The question now arises, not so much from whom, but when, did he receive this view of Christ and His system.  I do not mean, of course, the more minute features, but the substance.  To what period must his reminiscences as a Christian extend?  What time must his experiences cover?  Irenaeus, in the place I have quoted, speaks of him as the companion of Apostles, Clement of Alexandria as an Apostle, Eusebius and Origen as the fellow-labourer of St. Paul.  Now, I will not at present insist upon the more than likelihood that such was the fact.  I will, for argument’s sake, assume that he was some other Clement; but, whoever he was, one thing respecting him is certain—­that the knowledge of Christianity was not poured into him at the moment when he wrote his Epistle, nor did he receive it ten—­twenty—­thirty years before.  St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred in A.D. 68; the rest of the Apostolic College were dispersed long before.  This Epistle shows little or no trace of the peculiar Johannean teaching or tradition of the Apostle who survived all the others; so, unless he had received his Christian teaching some years before the Martyrdom of the two Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, some time before A.D. 68, probably many years, I do not see that there can have been the smallest ground even for the tradition of the very next generation after his own that he knew the Apostles.  Such a tradition could not possibly have been connected with the name of a man who became a Christian late in the century.

Now, supposing that he was sixty-five years old when he wrote his Epistle, he was born about the time of our Lord’s Death:  he was consequently a contemporary of the generation that had witnessed the Death and Resurrection of Christ and 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.