The Apostolic Fathers in English

by Michael W Holmes

  Concluding Remarks

  21 It is good, therefore, to learn all the Lord’s righteous requirements that are written here and to walk in them. For the one who does these things will be glorified in the kingdom of God; the one who chooses their opposites will perish together with his or her works. This is why there is a resurrection, this is why there is recompense.

  2 I urge those in high positions, if you will accept some well-intentioned advice from me: you have among you those to whom you can do good—do not fail.

  19.10 the presence of the saints Some ancient authorities omit. 19.11 giving Some ancient authorities add give to everyone who asks you (= Did. 1.5). • the evil one Or perhaps evil. 20.2 the good or good people.

  3 The day is near when everything will perish together with the Evil One. The Lord, and his reward, is near. 4 Again and again I urge you: be good lawgivers to one another; continue to be faithful counselors of one another; get rid of all hypocrisy among you. 5 And may God, who rules over the whole world, give you wisdom, understanding, insight, knowledge of his righteous requirements, and patience. 6 Be instructed by God, seeking out what the Lord seeks from you and then doing it, in order that you may be found in the day of judgment. 7 And if there is any remembrance of what is good, remember me when you mediate on these things, in order that my desire and vigilance may lead to some good result; I ask you this as a favor. 8 As long as the “good vessel” is still with you, do not fail in any of these things, but seek out these things constantly and fulfill every command, for they deserve it. 9 For this reason I made every effort to write as well as I could, in order to cheer you up. Farewell, children of love and peace. May the Lord of glory and all grace be with your spirit.

  21.3 The Lord . . . is near Cf. Isa. 40:10; Rev. 22:12. 21.6 be found One ancient authority reads be saved; another reads find. 21.8 good vessel I.e., the body.

  The Shepherd of Hermas

  Introduction

  The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the more enigmatic documents to have survived from the postapostolic period. Relatively simple in style and widely popular in the second and third centuries (there are more surviving early copies of The Shepherd than of many canonical writings),[1] it stands as an important witness to the state of Christianity in Rome in the early to mid-second century. Expressing a Jewish-Christian theological perspective by means of imagery, analogies, and parallels drawn from Roman society and culture, The Shepherd reflects the efforts of its author(s) to deal with questions and issues—for example, postbaptismal sin and repentance, and the behavior of the rich and their relationship to the poor within the church—of great significance and concern to him and to that part of the Christian community in Rome to which he belonged.

  The Shepherd narrates several revelations or visions (and the explanations of their meaning and significance) given to Hermas, a Christian living in Rome; the visions typically are mediated and explained by an angelic figure. The document takes its name from a key figure in the book, the “angel of repentance,” who appears to Hermas in the form of a shepherd.

  Throughout the book Hermas wrestles with whether repentance and forgiveness of postbaptismal sin are available. The answer, which seeks to balance both God’s justice and mercy (cf. 4 Ezra), is yes, once—but only for a limited time, so one must repent quickly before the opportunity passes. Essentially, Hermas seeks to affirm God’s mercy while maintaining a strict moralism.[2] A second major concern is the behavior of the rich and their relationship to the poor within the church. Hermas’s solution (Herm. 51 = Sim. 2) stands in tension with the Sermon on the Mount. While scholarship has tended to dissociate these two issues (i.e., postbaptismal sin and wealth), sociological perspectives suggest they are intimately related.[3]

  The Shepherd offers a glimpse of a Christianity whose piety (much like that of The Didache and Barnabas) is centered on observing the divine commandments and self-control. The distance from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (another document addressed to the Roman Christian community) in tone and perspective is considerable; the piety of The Shepherd has much more in common with 1 Clement (although its social location differs: The Shepherd represents concerns primarily of lower-class slaves and freedmen of marginal social and economic standing, whereas 1 Clement reflects the perspective of a better-educated, higherstatus group, many of whom were likely Roman citizens).[4] Christological reflection is minimal (the Holy Spirit or angels carry out many christological functions). There is scarcely any direct use of the Old Testament, or of early Christian documents (canonical or noncanonical), though there are probable allusions; substantial parallels with Jewish wisdom traditions run throughout the document, and the use of Roman examples and categories is more than merely circumstantial.[5]

