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Historical source reader
The First Epistle of Clement
A complete chapter-based reading edition of an early Christian letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth.
How this is being presented: as a noncanonical historical source. The complete letter supplies context; three passages are indexed to claims in the Minimal Facts evidence outline.
Edition record
What text is this?
Translation
J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, edited and completed by J. R. Harmer (Macmillan, 1891). Public domain in the United States.
Transcription
Early Christian Writings, preserving its section labels. Presentation markup was removed, whitespace normalized, and readable modern spelling retained.
Printed witness
Exact 1891 Lightfoot–Harmer scan, printed pp. 57–85. Substantive corrections are recorded in the data rather than silently changed.
Limits
This is a readable historical translation, not a new critical Greek edition. Attribution to Clement and the letter’s exact date remain historical questions; the letter itself speaks in the name of the Roman church.
Editorial and verification record
The machine-readable edition contains 65 chapters and 393 numbered sections, plus the salutation. All text was aligned against scan OCR, and every nontrivial difference was checked on the printed page. Spelling modernization is retained; 28 substantive corrections are listed individually in the edition data. The three evidence-linked passages are also checked against the reviewed local transcriptions and narration metadata.
Open the edition data · Read the collation record · Minimal Facts text and audio credits
Reference this edition
Suggested citation
Clement of Rome. The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians. Translated by J. B. Lightfoot, in The Apostolic Fathers, edited and completed by J. R. Harmer (London: Macmillan, 1891), 57–85. Reading edition, collation completed September 16, 2026. Convergent Views. https://convergentviews.com/projects/historical-sources/first-clement/