Transcript

Lost Bible: The Shepherd of Hermas

(00:02) foreign our topic tonight is the shepherd or thermos this is one of the we're calling it kind of lost Bible this is one of the texts written by early Christians that some early Christian communities considered to be scripture While others did not and which ultimately did not make it into the New Testament despite in this particular case it being a very popular work and so as we've seen in many multiple lectures even though nowadays the New Testament and in even for most Christian Bibles the New Testament together with the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament is more or less all published as if it were

(00:48) simply a single book published together it was not in any way ever written as a single book and indeed none of the individual authors were imagining that their book was going to be side by side with any of the books that are next to them in the Canon and so there were many additional texts that did not make it into the New Testament and we have looked at several of these and we've devoted full lectures to many of these and we've also had lectures about the diversity of early Christianity how there was not simply one church or one

(01:31) way to understand what it meant to be a Christian and therefore because there were all of these distinct Christian communities that had their own perspectives their own Traditions their own testimonies they also produced their own texts and so the audiences of these texts had different expectations they told the story differently they had different theological um uh beliefs and priorities and so the text that we have reflect all of those so they're very interesting for us as we are trying to reconstruct sort of that diversity that is otherwise mostly lost

(02:09) and obscure to us so for example of those texts that are running around they are circulating independently so in general now again we don't even have to have a printed book you can be reading all of these books just on your Kindle and they're all they can be all together in some big database that you have throughout the entire time period of the printing press the books have all been gathered together in one uh single codecs one single what we think of as a book we call it that's a codex in the past they would have been circulating all by themselves and so you

(02:49) wouldn't have um a whole new testament you just would have let's say the Epistle of Hebrews or you would just have the the little book that is the acts of Paul and thecla or there might be a little collection where you have three three or four books together so maybe you have a couple of Paul's letters kind of all published together or in one bounded together in one codex or something like that but they're generally speaking all circulating independently and certainly they were all like I say written independently and by in most cases very

(03:24) different communities from one another nevertheless when we first start to get compilation manuscripts when we finally get to ones that have survived anyway from the 4th century one of the most famous is the Codex cyanaticus where this is a codex or a big you know against codex is Latin for a book the way we think of books as opposed to a book like a scroll um and so it's bound together most of the manuscripts or most of the different books of the Bible are gathered together in these very important uh codices from

(04:04) the early 4th Century the cyanaticus the vaticanus um and in the case of the one from Sinai from the monastery in Mount Sinai in addition to the 27 books of the New Testament that we generally recognize today this codex cyanaticus also includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermes the text we're talking about tonight so that's just showing how many curly Christians including whoever compiled together this um precursor of a Bible That's put together into one book or manuscript also valued these and is presumably

(04:48) reading these two books as scripture since all the other books in in the compilation or scripture so how did texts make it into what we now think of as a Canon how did the canonization happen it was not in fact on the agenda at the Council of nicaea where they just said yes and no to all the different books um it was something that was a much slower process that happened um based on what different authorities what different early um writers and thinkers said were the um said with the scriptures that they said with the text that they considered to be scripture and so origen who we're going

(05:31) to have a lecture on is one of these really important early thinkers and he has his own list of what he thinks of as being scripture so the criteria that these fathers of the church when they are making their list had for inclusion in as scripture is antiquity so they were looking for the oldest Christian writings and in fact from what we have in terms of the ones that have survived most of the oldest texts made it into the Canon nevertheless we are aware of several lost texts that are just as old as the

(06:11) ones that made it in that were not included we talk all the time about the hypothetical text the sayings gospel Q and so the saying this gospel Q would be older than any of our gospels any of the canonical gospels and it would have been a text that was circulating enough that both the author of Luke and the author of Matthew had access to it and yet that text despite being very old did not survive enough to be on anybody's list so in other words nobody was head copied it enough and was continued so that someone like origen had a hold of it he didn't have it

(06:51) why didn't he have a text like that because that text had been an entirely incorporated into Luke and Matthew so nobody who got a hold of it said there's anything different here they'd say oh I've already heard this I've already heard this I've already heard this they wouldn't need to make a special copy of that little book because they've already got all of the all of the text that's in it in Luke this is one of the reasons why we almost lost Mark so as an early even though it's the text is earlier

(07:24) than Matthew or Luke because almost everything that's in it in Mark is also in Matthew people don't need to copy Mark anymore because they've already got everything that it says whenever they copy Matthew so that's one of the ways that older texts get lost they get just get absorbed so that would be an older one that we know of that hypothetically anyway existed that didn't make it into a Canon another one that we know of is uh in the letter to the Corinthians the First Corinthians as it's called in the Bible Paul talks about to the to the people that he's writing he says in my last

(08:00) letter to you so so he must have written before that a letter to the Corinthians that came before what we call First Corinthians and so that text if it was ever preserved by anybody has been lost so so Antiquity is important but not all the most ancient books made it in we had a lecture before on the dedicate which is one of the older books uh that did not make it in attribution to an apostle or in some cases an Apostolic companion was also really important and so we just had a lecture a couple weeks ago about how in

(08:35) fact the canonical gospels were not in fact written by the people who they're attributed to but because by the time the list started coming around because they'd gotten their names attached to them and so even though it was an anonymous person who was not an apostle or an Apostolic companion not an eyewitness who wrote the Gospel now called Matthew because uh later tradition later manuscripts had had the title The Gospel according to Matthew and because Matthew was an apostle because that had gotten that attached to it that gave it a sort of

