Clement of Rome

Apparently in AD 96, the Roman Church addressed an admonitory letter to the Church at Corinth. There, for reasons the letter does not reveal, the established elders had been deprived of office by younger members of the church. The letter is styled I Clement because, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, a man named Clement, who perhaps presided over the Roman board of elders or acted as its corresponding secretary, actually composed the letter. It is in any case a formal, carefully constructed, letter written in excellent Greek – the work of a competent rhetorician.

Richard A. Norris Jr., “The Apostolic and Sub-Apostolic Writings: The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14.