Every so often you bump into a line that looks too tidy to be “real history” and too specific to be pure invention. The little dossier that begins “Petrus et Paulus Romae sepulti sunt” is one of those. On its face it reads like a late medieval crib-sheet: short notices assigning apostles and early disciples to tombs, cities, and martyrdom sites. Yet the same small unit keeps reappearing in multiple manuscript settings, and it repeatedly anchors itself with an attribution to Clement’s Hypotyposeis (specifically “in the fifth book”). That combination—wide manuscript diffusion plus a stable patristic hook—deserves to be taken seriously as evidence for transmission rather than dismissed as a scribal flourish.
1. What the dossier looks like when you strip away the codex-setting
Across witnesses, the dossier is basically a catalogue of where they suffered or where they were buried—apostles first, then a few post-apostolic figures. In the form I’ve been collecting, it includes (among other items) a Roman opening (“Peter and Paul in Rome”), an Alexandrian datum (“Mark in Alexandria, in Bucolis”), a Jerusalem martyrdom notice for a “Jacob(us)” linked to the temple, and the striking chronological notice:
Symeon/Simeon, son of Clopas … crucified in Jerusalem … at Trajan’s command, and tied to an episcopal succession after “James.”
Even before we ask “who wrote it,” those last two lines already point away from random medieval invention. “Son of Clopas,” “crucified,” “Trajan,” and the succession framing are exactly the kind of tightly packaged Jerusalem-church tradition we expect from the second-century stream behind Eusebius.
2. The key patristic backstop: Eusebius explicitly connects Clement’s James notice to Hegesippus
Eusebius preserves a Clementine note about two men named James, and—crucially—he reports Clement’s version with the same temple/pinnacle + club + burial near the temple constellation echoed (and slightly scrambled) in the later dossier tradition. Eusebius then immediately says that Hegesippus gives “the most accurate account” of James’s death.
That matters because it gives us a concrete mechanism: Clement is not an isolated originator here; he is already functioning (in Eusebius’s presentation) as an epitomator whose notice sits alongside—indeed, appears dependent on—the fuller Hegesippan narrative.
So when later Latin lists attribute a “temple” martyrdom line to “Clement in the fifth book of the Hypotyposeis,” we are not dealing with a lone medieval fantasy. We are seeing the afterlife of a Clementine excerpt-type that Eusebius himself knew and explicitly set in relation to Hegesippus.
3. The Symeon “son of Clopas … crucified … under Trajan” line is straight Hegesippus in Eusebius
The Symeon tradition in Eusebius is also explicitly tied to Hegesippus: Symeon is presented as the one who succeeded James in Jerusalem, identified as “son of Clopas,” and said to have suffered martyrdom (crucifixion) under Trajan.
This is the “signature” set of data we've singled out. It is not merely similar in vibe; it is the same tradition-stream, with the same distinctive proper name and imperial dating. If a later dossier preserves that cluster while also tagging itself “Clement, Hypotyposeis V,” the most economical explanation is that Clement’s Hypotyposeis really did contain a compact succession/martyrdom catalogue drawing on Hegesippus’s Jerusalem material.
4. Why the “Jacob(us) Alphaei iuxta templum” confusion actually supports a Clement → excerpt → scribal drift story
The point about Jacob Alphaeus is important: the famous “thrown from the temple/pinnacle” martyrdom story belongs, in the standard patristic stream, to James the Just, not to the apostle “James son of Alphaeus.”
But notice what Eusebius tells us Clement was doing: Clement explicitly distinguished two Jameses—a perfect precondition for later excerpting to go wrong. Once a short list is detached from its explanatory prose, a scribe (or compiler) who wants everything to be “one of the Twelve” can easily slide the temple-martyrdom notice under the best available apostolic label, “Jacobus Alphaei.” In other words, the Alphaeus misassignment looks like the kind of secondary harmonization you get when a patristic note is reduced to catalogue-form and then “corrected” into an apostolic register.
This also dovetails with our final claim: later compilers (and even very competent ones) can preserve the data while losing the identification logic. In that sense, the confusion is not evidence against patristic origin; it is exactly the sort of error we’d predict if an early dossier were repeatedly copied as a stand-alone list.
5. Clement and Hegesippus travel together in Eusebius’s mind—not as rivals, but as corroborating authorities
In Book III, Eusebius treats Clement’s Hypotyposeis and Hegesippus as mutually confirming sources on Roman episcopal succession after the apostles (“Clement has set it down; Hegesippus agrees”). That is not trivial. It shows Eusebius had a mental category in which (a) Clement wrote “succession” material in the Hypotyposeis, and (b) Hegesippus is a check on that same kind of material.
Once you see that, a “burial/martyrdom/succession” dossier attributed to Clement no longer looks odd. It looks like a natural cousin of the very Clementine material Eusebius already knew—material he was comfortable pairing with Hegesippus.
6. Epiphanius as an additional witness to the independent circulation of Hegesippus (and the hazards of excerpting)
Lawlor notes that Epiphanius appears to have had access to Hegesippus’s “Memoirs” independently and in a form that (at least in places) could preserve readings better than Eusebius’s. Even if that does not by itself prove the Clement dossier, it supports the broader point: these traditions did circulate and were excerpted and re-embedded in later works, and not always through a single Eusebian bottleneck.
7. So what does it show, in terms of transmission and “branches”?
One branch is an early “catalogue” tradition (already visible in high-medieval witnesses) that transmits the dossier as a free-standing laterculus of apostolic burial places and martyrdoms, with a persistent patristic tag to “Clement, Hypotyposeis V.”
A second branch is the “schoolbook-appendix” tradition in which the same dossier is copied as an add-on at the back of larger didactic manuscripts (the Urbino/Comestor case is the cleanest example). In that setting, the list behaves like detachable paratext: something a reader or scribe thinks is useful enough to tack onto a standard work, thereby giving it a new material home while keeping the same opening incipit and the same Clementine explicit.
Across both branches, the content that is hardest to explain as medieval invention—the Symeon/Clopas/Trajan cluster and the temple-martyrdom cluster—lines up precisely with what Eusebius preserves as Hegesippus and what Eusebius explicitly relates to Clement.
8. The bottom-line argument
Put bluntly: the dossier is not compelling because “Clement’s name is attached to it,” but because the pieces that matter most are diagnostic Hegesippus—and Eusebius already shows us Clement transmitting Hegesippus-like Jerusalem material in compressed form.
So when multiple manuscript traditions preserve a catalogue that includes (i) Peter and Paul in Rome, (ii) Mark in Alexandria, (iii) a “James at/near the temple” martyrdom notice, and (iv) Symeon son of Clopas crucified in Jerusalem under Trajan, and when that catalogue ends by pointing to “Clement in the fifth book of the Hypotyposeis,” the best historical explanation is not “late medieval quirk.” It is: an excerpted Clementine dossier, ultimately dependent (at least for the Jerusalem cluster) on Hegesippus, copied and recopied as a convenient reference list—sometimes accurately, sometimes with harmonizing slippage like ‘Alphaeus.’
