The First Christian Centuries: The Shepherd of Hermas

Comprehensive and careful, this is the first and only full-length commentary on "The Shepherd" in English. The revelations are glimpses of the religious imagination, social world, and moral ideals among early second-century Roman Christians.

The subject of this study - originally submitted as a Th.D.dissertation to the Theological Faculty of the University of Utrecht - was suggested to me by Professor W.C.van Unnik, who also promoted its publication in the Supplements to Novum Testamentum. I wish to express my deep gratitude for the inspiration, encouragement, criticism and friendship with which he has followed my work through the various stages of its development. This book is written in a Dutchman's English, but Dr. Peter Staples, of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Utrecht, has been to it that it is not too Dutch but acceptable to those readers whose mother tongue is one of the various branches of the English language. I wish to express to him my sincere appreciation for his invaluable help.-Preface.

Assessments of the value of the Shepherd for our understanding of early Christianity have varied considerably in this century.On the one hand,"if such men as Hermas had become the real leaders of Christianity,if such books as his had made up the New Testament,the Church could hardly havesurvived."On the other.." more recent study has re-enthroned Hermas as in important witness to second-century Christiniaty in Rome.It is myconviction that the Shepherd,far from being merely a dreary treatise on penitential discipline,as some would see it,has much to yield toward an understanding of the life and problems of second-century Christianity as itstruggled to maintain its integrity in an environment that it found hostile in more subtle ways than political persecution. In a community increasingly threatened by material preoccupations and indifference to the hard sayings of the Gospel,the author works with the biblical traditions about wealth and poverty and produces a new interpretation adapted to the exigencies of his own social situation.Thus he stands in continuity with the New Testament and carries its legacy into his own age.

It is not at all unusual in Hermas research to deny that Hermas was a theologian,by which one seems to want to state that he lacked any conscious intention of thinking systematically.This may be correct or incorrect depending on what one means by the term theologian.If we understand a theologian as an author who pursues a particular idea and lets it be the centre from which a number of given concepts can be explained,there seem to be reasons for seeing a theology documented in the Shepherd.The hypothesis that forms the basis for this investigation,the validity of which we thus intend to test is that there is a central concept in the text and this central concept is the concept of the Church.From the latter other concepts in The Shepherd can be understood.Our task in this investigation is to try o show this inner coherence.