(09:11) apostolic um Authority as far as early Christians were concerned so the people thought it probably was written by that and the same thing is true for John and Luke and Mark so Luke and marker thought to have been companions of the Apostles even though again that's not the case it was these were believed to be at the time and so in that case this is another reason why when you are a early Christian writer this is another reason why it you you might ask well why are people writing in the names of Apostles when they're not so when we take the letters of Peter

(09:55) that made it into the New Testament we know that II Peter conclusively we can say that that is not written by the Apostle Peter even though it claims directly as I Peter I'm writing this letter we know that it is not the case because that text is in fact um textually dependent on and indeed is just a reworking of the Epistle of Jude and so why why would you claim to be Peter when you're not Peter or why are the later Pauline Pistols that are written in Paul's name that are not written by Paul it's because if you

(10:35) attribute your text to an apostle even if you're lying you got a lot better chance of getting it into the Canon and indeed lots of these texts which are not written by Apostles or their companions did make it into the New Testament so another thing that the ultimate um the church that is deciding on the New Testament uh decided on is that is it talking to an audience who are in fact the um the the predecessors of the people who win in Christianity so so we've lost as we've seen all of the texts any of the texts that were written in

(11:18) Aramaic initially because um because ultimately the church becomes more of a greek-speaking church ultimately the church follows it is more at people that are are converted uh from non-jewish Christianity so they come from being pagans Greek speaking pagans people who don't um obey Jewish law and don't have an actual Jewish background because that's the direction the church goes um The proto-orthodox Who decide what books get in the Bible are are the ones whose predecessors you know thought those things and so essentially anything that

(11:57) is heretical or what they consider to be not uh not their Community not their path any of those um uh audiences that were being written to like that made it much less likely that the text is going to get in and then that is especially true because they also will Express teachings that are inconsistent with the doctrines that became Orthodoxy in later Christianity so when the later Christians are deciding on uh what is Orthodoxy and what's heresy they look back at these ancient texts and some of them they say well that's a heretical idea we don't believe that and so that book gets knocked out and it

(12:36) does not get put in the Canon um so in the same way that if you didn't get put in the Canon you don't have Apostolic Authority so even important early writers like Clements like Ignatius like polycarp some of their letters were kind of considered scripture in many early Christian communities but because those are early Christians in the next second third generations of Christianity uh in the first century still they were left out because they are not they're very important early Christian readers but and they are actually contemporaries of the the evangelists the gospel writers

(13:15) but because they're not apostles and they're clearly not Apostles as opposed to the gospel writers who are not Apostles but people who thought they were apostles they didn't get it into the New Testament they addressed an audience that died out so we talked about that like the ebionites the nazarenes gnostics those don't make it into the Canon they have teachings that are heretical like Gnostic teachings decided teachings which is to say um where where you're saying that Christ only seemed to be human but was in fact always God always Divine and therefore

(13:57) is never human deceptic or adoptionist um teachings which is to say uh Jesus only becomes the Christ when he is resurrected uh and his uh and is given that position by God or is adopted by God as the son of God um because of the perfect life that he lived so adoptionistic christology so those ideas are all rejected by the later proto-orthodox Orthodox Catholic Christianity and so anything with that in the text makes it heretical so those get knocked out and it's also true that when the stories are too incredible for example like we've done a lecture on

(14:43) the infancy gospels like the infancy Gospel of Thomas the intimacy Gospel of James where um where Jesus as a child is doing just wild magic tricks where he's you know causing his classmates to drop down dead and then he resurrects them again and and this is a lot of um a lot of the different uh like the acts the Apostle John or there's all of these um texts that the ability that the early Christians have to just simply like resurrect people as a magic power almost is um it becomes like a superhero story and so it's too Fantastical and so these are

(15:28) all kept out and then there's forgeries that are simply just too obvious so there's like a series of letters that um the Apostle Paul is writing to the Contemporary philosopher Seneca and and Seneca didn't ever write to Paul you know this is a very late um text it's simply not credible that that happened and so that nobody believed that those were written by Seneca or most people didn't and so therefore they didn't make it in and I mentioned that you know again they did believe that um that again that Matthew or or John

(16:06) wrote those gospels and they were wrong about it and so what in some ways the the criteria for creating the Canon itself is very flawed so that's important to remember when we are considering these books that got knocked out even though um uh again the way that the Canon is determined itself was a flawed process so like I say um the early church fathers wrote a bunch of lists and is on their Authority that more or less it was decided which books got kept in so we mentioned the shepherd of Hermes and the Epistle of

(16:38) Barnabas are both in this early codex but they're not in the current New Testament so Barnabas is a letter by an early Christian it's attributed to Paul's companion and so a lot of these early uh Church fathers like Clement origin Jerome all agreed or they thought that Barnabas had written it and origen quite favorably quotes from it and it also quotes from The Shepherd of Hermes but in that case he admits that its canonicity is disputed he likes it but other Christians he know as at his own time don't

(17:21) however eusebius who is a little later but still a very early writer the first important Christian historian produced one of the earliest list of the New Testaments uh Canon and he relegates both of these books to what he calls disputed books he also would have liked to have gotten rid of the Book of Revelation but enough people argued for that that becomes the last book to kind of sneak into the Canon so among the earlys these early Christians who did reject the shepherd of Hermes as scripture is tertilian we have a letter from tertullian where

(18:05) he is answering to a lost letter from Pope calixtus the first and so tertullian in this says I would admit your argument so whatever clixtus has just argued um he says that would be a good argument that you're basing uh this on if the writing of the shepherd had deserved to be included in the Divine instrument and if it were not judged by every Council of the churches even your own churches among the apocryphal so essentially um tertullian is saying this is not scripture so you can't quote it and say that that proves anything but interestingly though what this

