Second Epistle of Clement

Lake, Loeb 1912

Chapter 12

Interpretation of a Saying of the Lord

Let us then wait for the kingdom of God, from hour to hour, in love and righteousness, seeing that we know not the day of the appearing of God.

For when the Lord himself was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he said: “When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.”¹

Now “the two are one” when we speak with one another in truth, and there is but one soul in two bodies without dissimulation.

And by “the outside as the inside” he means this, that the inside is the soul, and the outside is the body. Therefore, just as your body is visible, so let your soul be apparent in your good works.

And by “the male with the female neither male nor female” he means this, that when a brother sees a sister he should have no thought of her as female, nor she of him as male.²

When you do this, he says, the kingdom of my Father will come.

Notes

The same saying, or very nearly so, is quoted from Cassianus by Clement of Alexandria (), and the latter states that it is from the Gospel of the Egyptians. But the whole question has been complicated by the discovery of Grenfell and Hunt’s “Lost Gospel” (), which seems to refer to a similar saying, and the problem of the mutual relations between these documents is still unsolved.
Or, if αὑτοῦ be read instead of αὐτοῦ, “nor have any thought of himself as male.”