The Shepherd of Hermas

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The Shepherd of Hermas is a Christian text of the second century, written in Greek at Rome, that records a sequence of visions and instructions received by a man named Hermas and pressed on its readers as a last chance to set their lives in order. It takes its name from the figure who delivers most of its teaching: a shepherd, identified within the work as the angel of repentance, who appears in plain dress and speaks with unhurried authority. He arrives to Hermas seated at home, claims to have been sent to live with him to the end of his days, and from that point governs the book — its commandments dictated in his voice, its parables explained in his hand.

A book in three movements

The book is long and unusual in shape, falling into three parts that were already grouped together in antiquity: Five Visions, Twelve Mandates, Ten Similitudes. The opening is intensely personal. Hermas was raised in a household, sold as a boy to a woman named Rhoda at Rome, and met her again years later. Seeing her bathe in the Tiber, he stretched out a hand to help her from the river and let a fleeting desire cross his mind. The book begins with that desire returning to accuse him. Rhoda appears to him from heaven and tells him his thought was a sin; the heavens open; and an aged woman with a book in her hand begins the long instruction that follows.

That woman is the work’s first great image. She is revealed to stand for the Church herself — old, Hermas is told, not because she has aged but because she was created before all things, and the world was made for her sake. The Church is older than the cosmos it inhabits, prior to the world it gathers from; she precedes her own members the way a purpose precedes the thing made for it. Across the visions she changes appearance. First she is ancient and seated in a chair, her hair white, her flesh failing under the sins of the faithful. Then she comes younger, her face still wrinkled but her spirit restored. Then younger again, upright and glad, a bride dressed to go out, while her hair stays white. The Church grows young, the explanation runs, as those inside her repent: the aging is the wear of sin, the renewal is the work of turning back, and the same body carries both at once. The vision of an institution that grows younger as its people mend is among the oldest sustained images of the Church in Christian writing, and it is offered not as theory but as a thing seen.

In the third Vision she shows Hermas a tower under construction on the water, raised by six young men with thousands more carrying stones. The tower is the Church, and the stones are the faithful. Some arrive squared and bright and slip into the wall so cleanly that the seams vanish; some are set in place; some are thrown down the slope, cracked or stained or round and unworkable, to lie beside the building. The round stones must be cut square before they can be used; the cracked must be mended; some are flung far off entirely. The Ninth Similitude returns to this scene at far greater length, with twelve mountains furnishing stones of every color and quality, and the whole apparatus turned into a taxonomy of believers — the doubters and the rich and the hypocrites and the hospitable, each a kind of stone, each tested at the wall. The point of the image never wavers: the tower is still going up, and a stone rejected today may yet be trimmed and fitted, but only while the work continues.

The Twelve Mandates, or commandments, follow as brief moral instructions dictated by the shepherd: to believe in one God who made and ordered all things; to keep simplicity and innocence; to love truth and put away every lie; to guard chastity in marriage and thought; to be long-suffering rather than short-tempered, since patience houses the Holy Spirit and anger drives it out; to trust the angel of righteousness and refuse the angel of wickedness, the two spirits that contend within a person; to fear God and not the devil; to hold self-control; to ask of God without doubting; to put away grief, which grieves the Spirit; to test the prophets by their lives; and last, to drive out evil desire and clothe oneself in the good. The Ten Similitudes, extended parables, close the work — among them the elm and the vine that prosper only when bound together, an image of rich and poor leaning on each other, and the servant set to tend a vineyard who is rewarded for laboring beyond his orders, a parable the shepherd reads as the work of the Son of God in the flesh. Throughout, Hermas presents himself as a freed slave living in Rome, anxious over his household and his disorderly children and his own lapses, and the visions answer that anxiety directly rather than through abstraction.

A layman’s apocalypse

The form is as telling as the content. Hermas does not write as a teacher holding an office; he writes as a member of the congregation who has been given something to deliver, and the something arrives in the standard furniture of apocalyptic vision — the heavens opening, the otherworldly woman, the interpreting angel, the building seen and explained. But the apocalypse is bent toward the everyday. There is no cosmic war, no sequence of empires, no end of the age painted in fire; the revealed secrets are moral ones, and the disasters to be averted are the small private ruins of a man whose children have lapsed and whose wife talks too much and who has let his business swallow his attention. The book belongs to the literature of the second-century Roman church not by describing its doctrines but by preserving its anxieties: debt, respectability, the standing of the wealthy convert who keeps one foot in the city’s affairs, the believer who fears that a single fall has settled his case. Its method is to answer those anxieties through dreams, a building site, and a shepherd who keeps insisting there is still time, rather than through argument from authority. That is why it reads less like a treatise than like a record of an ordinary soul being slowly put back in order.

The economy of one further chance

The work’s governing concern is repentance after baptism. The earliest Christian discipline was uncertain whether grave sin committed after that washing could be forgiven at all. One strict view held that baptism cleansed once and for all, and that serious failure afterward placed a person beyond rescue, with nothing left but the judgment. Against that severity the shepherd announces something narrower than open forgiveness and wider than none: a single further repentance, granted to those already inside the Church, available now but not to be presumed upon or repeated. Hermas pleads that he has heard from some teachers that there is no second repentance, and the shepherd answers that for the baptized there is a repentance, but one — and that those who sin and repent again and again will scarcely live.