(18:44) actually also means is that even though tertullian doesn't consider the scripture and he says that all the councils don't either he's writing back to Pope clicks just the first and clicks is the first quoted from the Shepherd in order to prove his point and so some people are are considering it to be either scripture or scripture like including the pope and things that can be used as an authority for their arguments so um that's certainly happening there in the second and third centuries um ultimately it's cut from the list so what it goes against it

(19:20) Hermes the author is clearly not an apostle in addition the text seems to express ideas that are deemed as heretical by proto-orthodoxy as we're going to see and so the text reads like maybe it's talking about adoptionism so maybe it's expressing an adoptionist idea of who Jesus is and it also has a possibly non-trinitarian godhead we will read this a little bit at length about it is confusing what the shepherd or firmus is saying about how God works but it certainly doesn't seem like the trinitarian idea that has developed many centuries later or is developed over the course of the next centuries

(20:07) nevertheless in its favor one of the reasons why it took so long to make sure that it wasn't going to make it in is that it was so very popular and so we have I guess more manuscripts surviving of this than almost any book in the New Testament so that just a few of the most popular gospels are actually better preserved than uh The Shepherd of Hermes and so this was very well read and well liked it was translated into Latin very early on it was translated into Coptic and ethiopic and and actually into Persian and so it made its way East and

(20:47) so there was a lot of anyway a lot of reading of this text so even though it fell out of popularity in the later Middle Ages and it's largely forgotten today so you probably have never heard of this text or maybe only just heard the name prior to us doing a little bit of a deep dive at this lecture um the text does seem to be the origin of this convention of portraying these what's called shoulder Angels although a shoulder angel a shoulder devil is how it's usually portrayed in pop culture so essentially you have the on the one

(21:23) shoulder you have your conscious who is trying to telling you that you should do what's right and do other things and then you have Temptation the little devil on your other shoulder that's always trying to lead you astray and get you to do what you know is wrong the idea of this seems to have come from The Shepherd of Hermos I think this is also like the origin of like superstitions of throwing salt over one of your shoulders because that's where the little devil is um you're gonna get in his little eyes and

(21:54) so forth obviously in the case of Homer Simpson um the little devil is able to kill Homer's conscience and he's able to go off and live without a conscience thereafter so let's read a little bit about this where this comes from in the separate of Hermes so it comes from the middle section the text is divided into three sections in the middle section is called the mandates or the Commandments and so in the sixth mandate we hear a we hear about this this section of the shepherd of Hermos takes place I'm sorry takes the form of a

(22:34) dialogue between Hermes who is writing in the first person and a dialogue that he's having with the shepherd which is this is where we get the name Shepherd of Hermes so the guy writing it is named Hermes and he is having a dialogue often with the shepherd and the shepherd identifies itself as the angel of repentance so this is a revelation a book A book of where the a prophet here is talking directly to an angel now here the shepherd said about faith there are two angels with man one of righteousness and one evil one of evil

(23:16) how then sir I said so again it's written in the first person Hermes is saying this well I know their powers since both Angels live with me here's our two shoulder Angels listen he said the angel said and understand the angel of righteousness is delicate and modest and meek and quiet so whoever whenever this one Rises up in your heart he speaks with you at once concerning righteousness sincerity reverence contentment and every righteous deed in every glorious virtue whenever all these things come into your

(23:54) heart you know the angel of righteousness is with you so these are the works of the angel of righteousness so trust this one and his works now observe the works of the evil angel first of all he is ill-tempered and bitter and foolish and his works are evil destroying the Servants of God so whatever this one comes into your heart know him by his works and the Hermes complains to the angel sir I don't know how I will recognize him and so uh the shepherd then identifies the evil angel with being ill-tempered and all kinds of Temptations and so again this devil that's on your shoulder or in your heart

(24:32) is constantly uh causing you to uh into temptation for all sorts of all sorts of worldly things and so uh the shepherd here the angel of right of repentance is is telling Hermes that he should shun that and should listen to his righteous Angel his conscious who's telling him to do the good things so I want to with this uh presentation that we're doing tonight I want to examine the form of this text The Shepherd of hermas and also look at how it differs from other early Christian texts including the text that did make it into the New Testament it is in a lot of ways a very different animal than any of the kinds

(25:20) of texts that we have so we have Gospels we have Epistles we have a single book of Acts that made it in and we have a single apocalypse that made it in we don't really have anything that is too like The Shepherd of Hermos which takes the form of of dialogues with angels so it's a much longer it's a little apocalyptic in that sense in terms of it being a revelation but it is not so not so nearly concerned as other apocalypses with end times or anything like that uh and so it's interesting who wrote it we'll look at and when and what's the

(26:00) audience what is the community that is uh the author is speaking to what are the contents why was it so initially popular why does it fall out of circulation and ultimately then we're going to look at what this tells us about the diversity of early Christianity um just begin using this picture of a classical statue of the Good Shepherd this is one of the symbols of early Christianity that is used a lot and certainly we still use it I'm my role in this congregation and that I'm speaking from is as the pastor and so Pastor simply means Shepherd and so

(26:46) the image of the shepherd is still is still in use Shepherd of herbus doesn't originate with Shepherd or firmness but it is making use of that same early Christian imagery okay so we'll look at the authorship here so it's although um the text is written in Greek it is set in the city of Rome and it's clearly taking place in Rome the author is talking about all kinds of landmarks roads and other things in in the city of Rome the author is part of the Christian communities in Rome that had already been established prior to Paul writing his letter so Paul's letter