  With regard to the Holy Spirit, the reader will note that The Shepherd uses the word “spirit” in a variety of ways. Some of these usages are clearly generic, referring to this or that good or evil spirit. Others may at least appear to approach equivalence with the eventual Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit as a divine hypostasis distinct from the Father and the Son, but Herm. 58.2 and 78.1 indicate that it would be anachronistic to attribute such an understanding to this writer, and the plural “holy spirits” in Herm. 90.2 indicates that at least occasionally the phrase “holy spirit” is generic. Moreover, distinctions of the sort implied by the modern conventions of capitalization (or noncapitalization) would have been quite foreign to the author and his readers, as Greek documents typically were written in a single case. Consequently, I have followed the example of other recent translators and lowercased all occurrences of “spirit” in Hermas.[6]

  The Shepherd was generally well received in the early church. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen (at least for a while) accepted it as scripture, as apparently did Tertullian, although later, after he had joined the rigorous sect of the Montanists, he referred to it as the “shepherd of the adulterers” for its “lax” approach to repentance. In the fourth century, Athanasius quoted and used it, and even after the christology of the book proved to be congenial to his Arian opponents he continued to recommend that it be read by new converts. His Alexandrian contemporary Didymus the Blind included it in his canon of scripture, and it stands at the end (following the book of Revelation and The Epistle of Barnabas) of the important fourth-century biblical manuscript known as Codex Sinaiticus.

  Genre, Structure, Authorship, and Date

  The external structure of five visions, twelve commandments (or mandates, whence the abbreviation Mand.), and ten parables (or similitudes, whence the abbreviations Sim.) masks the fact that on the basis of its internal structure the document falls into two parts: chapters 1–24 (= Vis. 1–4) and chapters 25–114. The second part, which constitutes The Shepherd proper, consists of the Commandments (Herm. 26–49) and the Parables (Herm. 50–114), with Vision 5 (Herm. 25) serving as an introduction.

  The genre of Visions 1–4 is that of a Jewish-Christian apocalypse. A typical apocalypse (cf. Revelation) includes the following features: (1) a revelation from God, (2) usually in the form of a vision or dream, (3) often given through a mediator, (4) who provides an interpretation of the vision, (5) whose contents usually concern future events, especially the end times. Visions 1–4 neatly reflect this pattern, except for their contents: the focus is not on the end, but on the possibility of repentance because the end is not yet.

  The Commandments reflect the form of a typical Jewish-Hellenistic homily. The closest parallels to the Parables of The Shepherd are found in the book of 1 Enoch. These parables, in which typically the telling of the parable is followed by a request for and granting of an interpretation, and finally blessings and curses upon those who either do or do not heed it, are more like allegorical similes than the more familiar parables of the Synoptic Gospels.[7]

  The textual evidence suggests that the two major sections (Herm. 1–24 and 25–114) were written (and later circulated) separately. Both the important Michigan papyrus and the Sahidic Coptic version be
gin with Vision 5 (Herm. 25), and there are some discrepancies among the various versions in the numbering of the Parables and internal inconsistencies that indicate that Parables 9–10 (Herm. 78–114) are a later addition. In all, it appears that two separate sections were later combined, at which time Parables 9–10 were added to unify and link them together, creating The Shepherd as it is known today. Whether these sections represent the work of two or three different contributors at different times, or (more likely) the work of a single author writing in stages over a period of years or in a brief time, continues to be debated. It may be that the book was first composed (and perhaps even circulated) in oral rather than written form,[8] a circumstance that might explain some of the seeming discrepancies.

