For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Minimalist]

but it's a pain having to spend ages doing google searches to track down something of interest.

We can't always get what we want, can we? I think it is obvious that Humphreys used Staniforth's translation - one of the latest available, it seems, of these documents - to find what they said. This is a reasonable place to start and as long as Staniforth's translation is accurate, and no one has said it isn't, it does not matter that he was a parish priest himself.

But as you can see here

http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/clemrome.php

CLEMENS ROMANUS, one of the most celebrated names of Christian antiquity, but so overgrown with myths, that it has become next to impossible to lay bare the historical facts which it represents

With respect to the identity of his person, Irenæus (l.c.) makes him a pupil of an apostle; and Origen (In Joann. 1, 29), Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., III. 15), Epiphanius (Hær., XXVII. 6), and Jerome (De Vir. III.) identify him with the Clement mentioned by Paul (Phil. iv. 3), making him a special pupil of Paul. This supposition Chrysostom carries still further (Comm. in 1 Tim.), speaking of Clement as the steady companion of Paul on all his travels; while the Clementine literature, in harmony with its Judeo-Christian character, brings him in the closest connection with Peter, and makes him his most intimate pupil. These two traditions have been combined in many various ways, all more or less artificial.

Early xtian writers do not seem capable of agreeing on this person's biography and they are a lot closer in time to the events than we are. As noted, they have tried to homogenize the discrepancies in much the same way as xtians take the contradictions in their gospels and try to ram them into one story. It does not work.

You know, once you get past the idea that these early church writers were telling real history it is not so hard to see that all of this might easily have been concocted to present a coherent message. "Peter and Paul" went to Rome and were martyred, so the story goes. But the only place the story is mentioned is in Clemens and even he doesn't really say they were martyred. But then we have xtians making Clement a disciple of both peter and paul! This is a classic circular argument. We have only two much later manuscripts. There is no historical evidence of any such person as Clement of Rome Just like jesus, peter, paul, and the rest of the holy horseshit. It is far more likely to be fiction than any semblance of reality.

All of this feeds into the later dispute by which Rome emerged as the center of xtianity rather than Alexandria or Constantinople but there is no escaping the historical realities as we know them.

1- there is no contemporary evidence of a xtian presence in Rome during the first century in the written record.
2- there is no physical evidence of xtians in the first century, for example, the earliest xtian catacombs date from the 2d century while there are first century jewish catacombs.
3- Greco-Roman writers do begin to mention xtians during the 2d century.

I fully understand that scholars, particularly religious scholars, give church "tradition" merit but such traditions are based on air.