(27:28) to the Romans written around 55 or seven somewhere in that range is the last of Paul's writings and longest and in some ways the most sophisticated so Paul in writing that letter unlike his earlier letters he's usually writing in his earlier letters to communities that he himself has founded um so now what has happened is he has had a a struggle with a a group of other Apostles in the east in the places where Paul has established all of his communities across Greece and Anatolia Asia Minor and because other Apostles have questioned his authority and have also argued against his

(28:18) um positions for example that it's not necessary for the Gentile converts to not obey Jewish law a lot of them are saying no we should we have to obey the law Paul has decided that he's going to um you know give up that fight he doesn't want to fight about it and he is going to go to Spain and start all over again start planting all these communities and so in order to get there he needs to be patronized he needs some funding and so he actually is writing to the Roman Church kind of asking for that support and in doing that he is acknowledging to them that they

(29:01) are a already large and well-established Christian Community that he himself did not found and he calls out to several other Apostles that have been founders of that one of the uh uh one of the people that Paul greets in his letter to the Romans is a certain Christian named hermas uh and so that's a that's been tantalizing for people in terms of this particular text the shepherd affirmness which is from Rome uh nevertheless even though many ancient uh authorities equated the author of The Shepherd of Hermes with the guy that Paul is writing it doesn't seem that that's likely the case so we'll see

(29:49) um that's too late a text for that probably so at the beginning of the first vision of The Shepherd of Hermes the author identifies himself by that name Hermes and claims to be someone who's a Freedman someone who had formerly been enslaved an enslaved person and an enslaved uh as a as the master mistress a woman named Rhoda um so in terms of the authorship we also have a 85 line fragment text that was bound into an 8th Century codex so a very ancient book but it's a difficulty different book and there's a page that was a scrap somewhere that somebody thought was important and they just

(30:40) stuck it in this codex we don't really know when this was written or who wrote it so the meritorian fragment is written somewhere either in the late second century or maybe as late as the 4th Century but if it's earlier it's among our earliest lists of a description of what should go into the New Testament and it has a long thing about the shepherd of Hermes so this fragment says but Hermes wrote the shepherd very recently in our times in the city of Rome while Bishop Pious his brother was occupying the chair of the Church of the city of Rome

(31:23) and therefore it ought to be read but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among the prophets whose number is complete or among the apostles for it is after their time so this is an argument against including this text in the Canon but it also is including this detail that it was written by a brother of Pope Pius and so if this fragment is to be believed the shepherd then dates from the mid second century which is the traditional dates of Pope Pius the first so we don't have any good

(32:03) history for almost any of these early uh Bishops of Rome but it would be somewhere the traditional dates are 140 to 154. for Pius however again even though we have this very tantalizing fragment and most people just kind of credit it um I think the problem with it is it would be more contested if we knew where it came from and so sometimes when we get one of these magic part fragments we kind of feel like oh well that's that one's really giving us really specific information however because the author and the date of the fragment are unknown and because he's a priorities in so he

(32:42) doesn't want to include this text which he admits as being read in church he doesn't want it to be included in the Canon he may be either repeating a rumor or even creating a rumor so we don't know for sure if this is the case so does it make sense for example that the bishop of Rome in the middle of the second century Pope Pius that his brother had been a slave so it was Pious a slave too or something like that we don't have any information like that from any other source um so anyway we'll continue our look into

(33:16) authorship but I want to also look at the structure of the text as we have it so most New Testament texts are really short and they're extremely economical um when you when you look at most of the Parables of Jesus when we are doing that that textual transmission and when we're looking at the oral tradition of how how a teaching maybe is transmitted from the original sayings through the oral transmission or in Aramaic to being written down uh and and different layers of of the queue and then into Luke or Matthew or something like that we can just see actually how tiny most of the

(33:58) sayings or even the the longest parables are not that long by contrast the shepherd of Hermes as a text is actually relatively long and so if it had been included in the New Testament it would be by far in a way the longest book I think it's longer than all the letters that Paul's put together in a similar length in that sense to Luke ax which are um to Lucas the longest gospel and uh and is also a longest synoptic gospels and is also the first half of uh the book of Luke's acts and so it's actually one of our most prolific authors that made it into the New Testament

(34:37) um this is easily that I think that long again and so the shepherd of Hermes as we have it has three parts begins with five a series of five visions it next follows that with a series of 12 mandates or Commandments and then it has 10 similitudes or Parables but in all of these cases the Mandate is not simply um love thy neighbor as thyself there's a there's a commandment in there but then there is a very long dialogue as as uh Hermes is talking to the angel and so forth likewise The Parables there might be a parable that in most cases actually

(35:21) is a little longer than any of a parable of Jesus a similitude here but then again there is a long then dialogue where uh Hermes is talking to the angel and and getting kind of a commentary on it getting a description of it and so forth we're going to read a bunch of that we'll read some excerpts and you'll see even by me having just cut out some excerpts from these that even the excerpts are pretty long so scholar grade and Snyder wrote a translation and commentary of The Shepherd of hermas he suggested that the

(35:58) first four visions have a somewhat different perspective than the fifth vision and it's in fact the fifth vision is where the character of the shepherd is introduced and then becomes the main dialogue partner for the rest of the text um and so and then we also identifies that the very longest of The Parables the similitudes number nine is a reinterpretation actually of the of the third vision and so it's kind of a repetition but may also be then a later addition to the text and so the way Snyder proposes is that the author Hermes whoever that was

(36:42) he thinks maybe originally wrote the first Visions as his like original text and he suggested that perhaps the reign of the emperor trajan makes sense um so if we use a free Jewish slave a large number of educated Jewish slaves might have been introduced to Rome during the aftermath of the first Roman Jewish War when uh again when the Rebellion is is crushed and Jerusalem is destroyed just thousands and thousands of judeans including the Elite Class would have been enslaved and the therefore the ones that would have been most educated and so forth might have made their way to to Rome where again

