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Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions

Estimated Range of Dating: 320-380 A.D.

Text

• Clementine Recognitions
• Clementine Homilies (similar text)
• Kerygmata Petrou (source)

Offsite Links

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Clementines
• Clementine literature
• Pseudo-Clement
• The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Challenges of the Conversion of Families
• The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Antiochene Polemic Against Allegory
• The use of Scripture in the Clementine Homilies
• Heresiology and the (Jewish-)Christian Novel
• The Apocryphal New Testament
• Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 4-6: rare evidence of a Jewish literary source from the second century C.E.?
• Problems of the Clementine Literature
• Epiphanius, the Pseudo-Clementines, and the Reception-History of Jubilees

Books

• Donald H. Carlson, Jewish-Christian Interpretation of the Pentateuch in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies
• Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. 2, pp. 483-496

Information on the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions

Georg Strecker writes, "The Recognitions came into being independently of the Homilies - probably about A.D. 350 - in Syria or Palestine. Their author feels himself less bound than the Homilist to the content of the basic document. What has the appearance of heterodoxy is deleted, and the anti-Paulinism of the basic document is largely removed. We may thus conjecture that the Recognitionist was an orthodox catholic." (New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, p. 485)

Georg Strecker continues, "The Recognitions however had the misfortune to be interpolated by heretics so as to authenticate their irregular teaching. In a way that is nothing short of ingenious a disciple of Eunomius knew how to make room there for his own conception of the Trinity (III 2-11), with the result that the Recognitions also became suspect in the Great Church and gradually disappeared from it. Rufinus, Jerome's opponent, who translated the Recognitions into Latin, secured for them acceptation and circulation in the West, omitting in his rendering the portions that gave offence; and no difference was made to this by the fact that these portions were later brought back by another translator." (New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, pp. 485-486)

Concerning the manuscript attestation, Georg Strecker writes, "The Recognitions have come down to us only in the Latin rendering of Rufinus, without the Diamarturia and the two epistles, of which the translator had published that of Clement separately ... Both the Homilies and the Recognitions were early translated into Syriac. A manuscript from Edessa (British Museum Add. 12150) of the year 411 contains a collection of texts from R I-IV 1, 4 and H X-XIV 12 from the pen of two different translators. ... Finally, in addition to the Sinai-epitome composed in Arabic (ed. by M. Gibson, Studio Sinaitica 5, 1896), which presents a text of the Recognitions independent of Rufinus, we possess Clementine fragments in Ethiopic (Stählin, Literatur, p. 1213)." (New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, p. 486)

Some Contemporary Texts

• Freer Logion (300-400 A.D.)
• Gospel of Gamaliel (300-600 A.D.)
• Lactantius (303-316 A.D.)
• Reticius of Autun (310-334 A.D.)
• Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (320-380 A.D.)

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