ABSTRACT
If God is a lawgiver, he must have a law. Yet what normative claim the law of Moses had for Christians posed a major theological problem for Clement’s predecessors and contemporaries. As we explored in Chapter 1, the question concerning the status of the different elements of the Mosaic law proved to be something of a battleground for articulating Christian identity in the second and third centuries. In Clement’s own case, I argue that in his discussions of the law we find a comparatively more porous representation of the boundaries that delineate Christians and Jews than we see in certain other early Christians. In order to appreciate this fully, we must analyze his construction of the gnostic’s relationship to the Mosaic law by situating it within Stoic theories of the moral law as right reason.