(37:28) Hermes could have been one of these who was later then freed by his mistress Rota in the Visions Hermes mentions that there's a contemporary named Clement and so Snyder says well that could potentially be the historical Clement so traditionally Pope Clement is from around 88 to 99 it also doesn't seem to have a highly developed sense of the church as a hierarchy and we know that even though we've had a whole lecture on the origins of the papacy we know that even though there are traditionally understood to have been Bishops beginning with Peter we don't

(38:12) have really much evidence for that and instead there seems to have been a a diverse community of Christians in Rome and maybe even more counselor leaders at a certain point but in any event in The Shepherd of Hermes what we're seeing is Bishops kind of listed among other callings like apostles teachers and deacons not listed as not listed with as a hierarchy as much it's hard to say it may not have a vision therefore of a very ever very hierarchical church as it's later evolving so the first four Visions Snyder also

(38:57) points out are also concerned with a coming persecution and there was what such a persecution that was rumored at the time of trajan even though it didn't end up affecting the Roman Church very much but the main section that begins with the fifth Vision when this uh character of the shepherd is introduced is actually rather than that it's concerned with the idea of a Christian being caught between loyalties and so the argument here that um Schneider was making is that the main section of the text is written by the same author but perhaps later after in the aftermath of

(39:39) the persecutions that had happened didn't wipe everybody out but maybe during the persecutions the people who'd stayed true who had been persecuted but nevertheless not written renounce Christianity when those people were upset at the people who had maybe given in or said oh yeah no I'm not a Christian don't don't persecute me and so forth who now that the persecution is over they've come back and so they may be the text here The Shepherd of Hermes as calling those people quote apostates betrayers and blasphemers and is talking about whether they can be forgiven and brought back in

(40:19) to the church which is now something that you'd be worried about after a persecution and so then in this reconstruction the last component to be added would be the ninth similitude which reinterprets that original third vision and then unifies the work and also threatens those who'd been disloyal to the church so whether or not that's the case we can't be sure that that is suggesting that there is a component of it that is earlier so that would be um at the very end of the first century the very beginning of the second century but we do know that whenever this text

(40:56) was written irenaeus had it in its present form by around 175. so it could have been compiled in its present form around 140 or sometimes something like that so the early to middle of the second century so one of the ways we can find those things is based on textual dependence so we've done a lot on that is there a direct textual relationship we've talked about that a lot in terms of for example the author of Luke and the author of Matthew's use of Mark right so that helps us data that means that whenever

(41:33) Mark is written if Mark is written at 70 then that text has to be written and circulating long enough for two very different communities the Lucan community and the Matthew and Community to get a hold of that and use it as a source for their texts so the thing about this text with the shepherd of hermas while there are many instances of phrases that are found in the Hebrew Bible um nevertheless very unusually among Christian texts the text is not actually directly quote from any scriptures so it doesn't say like the gospel of Matthew

(42:11) says all the time in the words of the Prophet or in the words of the prophet Isaiah or Micah or whoever he's quoting uh or this thus is fulfilled the the words of the prophet that Hermes doesn't do that once so the only direct quotation of any Scripture that occurs in this very long early Christian text is a quote that's attributed to the book of eldad and modad and you probably have never heard of the book of eldad and modad because this is a otherwise almost unknown but lost book of Old Testament Apocrypha and

(42:52) these guys are are two um Old Testament figures that are mentioned in numbers and so somebody will have written apocryphal text and Hermes is quoting that but doesn't actually directly quote anybody else which is really interesting um there are also similarities between so for example when we talked about their similitudes or Parables so many of the similitudes are very close in terms of their um form of Parables of Jesus that are in the synoptics but these are different Parables and so lots of the language that we see in Hermes is very similar and it has a lot of overlap for example

(43:35) with language and ideas that we have from the James Ian church so the Epistle of James from the johanning communities the um the writings of the Gospel of John the letters of John and also there's some overlap with Hebrews and even with Paul although um there are arguments that the Pauline Church would have have with the shepherd of hermas both Hermes and the Book of Revelation Envision the church metaphorically as a bride which doesn't exist in a lot of the rest of Christianity so there's potentially awareness of The Book of

(44:22) Revelation which would also means that the shepherd of Hermos the author hermas here if he's called Hermes for real might have had access to a lot of these texts or all of these texts but because they're not directly quoting anything we don't really have um you know really rock solid evidence to say that the text is dependent on any of them it could be dependent on in a lot of cases when you don't have somebody copying a whole long quotation out then um or reworking a quotation or something like that it could just simply be that

(45:00) they're working from the same oral tradition that the the other text has so we can't show a textual dependence in this case um while the author of Hermos is a Greek speaking Jewish Christian and it there's a big Greek speaking community in Rome there's a big Jewish community in Rome so that's also not unusual he doesn't use the word Christian so the way he refers to Christians what we think of as Christians he calls disciples slaves of God so he uses that formulation a lot and also Saints and we know that several Paul often calls

(45:39) Christian Saints the word Christian is not part of certainly doesn't date back to the historical Jesus even the book of Acts suggests that it's a later development and so this is a component of the Christian Community that are not making use of that word or at least it's not in anything any part of this long texts the text also does not quote Jesus so it is not preserving saving sayings of Jesus or use the word Christ although the son of God is discussed in the fifth similitude and in other places discuss kind of at length of the fifth

