Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions: Essential Insights for Scholars

Chapter 1

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.

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.

Concerning the manuscript attestation, 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, which presents a text of the Recognitions independent of Rufinus, we possess Clementine fragments in Ethiopic.