“Owing to envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven…”
Owing to envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee, and stoned. After preaching both in the east and west, he gained the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world, and come to the extreme limit of the west, and suffered martyrdom under the prefects.
Clement of Rome · The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians · ANF I, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Chapter V
The oldest surviving account of the deaths of Peter and Paul, written within living memory of them and offered not as history but as an example of what envy does. The phrase about the extreme limit of the west is the whole basis of the tradition that Paul reached Spain.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Clement is writing at Rome perhaps thirty years after the events and appeals to them as things his readers know; the volume's own footnote records that the seven imprisonments are not in Scripture, and that what the limit of the west means has been argued over ever since.
Read in Roberts & Donaldson, ANF vol. 1 (1885) · Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe
Also by
- Clement of Rome every saying recorded of this person, and their page