(46:18) similitude and nevertheless when the Son of God is discussed there are some very very interesting differences from other proto-orthodox ideas about Christ so this is where one of the places where this text diverges into its own kind of different theology so I want to do our first kind of Deep dive into that so let's look at this fifth similitude or fifth Parable from The Shepherd of hermas it's on the topic of fasting and it's talking about um essentially literal fasting and a kind of a true spiritual fasting and so herma says while I was fasting

(47:05) and sitting on a certain mountain and thanking the Lord for all that he'd done for me I saw the shepherd sitting beside me and saying these things to me why have you come so early he asked he says I say because sir I am on guard Duty what he said he is the guard I am fasting sir I said but what said he is this fast that you are keeping sir I am fasting just as I have been accustomed to do and and then he said you do not know how to fast to God and this useless fast you're keeping for him is not a fast and so you can kind of see how

(47:47) there's this dialogue format right where where hermas in the first person is recounting a dialogue that he's having with the shepherd the angel of repentance here so the shepherd after saying that this is not a real fast the kind of literal fasting that he's doing as a what he would think is a religious practice it doesn't have any uh any use so this is futile the shepherd says to truly fast he says a disciple must do nothing evil in your life but serve the Lord with a clean heart keeping his Commandments following his orders and

(48:23) let no evil desire arise in your heart involves all kinds of good works and charity that are not not simply a religious ritual so here in elsewhere the text The Shepherd of Hermes has an emphasis on keeping Commandments and the law which is one of the reasons why Scholars agree that this indicates that the author is from a Jewish Christian Community that is still observing Jewish law in the way of some early Christians were doing and so that would be as opposed to Pauline Christians where Paul has argued

(49:01) that you shouldn't be obeying the law that if you if you obey the law then Christ died for nothing this is an early controversy in the church between that so anyway as we continue in this uh in this dialogue the shepherd here talking to Hermes offers a parable and so that dialogue about questions about what true fasting is and so forth leads into a parable that will be concerning fasting according to the angel listen to the parable which I'm going to tell you concerning fasting a certain man had a field and many

(49:41) slaves and in a certain part of the field he planted a Vineyard and as he was going away on a journey he is selected a certain slave who was reliable and pleasing and called him and said to him take this Vineyard which I have planted and fence it until I come and do nothing more to the vineyard keep this commandment of mine and you will be a Freedman with me and the master of the slave went away on a journey you know so okay so while this is not one of Jesus's Parables there are already a bunch of similarities with The Parables that we see in the synoptic

(50:21) gospels so having a Lord that owns property owns a Vineyard who has servants who he assigns different tasks uh he goes Master goes away on a journey and leaves them and so forth this is found in uh you know a bunch of The Parables the parable the talents the parable of the bad tenants and so forth so after the master Departed the parable continues the angel continues telling the parable the slave took and fenced the vineyard and when he had finished the fencing of the vineyard he saw that the vineyard was Full Of Weeds so he thought to himself saying I have completed the

(51:00) Commandment of the Lord in addition I will cultivate this Vineyard and it will look better after it is cultivated and with no weeds it will yield more fruit because it is not choked by the weeds and so the servant then does extra work above and beyond What the Lord Has commanded and so then when the Lord the owner of the vineyard returns he is very very pleased with the results so the vineyard owner called his beloved Son who was his heir and his friends who were his advisors and he told them what he'd commanded his

(51:36) servant to do and what he'd found accomplished and he said to them I promise freedom to this slave if he kept my commandment which I gave him he kept my commandment and he added to it good work in the vineyard and he pleased me greatly so in return for this work which he has done I wish to make him a joint Heir with my son because when he had a good thought he did not neglect it but carried it out so you know if you're used to Christianity you know you can maybe already filling in the the picture of what you're thinking uh who the Lord is here who his beloved Son is who's the

(52:20) servant the vineyard and all those kinds of things but watch out because it's gonna have a Twist when we get to uh when the angel starts to explain this to us so um in the format of the similitude section after the shepherd has shared the parable we next have a long explanatory dialogue so Hermes starts asking the angel what it means and so forth so I Hermes I said to him the angel sir I do not understand these Parables you know that you keep telling me nor can I comprehend them unless you interpret them for me

(52:55) I will interpret everything to you he you know the angel of repentance the shepherd had says in return and whatever I tell you I will explain so I besought him to explain to me the parable of the field and the master and the vineyard and the slave who fenced the vineyard and the fences and the weeds that were pulled out of the vineyard and the Sun and the friends who were the advisors for I understood that all of these things were a parable so Hermes knows this is a parable but he doesn't know what any of those things

(53:24) are so tell me every one of those things and so although the the shepherd has a lot of reluctance and he feels like you know you should you shouldn't be asking me all these things you're asking me too much why are you asking me all this that kind of thing he nevertheless says yes it says ask and you will receive you know not gonna you know be open to you without exactly quoting Jesus but having that same general sense and so he you know again responds that he he'll answer everything that he asks and so the shepherd explains all he says listen now

(53:56) he said and understand them the field is this world and the lord of the field is he who created all things and completed them and gave them power so that part that part we guessed the Sun is the Holy Spirit what that's a Twist okay so the sun I would have thought that the son is Christ but actually no the sun is the Holy Spirit the slave is the son of God and the vines are those people which he himself planted the fences are the Holy Angels of the Lord who hold his people together the weeds which were pulled up

(54:36) out of the vineyard are the iniquities of the Servants of God the friends and advisors or the Holy Angels who were created first the absence of the master is the time remaining until the second coming until the Apocalypse so interestingly therefore the beloved Son Of The Vineyard owner God is the Holy Spirit while the slave in the parable is said to be the Son of God so that seems very unexpected in a confusing twist in terms of the interpretation of this Parable Hermes hermanus also finds this explanation to be great and wondrous how I said could I have understood these

