Guest Columnist From Peter to Clement to ... Benedict

Feb 22, 2011

On Feb. 22, the Church celebrates the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, Apostle.

It’s an ancient feast, originally marking the first time the Prince of Apostles celebrated Mass with his Roman flock. Today, we continue the tradition of our Fathers, and we celebrate the office of St. Peter’s successors as well. We celebrate the papacy.

We have good reasons to celebrate. Peter’s chair is a point of unity for us. It is a haven of safety. We have the guarantee of divinity on the matter.

Jesus said to Simon: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18-19).

Of course, the witness doesn’t stop with the New Testament. It continues to our own generation and has been present in every historical moment, just as the Lord promised.

Consider our earliest record of an exercise of papal authority, St. Clement of Rome’s first-century Epistle to the Corinthians.

It would be difficult to overestimate the historical value of that letter. It is one of the very few Christian documents that have survived from the generation immediately following that of the Apostles.

For centuries, Christians took utmost care to preserve those writings, copying them out laboriously by hand and risking their lives in order to hide them from persecutors.

In the case of Clement’s Epistle, some local churches even preserved the book for proclamation, as part of the New Testament.

For reasons that Msgr. Thomas Herron made clear in his 1988 book on the subject, most recent scholars have placed the document at the end of the first century, around 96 A.D. But Msgr. Herron’s meticulous research led him to conclude otherwise.

It led him to believe that the letter was composed much earlier, probably before 70 A.D. He was not the first scholar to argue so; the Protestant John A.T. Robinson had done so, decades before. But Msgr. Herron was the first to undertake a thoroughgoing study of the matter.

He found 11 instances where the Epistle shed light on the dating question, and he analyzed each in detail. For example: Clement seems to assume a close proximity to the lives of Sts. Peter and Paul, and that there are many people still alive who knew them. He assumes also that the Jerusalem Temple is still standing. (It would be destroyed in 70 A.D.) The “recent calamities” he describes fit events of the mid-century better than later.

And, finally, there’s external evidence for an earlier dating. The fourth-century author Eusebius is the primary authority for placing Clement around 96 and listing him as the fourth pope. But ancient Roman lists of popes, to the contrary, name Clement as the third pope, after Peter and Linus. St. Augustine followed the latter sequence, as did St. Jerome.

Did Msgr. Herron succeed in making his case? Well, his work has been cited as authoritative by scholars such as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. And his Holiness is not alone.

One of the foremost experts on the early Fathers is Clayton Jefford of St. Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana. His books on the early Fathers are standard textbooks; and until recently he favored a late date for Clement.

However, in his 2006 study, The Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament, he concluded: “I am ultimately content … to place 1 Clement in Rome, written by the hand of someone named Clement (perhaps eventually to become Pope Clement) after the deaths of Paul and Peter (by tradition during the reign of Nero) but before the fall of the temple in the year 70.”

In a footnote, Jefford explained what caused his turnabout: “the brilliant analysis by Thomas J. Herron.”

That “brilliant analysis” was from the start a rare book, published in Rome as the author’s doctoral dissertation. He planned to pursue the matter with further research, but God had other plans.

Msgr. Herron was summoned instead to serve as in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as the English-language secretary to the prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger.

After finishing his term, he returned to Philadelphia, where he served as a seminary professor and pastor. He remained in close contact with his old mentor in Rome. He expressed the hope that he would return to Clement some day.

In 2002 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, from which he suffered mightily over the following months. He died May 2, 2004, at age fifty-six. One of his last acts was to grant permission for the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (of which I am president) to reprint his valuable book.

The book has just been released as Clement and the Early Church of Rome: On the Dating of Clement's First Epistle to the Corinthians with the help of Emmaus Road Publishing.

I hope and pray that Msgr. Herron’s book will now accomplish its mission in service of St. Peter’s Chair – the mission intended by the author and by God. May St. Clement intercede for us!