Clement Thought Luke was from the Second Century

November 29, 2025

Clement Thought Luke was from the Second Century

Clement must have thought Luke was from the second century.

That’s the only way his picture of Luke really makes sense once you put all the pieces together.

What follows is basically an attempt to pull together three lines of data that get treated separately in the literature:
(1) Clement’s role as our earliest detailed “Luke-tradition” witness,
(2) his attribution of a Jewish–Christian dialogue known to Celsus to Luke, and
(3) the second-century profile of that dialogue as reconstructed by Carriker, Bovon, and others.

Put the three together and Clement’s Luke starts to look less like a mid-first-century companion of Paul and more like an author who is still busy writing in the middle of the second century.

1. Clement as the first “thick” witness to Luke

Everybody knows to quote Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1, as the classic statement:

“Luke also, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by him,”

and then to line this up with the canonical Luke–Acts package. That’s the standard story.

What gets less attention is how dense Clement’s Luke-tradition is, compared with Irenaeus.

In the Hypotyposeis, as quoted by Eusebius, Clement doesn’t just repeat the “Luke the companion of Paul” line. He adds a whole extra layer of traditions about Luke’s literary activity:

Luke, Clement says, is responsible for Hebrews in Greek. According to Clement, the epistle is Paul’s in substance but Luke’s in style, and “the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews has the same character as the style of the Acts.” ToposText
In the same context Eusebius notes that Clement gives an ordered sequence of the gospels in the Hypotyposeis and explicitly treats Luke as one of the authors with a genealogy (Matthew and Luke first, then Mark, then John). ToposText

So Clement’s Luke is already a highly literate, rewriting, harmonizing figure: he not only writes a gospel and Acts, he also re-casts Pauline material (Hebrews) into polished Greek, in a style Clement can recognize and compare.

That already gives Luke a decidedly “post-Pauline” profile. Hebrews is not the raw voice of a travelling Aramaic-speaking missionary; it is an elegant, Alexandrian-sounding homily in Greek, and Clement just hands it to Luke as a kind of Pauline redactor.

2. Clement’s Luke writes the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus

Now add the piece that Andrew Carriker and others have focused on.

Maximus the Confessor, in his scholia on the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, mentions a work by Ariston of Pella about “seven heavens,” and then adds that he has read this in the Dialogue of Papiscus and Jason. He then says (paraphrasing the Greek that Carriker prints):

“The dialogue of Papiscus and Jason, which Clement of Alexandria in the sixth book of his Hypotyposeis says the holy Luke wrote.” Academia

So according to Maximus’ source, Clement explicitly attributed the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus (Altercatio Iasonis et Papisci) to Luke.

This Lukan attribution is not just a late fantasy of Maximus. A newly discussed fragment in John of Scythopolis’ scholia, transmitted through Sophronius and analyzed in recent work, confirms that there was an earlier tradition connecting Clement, Luke, and this dialogue: John explicitly reports Clement’s attribution of the dialogue to Luke and understands that as a reason to see the work as “Lukan.” Academia

So:

Clement knows the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus.
Clement thinks Luke wrote it.
Later Byzantine readers still remember this attribution and explicitly trace it back to Clement.

At the same time, Origen tells us that Celsus used a work he calls an “antilogia of Jason and Papiscus.” Origen knows this text well enough to summarize it and critique it, and he tells us he is using it to rebut Celsus’ misuse of it. Academia

In other words, by the time Celsus is writing (mid-to-late second century), the Jason and Papiscus dialogue is already:

circulating widely enough for Celsus to cite it as a Christian text, and
sufficiently “canonical” that Origen feels constrained to defend or at least explain it.

If Clement thinks this text is Luke’s, then Clement’s Luke is not merely the shadowy author of a first-century gospel. He is also the credited author of a polished anti-Jewish dialogue occupying a very recognizably second-century slot in the history of Christian–Jewish debate.

3. Carriker and Ariston of Pella: the dialogue’s date and profile

Enter Carriker.

Eusebius, in HE 4.6, mentions an Ariston of Pella who “relates” Hadrian’s exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). ToposText Much later, Maximus links Ariston of Pella to the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus; that linkage became traditional in scholarship.

Carriker dismantles that neat package. On his reading:

The early evidence for Ariston-of-Pella-as-author of the dialogue is essentially non-existent; Celsus, Origen, Jerome, and the Latin translator of the Altercatio all treat the work as anonymous.
Ariston is more plausibly the author of a lost historical work on the Jewish wars that Eusebius used for HE 4.2 and 4.6, not the composer of the Jason–Papiscus dialogue.

Once you detach Ariston from the Altercatio, you remove the temptation to treat the dialogue as a little apologetic tract of some anonymous Christian apologist with no definite date. What you are left with is its actual profile:

a fairly sophisticated, literary dialogue between a Christian and an Alexandrian Jew,
known to Celsus, attacked (or at least appropriated and “corrected”) by Origen,
and later embedded in the Caesarean library tradition that preserves Clement’s attributions.