  The author of The Shepherd is certainly not Paul (a suggestion made on the basis of Acts 14:12) or the Hermas mentioned in Romans 16:14 (Origen’s suggestion). According to the Muratorian Canon, the oldest (ca. AD 180–200?) known list of New Testament and early Christian writings, Hermas was the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome (ca. 140–154). Whether or not this is so, little else is known about the author(s). There are a few seemingly factual bits of autobiographical information in the document (suggesting that the author was a freedman living in Rome and associated with a [or the] church there, but not in a leadership capacity); beyond this, however, the line between fictional and reliable data is often unclear, and much of the seemingly reliable is of ambiguous significance.[9]

  The date of The Shepherd is likewise difficult to establish. Reference to it by Irenaeus (ca. 175) establishes a date before which it must have been written, but on the other end dates as early as the 70s and 80s have been proposed. The evidence of the Muratorian Canon (“But Hermas wrote The Shepherd quite recently in our time in the city of Rome while his brother Pius, the bishop, was sitting on the throne of the church of the city of Rome”) must be used with caution, since it appears to reflect a subtle attempt to discredit The Shepherd. The internal evidence is inconsistent. Data in Hermas 1–24, including the reference in 8.3 to “Clement,” who may possibly be the Clement of Rome responsible for 1 Clement (see the introduction to that letter), point to the end of the first century or early part of the second, while Hermas 25–114 seems to come from a later time. If The Shepherd is, however, a composite document, this would resolve many of the difficulties. Visions 1–4 would represent the earliest stage of its formation, while the final editing, including the interpolation of Parables 9–10, may well have occurred about the time (mid-second century) suggested by the Muratorian Canon.

  Text

  The text of The Shepherd has not been well preserved. Only four incomplete Greek manuscripts preserve more than small fragments of the text, and no Greek text is available for nearly all of Hermas 107.3–114.5. The four major witnesses are: Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century; contains 1.1–31.6); Codex Athous (fourteenth–fifteenth century; contains 1.1–107.2); Papyrus Bodmer XXXVIII (late fourth–early fifth century; contains 1.1–21.4); and Papyrus Michigan 129 (third century; contains 51.8–82.1). The Latin and Ethiopic translations are also important witnesses to the text of The Shepherd.

  The Reference Systems

  Two different reference systems exist for the text of The Shepherd, both of which are used in the foregoing paragraphs. The older one follows the division into Visions, Commandments (Mandates), and Parables (Similitudes), while the newer system employs chapter numbers. Both have been given in the translation below. The following table indicates the relation between them.

  Vis. 1 = Herm. 1–4

  Vis. 2 = Herm. 5–8

  Vis. 3 = Herm. 9–21

  Vis. 4 = Herm. 22–24

  Vis. 5 = Herm. 25

  Mand. 1 = Herm. 26

  Mand. 2 = Herm. 27

  Mand. 3 = Herm. 28

  Mand. 4 = Herm. 29–32

  Mand. 5 = Herm. 33–34

  Mand. 6 = Herm. 35–36

  Mand. 7 = Herm. 37

  Mand. 8 = Herm. 38

  Mand. 9 = Herm. 39

  Mand. 10 = Herm. 40–42

  Mand. 11 = Herm. 43

  Mand. 12 = Herm. 44–49

  Sim. 1 = Herm. 50

  Sim. 2 = Herm. 51

  Sim. 3 = Herm. 52

  Sim. 4 = Herm. 53

  Sim. 5 = Herm. 54–60

  Sim. 6 = Herm. 61–65

  Sim. 7 = Herm. 66

  Sim. 8 = Herm. 67–77

  Sim. 9 = Herm. 78–110

  Sim. 10 = Herm. 111–114

  Bibliography

  Commentaries

  Osiek, Carolyn. Shepherd of Hermas. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999.

  Snyder, Graydon F. The Shepherd of Hermas. Vol. 6 of The Apostolic Fathers, edited by R. M. Grant. Camden, NJ: Nelson, 1968.

  Studies

  Barnard, L. W. “The Shepherd of Hermas in Recent Study.” Heythrop Journal 9 (1968): 29–36.

  Bauckham, Richard J. “The Great Tribulation in the Shepherd of Hermas.” Journal of Theological Studies 25 (1974): 27–40.

  Hauck, Robert J. “The Great Fast: Christology in the Shepherd of Hermas.” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993): 187–98.

