Did you know? Interesting and unusual facts about the church's first Bible interpreters.

Great grandfather of medieval culture?

Clement of Alexandria (ca. 160-215) began the monumental project that would culminate in the Middle Ages--to place all of Western culture on a biblical foundation. Robert Wilken calculates there are between seven and eight biblical citations on every page of Clement's writings, which contain, in all, some 1,500 references to the Old Testament and 3,000 to the New Testament. His writings are "suffused with [the Bible's] language, its forms of expressions, its images and metaphors, its stories. Its heroes become his heroes, and its history his history." This is all the more remarkable, adds Wilken, given that for Clement the Bible was "an alien book, written in a plain and unadorned style, a product of Jewish culture, quite unlike the artful and polished works of Greek …