(55:19) things nor could any other man even if he were very intelligent understand these things without you the angel explaining them directly what it means and I I agree I would not have guessed that was the interpretation without the interpretation nevertheless herma still has many many questions so why sir said I does the Son of God appear in the guise of a slave in the parable so we said the slave the servant is of of the Lord uh you know it was left to fix the vineyard and fence it and so forth and then he was later going to be freed as his reward right so why does the Sun but then we've heard that

(55:55) that guy is the Son of God why does he appear in the guise of a Slave listen the angel says the Son of God does not appear in the guise of a slave even though I just said he did but appears with great power and authority how sir I do not understand because God planted the vineyard he said that is created the people and he turned it over to his son and the son appointed the angels to protect every one of them the angels of the fences that he's fencing and having worked much and endured many labors he

(56:29) himself cleansed their sins for no one is able to cultivate a Vineyard without labor and hardship so when he'd cleansed the sins of the people when he got rid of the weeds he showed them the paths of life and gave them the law which he had received from his father you see then said he that since he received all power from his father he is the lord of the people but here why the Lord took as a counselor concerning the inheritance of the slave his son and the Glorious angels the pre-existent Holy Spirit which

(57:07) created all creation God caused to dwell in that flesh which he wished so this Flash in which the Holy Spirit dwelt dwelled serve The Spirit Well living in reverence and purity and did not defile the spirit in any way so because it had Pro conducted itself appropriately and purely and worked with the spirit and collaborated in every deed acting with strength and courage he chose it as a partner with the Holy Spirit for the conduct of this flesh please God because it was not defiled while it possessed the Holy Spirit on Earth so he took the son as a counselor and

(57:55) the Glorious angels that this flesh also after it served the spirit blamelessly should have some place to dwell and not seem to have lost the reward of its servitude for All Flesh in which the Holy Spirit has dwelled when found undefiled and spotless we'll receive a reward okay so this is a really confusing christology as we've just barely kind of gone through it so like I say the parable calls the beloved Son it says that the meaning of that is that the Beloved son is the Holy Spirit and it equates the servant here as the Son

(58:39) of God who then as a result of all of his actions is made at the end of the Parable co-heir with the beloved Son the spirit and it also says essentially that the holy spirit is both pre-existent to Creation the holy spirit is the is what through which God uh you know created all things so the spirit is Holy wisdom of the Book of Proverbs as we'll talk about in a couple weeks and is also caused to dwell in the flesh so incarnate Christ maybe the uh in the servant who becomes then uh a co-heir so so this weird intermixture of the Holy Spirit and the son of God

(59:29) the roles of Christ and the roles of the holy spirit so some Scholars have said well maybe this is binitarianism as opposed to trinitarianism because essentially you have um God the Creator and you have the Holy Spirit Son of God as one person kind of together uh that it in terms of bit the um uh the spirit being that uh the pre-mortal and pre-existent uh component of this second person of the Trinity who then is Incarnate uh and that and takes on you know the flesh and is therefore you know is the Son of God then uh together

(1:00:14) so there's also um uh Scholars who argue that it's binatarianism mixed with adoptionism so uh the fact that the servant is appointed to all of this goes above and beyond what God even told him to do he has this great result then he is rewarded at the end of this by being exalted and by becoming the Son of God and so that would be that would reflect an adoptionistic um christology and so whatever the christology is uh of this particular um long Parable or uh you know it's it's a little bit confusing so even

(1:00:57) after the description of exactly what the guy is trying to say in my opinion um in addition to that as we were just reading that same excerpt it was talking about being rewarded uh for everything that you do the labor in your Vineyard all the good deeds and everything like that you're supposed to do um this seems to represent what we might call a synergistic view of Salvation so this contrasts with Paul so Paul rejects observance of the law and he also believes that salvation is by faith alone and it does not you are

(1:01:34) not buying your way into Heaven by doing good acts it is simply the fact that you have faith that you are um as a sign anyway of of Salvation that is given by God's infinite grace the text here at Hermes indicates that yes faith is important but you also have to observe the law and others the Commandments which have been given by the father through the servant here and indeed you also need to do the good works too in order to achieve the Salvation so the parable indicates labor in the vineyard over and

(1:02:12) above obedient to the Commandments is one of the things that's necessary for receiving this reward from the Lord I want to do one more kind of long uh look into one of the similitudes in this case the ninth similitude which is the longest one was suggesting that this one um uh is maybe the last one of these to be written it's a reinterpretation of the early third vision and this kind of a famous similitude or parable comparing a tower a tower that's being built out of various stones to the Christian church and so we read here in the ninth

(1:02:58) similitude after I hermas here had been had written the Commandments and Parables of the shepherd the angel of the repentance so this is one of the one of the maybe the uh the Tells here that this is written later so we've already had maybe the parable sections have already been written and so now after I had written those I'm writing this one he came to me and said I want to show you what the Holy Spirit which spoke to you in the form of the church showed you for that spirit is the Son of God so previously the new the angel uh tells Hermes

(1:03:42) previously back when the Visions were happening you were having visions from an angel who is in fact the church embodied those are what the first four Visions are being brought from that angel now though because this was a lesser kind of vision that you were having you didn't understand everything back when you had this vision of the Tower so now that you're talking to me the shepherd the angel of repentance I'm going to re-show you this Vision that you had before and it's going to be much more plain and clear than the last time you saw it and it's also going to be a lot longer

