d the founding of the Church. If he
had ever been in Jerusalem before its destruction, he must have fallen
in with multitudes of surviving Christians of the 5,000 who were
converted on and just after the day of Pentecost.

His Christian reminiscences, then, must have extended far into the age
of the contemporaries of Christ. A man who was twenty-five years old at
the time of the Resurrection of Christ would scarcely be reckoned an old
man at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Clement consequently
might have spent twenty of the best years of his life in the company of
persons who were old enough to have seen the Lord in the Flesh. [193:1]

So that his knowledge of the Death and Resurrection of Christ, and the
founding of the Church, even if he had never seen St. Paul or any other
Apostle, must have been derived from a generation of men, all the older
members of which wore Christians of the Pentecostal period.

Now when we come to compare the Epistle of Clement with the only
remaining Christian literature of the earliest period, _i.e._ the
earlier Epistles of St. Paul, we find both the account of Christ and the
Theology built upon that account, to be the same in the one and in the
other.

The supernatural fact respecting Christ to which the earliest Epistles
of St. Paul most prominently refer, was His Resurrection as the pledge
of ours, and this is the fact respecting Christ which is put most
prominently forward by Clement, and for the same purpose. The First
Epistle to the Corinthians is referred to by Clement in the words:--

"Take up the Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Paul. What did he write
to you at the time when the Gospel first began to be preached?
Truly, under the inspiration of the Spirit ([Greek: pneumatikos]) he
wrote to you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even
then parties had been formed among you." (Ch. xlvii.)

The other reproductions of the language of St. Paul's Epistles are
numerous, and I give them in a note. [194:1] The reader will see at a
glance that the Theology or Christology of Clement was that of the
earliest writings of the Church of which we have any remains, and to
these he himself frequently and unmistakably refers.

The earlier Epistles of St. Paul, as those to the Thessalonians,
Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are acknowledged on all hands, even
by advanced German Rationalists, to be the genuine works of the Apostle
Paul; indeed one