“Let Us Fix Our Eyes on the Blood of Christ” (1 Clement 7.4): Blood and Atonement in 1 Clement and Hebrews

Résumé fourni par la source

Abstract Recent debates about atonement in the Epistle to the Hebrews, including questions regarding the location and timing of Jesus’s atoning sacrifice, call for a consideration of Jesus’s high priestly identity and his salvific blood in an early Christian text often linked with Hebrews, namely, 1 Clement. The letter from the Christ-following community in Rome to the Christ-following community in Corinth is perhaps the earliest Christian writing outside of Hebrews explicitly to identify Christ as high priest (36.1, 61.3, 64.1). Moreover, several references to the saving significance of Christ’s blood in 1 Clement (7.4, 12.7, 21.6, 49.6) offer an opportunity to reflect on blood and atonement in a text that shares some thematic and linguistic parallels with Hebrews. I argue that, although Jesus is depicted as high priest in 1 Clement, this characterization differs from the perspective on Jesus’s priestly identity and work in Hebrews. It is also the case that the Roman authors of 1 Clement employ the image of Christ’s blood as a metonym for Christ’s substitutionary and saving death. Whatever we make of where and when Jesus offered himself according to the author of Hebrews, in 1 Clement the saving significance of Jesus’s blood is attached to his substitutionary death.

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