Rome writes to Corinth: 1 Clement, AD 96

**The earliest Christian writing outside the New Testament that the archive holds in full**, and one of the most useful, because it is a practical letter rather than a treatise.

The occasion was a quarrel. The Corinthian church had deposed its presbyters, and the church at Rome wrote to say they should be restored. **The letter never names its author** — it is sent in the name of “the church of God which sojourns at Rome” — and the attribution to Clement comes from later writers, which the archive records rather than assuming.

## It names its own couriers, and the archive holds them

This is the feature that makes it a prosopographical source. The letter closes by naming the men who carried it: **Claudius Ephebus**, **Valerius Bito** and **Fortunatus** — sent as “faithful and prudent men, that have walked among us from youth unto old age blamelessly”, who are to be sent back promptly with news of peace.

**Two of those are Roman names of a particular kind.** Claudius and Valerius are imperial and senatorial nomina, of the sort borne by freedmen of great houses — which is a small piece of evidence about who the Roman church was, and it is evidence from inside.

## What else it supplies

**The Peter and Paul notice** — chapters 5–6, treated on the record for AD 64: the two apostles as pillars who contended unto death, and “a vast multitude of the elect” with them. Written within living memory, to people who had known them.

**And the phoenix.** Clement argues the resurrection from the bird that rises from its own decay — offered as a fact of natural history. The archive records it without embarrassment: it shows what a Roman Christian of AD 96 took to be common knowledge, and it is the kind of detail a later forger would not invent.