The terms are precise and they are temporal. The chance is genuine, but it has a horizon. A day is coming after which the door closes; the tower will be finished, and stones not yet fitted will have no place in the wall. This is why the book reads as urgent and consoling in the same breath. It does not loosen the discipline into permission. It opens one gate, names it the last, and tells the hesitant to pass through while the building is still rising. That message — a mercy with a deadline — is what made the work matter to its first readers, who were not theologians weighing doctrines but ordinary believers wondering whether their failures had already disqualified them.

The position the shepherd stakes out sits between two harder ones. On one side stood the conviction that the baptismal washing admits of no repair: cleansed once, the Christian who falls into grave fault has spent the only remedy, and what remains is endurance and hope of mercy at the judgment, not a fresh absolution from the community. On the other side lay the danger the rigorists feared most — that any allowance for a second chance would slide into an expectation of endless ones, repentance treated as a renewable resource and the seriousness of the washing dissolved. The Shepherd refuses both. It grants the one repentance the strict party would deny, and it bars the repeated repentance the strict party warned against, by setting a number and a deadline on the grant. The single further chance is offered as a concession to human weakness already shown — the believers are inside the Church and have already stumbled — and not as a standing policy for the future. Whoever treats it as a license to fall and rise again at will, the shepherd says, will find it does not hold a second time.

How widely it was read, and why it was set aside

It was read everywhere. Hermas stands among the most widely copied Christian writings of its age, drawn on for the instruction of converts and quoted as authority. Irenaeus cited it as scripture; Clement of Alexandria treated it as a divinely given writing; Origen thought it useful and, to his mind, inspired. The fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, one of the great Greek Bibles, bound the Shepherd into its pages, placing it with the Epistle of Barnabas after the books of the New Testament — the last two works in what survives of that manuscript. For a generation of readers it sat inside the covers of scripture and was used to ready catechumens for the font.

Yet it was finally left outside the canon, and the reasons were as much about dating as about doctrine. The Muratorian fragment, an early list of accepted writings, allows that the book may be read privately but rules that it must not be proclaimed in the assembly among the prophets or the apostles, on the ground that it was composed too recently — written, the list says, in very recent times by the brother of the man who then held the bishop’s chair at Rome. The objection is one of office and era: a work from within living memory, by a known contemporary, could be edifying without being apostolic. Tertullian’s verdict hardened over his life. Having once cited the Shepherd warmly, he turned against it in his rigorist period and dismissed it in On Modesty (De Pudicitia) as the apocryphal shepherd of adulterers — precisely because its one further repentance reopened a door he wished sealed. Athanasius later set it outside the canon while still commending it to converts; the same writing could be kept on the shelf and kept out of the lectionary at once.

Where the Greek runs thin, the translations preserve the whole. Only two Greek manuscripts carry substantial portions, and the Greek of Sinaiticus breaks off before the end; the complete text survives through two Latin versions, an Ethiopic rendering made from a Greek original in the Aksumite centuries, and fragments in Coptic and Middle Persian, with a leaf of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus preserving part of the conclusion otherwise lost in the original tongue. Modern scholarship places the composition in the first half of the second century, likely written over a stretch of years and assembled in stages rather than at a single sitting, and counts the work among the writings later grouped as the Apostolic Fathers. Its passage from the edge of scripture into a category just outside it belongs to the long sorting that the discipline of canonization describes, and its patient anatomy of the soul’s faults and remedies anticipates the later mapping of the spiritual life set out under ascetical theology.

Text, translation, and scholarship

The standard critical access to the Shepherd in English is the Loeb edition by Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Volume II (Loeb Classical Library 25, Harvard University Press, 2003), which sets a Greek text facing a modern translation; the volume is cataloged at loebclassics.com/view/LCL025/2003/volume.xml. The fullest English commentary is Carolyn Osiek, The Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary (Hermeneia, Fortress Press, 1999), which treats the text as the product of a single author working across an extended period and reads it against the social world of the Roman church; it is described by its publisher at fortresspress.com. On the work’s debts to earlier Christian writing, Jonathan E. Soyars, The Shepherd of Hermas and the Pauline Legacy (Brill, 2019), traces its reuse of Pauline language and argument. The witness of the Ethiopic version — which alone transmits the entire text, conclusion included — is surveyed by Massimo Villa in the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin, available as a PDF at aai.uni-hamburg.de. Together these set the boundaries of what can be known: a Greek work whose original is partly lost, recovered through the languages of the churches that went on copying it after Rome’s own usage cooled.

The shepherd’s whole instruction rests on a single architecture. The tower is half built; the stones lie sorted on the slope, some squared and waiting, some cracked and set aside to be mended, some flung beyond reach. To the one who asks whether a fall after baptism has ruined him, the answer is the building site itself: the wall is not finished, the masons have not gone home, and a stone trimmed in time still goes into the Church. One repentance, freely given and not to be spent twice — the gate held open exactly as long as the work goes on, and no longer.

→ Related: Epistle Of Barnabas · Agape · Ritual Purification · Apostolic Fathers · Irenaeus · Clement Of Alexandria · Canonization · Ascetical Theology · Sin · Baptism · Tertullian · Origen