That profile fits very comfortably with the other recorded Jewish–Christian dialogues we can actually date. These are not generally products of the first century, when Christians were still a relatively small Jewish sect and nobody was producing polished pro-and-con philosophical disputations for libraries. They are overwhelmingly second-century phenomena, when Christians and Jews are now two distinct communities and have begun to produce literary dialogues as a way of memorializing (and staging) their disputes.

So when Clement hands authorship of Jason–Papiscus to Luke, the Luke he has in mind is an author whose activity extends into that same second-century literary and polemical environment.

4. “But Clement thought Luke was Paul’s companion…”

Andrew Criddle’s pushback is exactly what you’d expect:

“Clement clearly regarded Luke as the companion of Paul. If he regarded Luke as the author of this dialogue he must have regarded the dialogue as 1st century.”

That sounds intuitively right until you remember how loose early Christian chronography actually is.

Clement lives in Alexandria around 190–215. For him, “Paul’s companion” is already an epic, almost legendary figure. The same tradition that lets John the apostle live on into the reign of Trajan, and that blithely folds the destruction of Jerusalem and Hadrian’s founding of Aelia into the long shadow of the apostolic age, has no difficulty stretching an apostolic associate across multiple generations of controversy.

In exactly the same Hypotyposeis tradition that hands Hebrews to Luke as translator, Clement is quite prepared to imagine Luke revising and polishing Pauline material long after Paul’s own lifetime. ToposText It is a small further step to imagine that same Luke composing an elegant philosophical dialogue in Greek to answer Jewish objections that presuppose the fall of the Temple, the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the gradual crystallization of “Judaism” and “Christianity” as rival identities.

If we insist that Clement’s chronology has to be internally consistent, then one of two things has to give:

Either Clement really does think this kind of literary dialogue is a first-century product – in which case we would be forced to push the whole Jewish–Christian dialogue genre back into the apostolic period; or
Clement implicitly places Luke’s literary career well into the second century, so that a Lukan Jason–Papiscus sits comfortably alongside Celsus, Origen’s early works, and the Bar Kokhba memories.

Which of those is more plausible?

All the actual evidence we have about when such dialogues appear – Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, the apocryphal dialogues, the patristic reception of Jason–Papiscus – points to the second century. There is no parallel for this genre simply “appearing” in the 40s or 50s and then quietly continuing into the time of Celsus without anyone noticing the chronological stretch.

Clement is not doing critical historiography. He is attaching beloved texts to apostolic names. If you follow the logic of his attributions rather than retrofitting them to modern chronology, his Luke is simply still writing in Clement’s own world.

5. Clement, Luke–Acts, and the Celsus connection

Now fold Luke–Acts back into the picture.

Clement:

treats Luke as the author of a gospel with a genealogy,
ties the style of Hebrews to the style of Acts, thus reinforcing Luke as that book’s author, ToposText
and credits him with a sophisticated anti-Jewish dialogue that Celsus knows and Origen feels obliged to discuss. Academia+1

If Clement is our earliest thick witness to a Luke who is:

a companion of Paul,
the author of a gospel and Acts,
the translator and editor of Hebrews,
and the author of Jason and Papiscus,

then the picture of Luke that Clement is working with is not a mid-first-century evangelist safely tucked away in the 60s. It is a second-century theological author whose literary career runs right into the era of Hadrian and Celsus.

You can try to save a first-century Luke by shoving Jason–Papiscus back into the first century. But that operation does violence to everything we know about the genre, the polemical context, and the way Origen treats the text.

The alternative is to take Clement seriously on his own terms: when he says Luke wrote this dialogue, he is implicitly placing Luke into the same chronological space as the other second-century Jewish–Christian debates we can actually see.

6. So what follows?

If you grant Clement his own premises, you end up very close to the dilemma sketched at the end:

Clement is unlikely, from his perspective, to be “mistaken” about Luke’s authorship of the dialogue; he is our first witness to Luke’s authorship of anything, and he is closer to the Alexandrian traditions that preserve these texts than we are.
If the Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus really belongs where its genre, polemical content, and Celsus/Origen reception place it – mid- to late second century –
Then the Luke of Clement’s tradition is either:
– still alive and writing in that same period, or
– at least being imagined as a second-century figure whose literary activity stretches far beyond the apostolic age.

In other words, Clement’s Luke isn’t “the man who wrote a gospel in the 80s and then vanished.” Clement’s Luke is a working theologian and literary craftsman whose fingerprints are still showing up on texts that stand alongside Celsus and Bar Kokhba in our timeline.

If we want to keep a first-century Luke, we have to start by dismantling Clement – deny his attribution of Jason–Papiscus, ignore his Hebrews tradition, treat his Luke as a pious fiction.

But if we listen to Clement rather than correcting him, the Luke he knows is a second-century author.

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