The Shepherd of Hermas

The book presents itself as the work of Hermas, a former slave living at Rome. An early witness, the Muratorian Fragment, states that it was written by Hermas while his brother Pius was bishop of Rome (c. 140–155), which places its final form near the middle of the second century, though some of its visions may be older.

Origen proposed that this Hermas was the one greeted by the Apostle Paul in Romans 16:14. That is a patristic conjecture rather than a claim the book makes for itself, and it cannot easily be reconciled with the Muratorian dating — the Hermas of Romans would have written the better part of a century earlier. Modern scholarship generally follows the later date.

Many scholars judge the work to be composite, assembled over time from separate units rather than written at one sitting. That is a literary judgement of modern scholarship, not a teaching of the Church.

No complete Greek manuscript survives. The Greek is reconstructed from Codex Sinaiticus, which breaks off partway through, from the fifteenth-century Codex Athous, and from a body of papyrus fragments; the whole work is preserved in two Latin versions and in Ethiopic, with further fragments in Coptic and Middle Persian.

Its presence in Codex Sinaiticus is the single most striking fact about its early standing. The scribes of that fourth-century Bible copied the Shepherd, together with the Epistle of Barnabas, immediately after the books of the New Testament.

The Shepherd was read very widely. St. Irenaeus cites it, Clement of Alexandria quotes it repeatedly, and Origen valued it highly; Tertullian, who came to reject it, is himself evidence of how seriously others took it. Eusebius records that it was read publicly in churches while reckoning it among the disputed books.

The Muratorian Fragment gives the clearest ancient statement of the limit placed on it: it ought to be read, but not read publicly to the people among the Prophets or the Apostles. That is precisely the distinction the Church went on to keep — a book of genuine profit, and not a book of the canon.

St. Athanasius, in the Festal Letter of 367 that fixes the New Testament canon, places the Shepherd among the books appointed by the Fathers to be read by those newly coming to us and wishing to be instructed in the word of godliness — useful for catechesis, and outside Scripture.

In the Christian East the book gradually fell out of use. It has no place in Orthodox liturgical life, and later Byzantine and Slavic tradition drew on Scripture and the Fathers instead. It survives as a historical witness rather than as a living source.

The work falls into three parts of very different character. The table sets out what each contains, the themes it presses, and the heavenly figures that carry it.

Repentance is the book's reason for existing. Its most distinctive and most debated teaching is that a Christian who sins after baptism is granted one further repentance, and one only. The urgency is pastoral rather than arithmetical: the door is open now, and the tower is still being built.

The Church is the other great subject, and it is presented twice over — as the aged woman who was created first of all things and for whose sake the world was made, and as the tower rising on the waters out of living stones. The two images say the same thing: the Church is older than the world, and is still unfinished.

Virtue is treated as clothing rather than as achievement. No one enters the tower unless the virgins have clothed him, and a believer who bears the Name without their garments is told he bears it in vain.

The angels run through all three parts, but their function is instructional. They interpret, test, chastise, and encourage. They are not objects of devotion, and the book never directs a prayer to one.

Angels appear in the Shepherd more thickly than in almost any other work of the sub-apostolic age, and in at least three distinct modes. Some are straightforwardly angels — Thegri, who has rule over the beasts; the angel of punishment, who belongs to the just angels; Michael, named once. Some are moral agencies described in angelic terms: the angel of righteousness and the angel of iniquity of Mandate 6. And some are figures the text explicitly interprets as something else — the twelve virgins are called holy spirits and the powers of the Son of God, and the aged woman is the Church.

Mandate 6 contains the book's nearest approach to a teaching on guardianship, and it is worth stating precisely, because it is often reported loosely. The text does not say that each person has a guardian angel. It says there are two angels with a man — one of righteousness, and the other of iniquity — and it teaches Hermas to tell them apart by their works: the angel of righteousness is gentle and modest, meek and peaceful, while the angel of iniquity is wrathful, and bitter, and foolish. This is a doctrine of discernment, closer to the two-spirits teaching of Second Temple Judaism than to the Orthodox teaching on the guardian angel, which rests on Matthew 18:10 and on the Church's own prayers.

Nothing in the Shepherd's angelology is a source of Orthodox doctrine. The Church's teaching on the angels comes from Scripture, from the services, and from the Fathers. What this book offers is evidence of how the vocabulary was being used at Rome around the middle of the second century.

Much in the book runs with the grain of Orthodox teaching — the necessity of repentance, the Church as a divine reality older than the world, the reality of angelic ministry, the moral seriousness of the Christian life, and the insistence that faith without the virtues is empty.

Other things in it do not, and should not be smoothed over. The limit of a single post-baptismal repentance is not Orthodox teaching; the mystery of confession knows no such ration. The book's language about the Son of God and the Holy Spirit is pre-Nicene and imprecise — Similitude 5 has been read since antiquity as sitting uneasily with later Trinitarian and Christological definition, and it must not be quarried for doctrine. And its symbolic figures are not members of the heavenly hierarchy: none has a feast, a rank, an icon, or a place in the services.

The right posture is the one the Muratorian Fragment already recommends. Read it; do not read it as Scripture.

The Shepherd stands near the head of two long traditions. Its treatment of sin after baptism belongs to the prehistory of the Church's penitential discipline, and the third-century controversies over restoring the lapsed were argued in a world where this book was widely known.

Its pairing of twelve virtues against twelve vices is among the earliest sustained Christian allegories of the moral life, and the habit of thinking in such catalogues runs on through the monastic literature on the passions.

The image of the Church as a tower of living stones — quarried from every place, tested one by one, some set aside for reshaping — proved durable well beyond the book's own currency.