I. An Epistle to the People of Antioch. 1
Alexander, a servant and prisoner of Jesus Christ, sends greeting in the Lord to the blessed church of Antioch. Easy and light has the Lord made my bonds to me during the time of my imprisonment since I have learned that in the providence of God, Asclepiades--who, in regard to the right faith, is most eminently qualified for the office--has undertaken the episcopate of your holy church of Antioch. And this epistle, my brethren and masters, I have sent by the hand of the blessed presbyter Clement, 2 a man virtuous and well tried, whom ye know already, and will know yet better; who also, coming here by the providence and supervision of the Master, has strengthened and increased the Church of the Lord.
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A fragment. In Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., book vi. ch. xi. ↩
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It was the opinion of Jerome in his Catalogusthat the Clement spoken of by Alexander was Clement of Alexandria. This Clement, at any rate, did live up to the time of the Emperor Severus, and sojourned in these parts, as he tells us himself in the first book of his Stromateis. And he was also the friend of bishop Alexander, to whom he dedicated his book On the Ecclesiastical Canon, or Against the Jews, as Eusebius states in his Eccles. Hist., book vi. ch. xiii. (Migne). [But from the third of these epistles one would certainly draw another inference. How could he, a pupil of Clement, describe and introduce his master in such terms as he uses here?] ↩