  Humphries, Edith M. The Ladies and the Cities: Transformation and Apocalyptic Identity in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and the Shepherd of Hermas. JSPSS 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

  Jeffers, James S. Conflict at Rome: Social Order and Hierarchy in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991.

  Kirkland, Alastair. “The Literary History of the Shepherd of Hermas Visions I to IV.” Second Century 9 (1992): 87–102.

  Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.

  Maier, Harry O. The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of Hermas, Clement, and Ignatius. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991.

  Miller, Patricia Cox. Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Osiek, Carolyn. Rich and Poor in the Shepherd of Hermas. An Exegetical-Social Investigation. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983.

  Pernveden, Lage. The Concept of the Church in the Shepherd of Hermas. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1966.

  Reiling, J. Hermas and Christian Prophecy: A Study of the Eleventh Mandate. Supplements to Novum Testamentum 37. Leiden: Brill, 1973.

  Snyder, Graydon F. “Hermas’ The Shepherd.” In Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman, 3:148. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

  Stewart-Sykes, Alistair. From Prophecy to Preaching: A Search for the Origins of the Christian Homily, pp. 105–17. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 59. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

  Verheyden, Joseph. “The Shepherd of Hermas.” Expository Times 117, no. 10 (2006).

  ———. “The Shepherd of Hermas and the Writings That Later Formed the New Testament.” In The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, edited by Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett, 293–329. Vol. 1 of The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Wilson, J. Christian. Five Problems in the Interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas: Authorship, Genre, Canonicity, Apocalyptic, and the Absence of the Name ‘Jesus Christ.’ Mellen Biblical Press Series 34. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1995.

  ———. Toward a Reassessment of the Shepherd of Hermas: Its Date and Pneumatology. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993.

  Young, Steve. “Being a Man: The Pursuit of Manliness in The Shepherd of Hermas.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 237–55.

  THE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS

  The Visions

  * * *

  Vision 1

  The Vision of Rhoda

  1.1

  1 The man who brought me up sold me to a woman named Rhoda in Rome. Many years later I met her again and I began to love her as a sister. 2 Some time later I saw her bathing in the Tiber River, and I gave her my hand and helped
her out of the river. When I saw her beauty I thought to myself and said, “How happy I would be, if I had a wife of such beauty and character.” This was the only thing I thought, nothing more. 3 Some time later, as I was going to Cumae and glorifying God’s creatures for their greatness, splendor, and power, I fell asleep as I walked. And a spirit took me and carried me away through a pathless region through which a man could not make his way, for the place was precipitous and eroded by the waters. When I had crossed the river, I came to level ground, and I knelt down and began to pray to the Lord and to confess my sins. 4 While I was praying the heavens opened and I saw that woman whom I had desired greeting me from heaven, saying, “Hello, Hermas.” 5 And I stared at her and said, “Lady, what are you doing here?” And she answered me, “I have been taken up in order that I may accuse you of your sins before the Lord.” 6 I said to her, “Are you now accusing me?” “No,” she said, “but listen to the words I am about to say to you. God, who dwells in the heavens and created out of nothing the things that are, and increased and multiplied them for the sake of his holy church, is angry at you because you sinned against me.” 7 Answering her I said, “I sinned against you? In what way? Or when have I ever spoken an indecent word to you? Have I not always regarded you as a goddess? Have I not always respected you as a sister? Why do you falsely accuse me, lady, of these evil and unclean things?” 8 She laughed at me and said, “The desire for evil rose up in your heart. Or do you not think that it is an evil thing for a righteous man if an evil desire rises up in his heart? It certainly is a sin, and a great one at that,” she said, “for the righteous aim at righteous things. So, then, as long as their aims are righteous, their reputation is secure in heaven and they find the Lord favorably inclined in all they do. But those who aim at evil things in their hearts bring death and captivity upon themselves, especially those who lay claim to this world and pride themselves on their wealth and do not hold fast to the good things that are to come. 9 Their souls will regret it, for they have no hope; instead they have abandoned themselves and their life. But you, pray to God, and he will heal your sins, and those of your whole house, and of all the saints.”