What recompense then shall we give unto Him? Or what fruit worthy of
His own gift to us? And how many mercies do we owe to Him!
For He bestowed the light upon us; He spake to us, as a father to his
sons; He saved us, when we were perishing.
What praise then shall we give to Him? Or what payment of recompense
for those things which we received?
We who were maimed in our understanding, and worshipped stocks and
stones and gold and silver and bronze, the works of men; and our
whole life was nothing else but death. While then we were thus
wrapped in darkness and oppressed with this thick mist in our vision,
we recovered our sight, putting off by His will the cloud wherein we
were wrapped.
For He had mercy on us, and in His compassion saved us, having beheld
in us much error and perdition, even when we had no hope of
salvation, save that which came from Him.
For He called us, when we were not, and from not being He willed us
to be.
–2 Clement 1:3-8
Should that be “we worshipped sticks” or “stocks”?
I was using the Lightfoot translation a copy of which can be found here:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/2clement-lightfoot.html
It has stocks, but it reads as if it should be sticks.
Hmm, Poole also has “stocks” but Roberts-Donaldson has “worshipping stones and wood, and gold, and silver, and brass”…
Who is Clement? (Please pardon NW Bob’s ignorance.)
IHSV,
Northwest Bob
#$, Clement of Rome was a late first-century bishop of Rome. The letter 1 Clement is generally considered to have been written by him in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. 2 Clement is probably not his; it is believed to be a mid-second-century anonymous homily.
My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a stock as: Stump, butt, main trunk into which plant graft is inserted…; [i]stocks & stones[/i], inanimate things
You can read Lightfoot’s Greek text and notes [url=http://www.archive.org/details/p1apostolicfathe02clemuoft]here[/url] in Part 1, Vol. 2 of his five volume work on the Apostolic Fathers. The key text is at pp. 211-213. Since I cannot read Greek, I cannot tell if Lightfoot comments on the stocks/sticks question. As noted, Lightfoot’s translation is “stocks”. See p. 306.
Interestingly, in the recent one volume edition of Lightfoot’s translations of the Apostolic Fathers edited by Michael Holmes, the translation is changed to “wood” without any indication that it has been revised.
Certainly there is some vestigial use of the word stock in English in the wood of a rifle or gun, trunk base and for a plant graft, and perhaps it gave its name to a device for punishing miscreants so I wonder if the original usage of stock and stick was so far apart.
Perhaps the writer had in mind ‘pole’ as in Asherah pole.
Ah, the word stock comes from the German ‘stoc’ meaning tree trunk, apparently.