A New Commentary Series on the Apostolic Fathers

In 2007, Wilhelm Pratscher contributed Der Zweite Clemensbrief to the series Kommentar zu den apostolischen Vätern. Five years later, Christopher Tuckett inaugurated the Oxford Apostolic Fathers series, the first such series in English since the serviceable but brief commentaries in the six-volume Apostolic Fathers series (Nelson and Sons, 1964–68). Tuckett’s excellent contribution is to be welcomed as ‘the first full-scale edition and commentary in English of the text known as 2 Clement since Lightfoot’s magisterial work at the end of the nineteenth century’, as the book’s dust jacket touts. The Introduction (pp. 1–82) lucidly surveys standard isagogical issues: manuscripts, early attestation to Second Clement, authorship, genre, literary unity, the writing’s many citations, the identity of possible opponents, the place and date of composition, and the writing’s theology. A comment on each of these points will serve to make both Tuckett’s views and the little-studied writing known to us as the Second Letter of Clement better known to readers of the Expository Times. In all three surviving manuscripts (one Syriac and two Greek – including Alexandrinus, whose text breaks off at 12.5a), Second Clement follows directly after First Clement. In Alexandrinus and the Syriac manuscript, both Clementine epistles comprise part of the canonical NT (pp. 3–6). The rather sparse early attestation to Second Clement points to some controversy about the writing’s canonical status. Eusebius of Caesarea is apparently the earliest witness, although Irenaeus and Origen could have cited it (pp. 7–13). Virtually all scholars agree that First and Second Clement had different authors who addressed markedly different situations. Despite several scholars’ attempts to speculate, little more can be said about this anonymous, Gentile Christian author who was comfortable citing various parts of Jewish Scripture, including Tobit (pp. 14–17; cf. 265–68). Whereas most scholars have inferred that Second Clement is a ‘sermon’ or a ‘homily’ – and have assumed that it is a distinct and recognizable genre – Tuckett is to be praised for acknowledging the problem of the writing’s genre (pp. 18–26). He concludes that it is ‘some kind of “sermon”’ and is open ‘to categoriz[ing] the contents of the work as “paraenesis”’ (pp. 25, 26). On the question of literary unity, scholars have mustered numerous arguments as to why 2 Clement 19–20 is, or (less commonly) is not, a later addition to the text. Tuckett, however, deems the question as ‘probably indecisive’ and, in any case, likely not the crux interpretum that the vast majority of scholars make it out to be, since ‘19.1–20.4 adds not very much more to what has been said’ in 2 Clement 1–18 (pp. 27–33 at 33). Next follows a helpful overview of Second Clement’s many citations of the OT and various gospel traditions (pp. 34–46; see further below). A New Commentary Series on the Apostolic Fathers 588889 EXT0010.1177/0014524615588889The Expository Times research-article2015