.8–11/Rec. 3.69.6–8; Ep. Clem. 5.37–6.5/Rec. 3.71.28–30; Werner Heintze, Der Klemensroman und seine griechischen quellen (TU 40.2; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1914) 36–37.

80 Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 246.

81 Ibid., 247.

82 Ibid., 245. This observation informs Irvine’s claim that “all interpretation is allegorical,” since “all interpretation posits a meaning which can only be revealed in another or supplementary discourse” (245).

83 Michel Foucault, “Appendix: The Discourse of Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Pantheon, 1972) 221.

84 Ibid.

85 Similarly, Elizabeth Clark works with Jacques Derrida in noting that commentary text and “original” text are “imbricated” in that the commentary completes a lack in the “real text” and (like Foucault’s formulation) comes to displace it by its very act of supplementing; Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 7–8. Following Derrida via Clark, we might say that as a supplement to the Recognitions, the Epistula Clementis has replaced it. By advancing the “presence” of a desirable authoritative ecclesiology, a notion that is relatively “absent” in the Recognitions, the letter that (“merely”) introduces the novel has shifted its very value or meaning.

86 Edward C. Brooks unironically reflects the theological pressure exerted by each of the Pseudo-Clementine epistles. In his 1975 article on the Epistula Clementis, Brooks comments that the Epistle of Peter to James “emerged from a Scriptorium with outdated and discredited heterodox ideas, [whereas] the scriptorium of the Epistola Clementis lacks this defect, and is fully pastoral in tone, progressive in Church order, and breathes a thoroughly apostolic awareness of contemporary dangers” (Brooks, “The Epistola Clementis,” 216).

87 Recall Brussels, Königliche Bibliothek 3132, where the Recognitions is transformed into another text not only at the editorial level, which saw the creation of the Passio s. Petri from out of the Recognitions, but at the level of a collection, where the Epistula Clementis is used as a bookend within which more Petrine material might be included.