(1:04:19) so he said so hermesley is in the middle of the plane he showed me a Great White Rock which had risen up out of the plane and The Rock was higher than the mountains and square so as to contain the entire world and that rock was old with a portico carved out of it but it seemed to me that the carving of the Portico was recent and the Portico was more radiant the Sun and then the Sun so that I marveled at the rightness of the Portico and around the Portico stood 12 virgins the four that stood at the corner seemed to be to be more glorious though the others were glorious too

(1:05:03) and they stood at the four sides of the Portico each with two virgins between them so a foundation here of a building that is surrounded by holy Angelic uh virgins that are absolutely pure um he goes through and a whole bunch of things he sees the six men arrived tall and glorious a like an appearance and they called forth a multitude of men and those who came were also tall and very handsome and strong and the six men ordered them to build a particular Tower over that foundation and so the virgins also urged the Virgin builders on it's a very along and elaborate scene here and

(1:05:41) they begin to gather stones in holy numbers and they start setting up these original Stones as a foundation then they build the Tower up together so ultimately then stones are brought from mountains of various colors quarried by men and they were given to the virgins The Virgins took them through the Portico and delivered them for building the building of the Tower and when the various Stones were put in the building they became all alike and changed their previous colors to White but some of the stones were delivered by the men for the construction and they did not become bright but they remained

(1:06:25) as they were when placed for they'd not been delivered by The Virgins nor had they been brought through the Portico so these Stones were inappropriate for the building of the Tower so you can already see that this is becoming in a very elaborate allegory or metaphor so the inappropriate stones that have not gone through the proper Portico and haven't been handled properly by The Virgins they're taken back they're taken out and sent back so later after all this building has been going on for a while the lord of the tower arrives and conducts an inspection and some of these seemingly

(1:07:04) white stones that have been used in the tower now under the audit from the Lord they are shown to be blackest soot and others that are already been put into the tower are defective in various ways and so all of the defective stones are removed as well so like I say this vision is much elaborated but eventually after we're done with pages of it Hermes is able to have the dialogue with the shepherd and starts asking for explanations what does this all mean so first of all sir I said explain to me this who is The Rock and the Portico

(1:07:42) this rock said he and the Portico are the son of God how is it sir said I that the rock is old and the Portico is new listen said he and understand foolish man the Son of God is older than all of his creation so that he was counselor to his father in his creation that is why the rock is old so we have the idea the Son of God here as being holy wisdom we know from like I say we'll see if in the Book of Proverbs is there before all of creation and helps god with creation and and God the creator creates everything with wisdom and through wisdom uh or in

(1:08:31) this case the through the Son of God as it's called and why though is the Portico news sir said I because he became manifest at the last days of the consummation that is why the Portico is new so that those about to be saved may enter through it into the kingdom of God so we also have um again maybe the Son of God here maybe understood as opposed to the holy spirit this might be again this Unitarian idea of a christology so this is a christology that is being manifest there's the sun is now manifest or incarnate in these

(1:09:14) last days the days that the text is being written two thousand years ago but who is the tower said I this Tower said he is the church and who are these virgins they he said he Are Holy Spirits a man cannot have come into the kingdom of God by any other way then that they clothe him with their clothes and we find that the names of these holy spirits the name of the son of God are the allegorical clothes in which the diverse stones are covered as they're brought into the tower is there made white and so forth all of the stones said he which you saw going to the

(1:09:56) structure into the tower delivered by their hands and remaining in the building are clothed with the power of these versions that is why you see that the tower has become a monolith with The Rock so also those who believe in the Lord through his son and dress themselves in these Spirits we'll become one Spirit one body and one color for all of their garments so this is the idea that essentially as you are brought into the Community of Christ you all become one Community we're all one in Christ Jesus and so it's expressed here as the tower becomes

(1:10:40) a single monolith even though it's made up of all of these rocks these individual disciples so the shepherd further explains that the stones that were later found to be defective and rejected are people who became part of the church but later fell into Temptations and so we talked about this that perhaps this community that the shepherd is writing to the church in Rome had had members uh that fell away during a persecution so that during a persecution they recanted uh Christ so that they wouldn't be tortured or something like that and so then they later came back and so then this is

(1:11:23) um how do you deal with that a lot of people said no you've you fell away and and and not uh the text here holds out a hope that they could uh repent and come back but it's not not going to be easy they're not making it easy so is repentance possible after being rejected so then said I what if these men being what they are repent and throw off their desire for these women I didn't read this part but essentially there's women who are allegorizing worldly Temptations and so they've gone off into the worldly Temptations what if they reject those allegorical women and

(1:12:01) return to the allegorical virgins and live by their power and their Works will they not enter the house of God they will said he if they disavow The Works of these women and take back the power of the virgins and live by their works because of this too there was a pause in the construction of the Tower so that if these would repent they might go back into the structure of the Tower and if they do not repent then others will enter and ultimately they'll be cast out so there is a hope here that um it's not just saying they can't come

(1:12:39) back but they're not going to make it easy necessarily so the parable of the tower is much more elaborate than those brief excerpts and so if you are there's a lot of people for whom this kind of allegory is really um that really like it like having like a little bit of a secret code and you tell a very long analogy or a metaphor that is just too elaborate that's what these are like and then they have a long discussion that decodes it in that sense there's that I think that does have a lot of appeal to a lot of people and I think that maybe one of the reasons why this text was as popular as it was

(1:13:19) going to pull out a couple other details and so one of these is for example um uh Al parts of the allegory that tell us about uh first and now second century Christian practices and how they're understood so for example baptism and so Hermes asks the shepherd at one point why sir said I did the stones come out of the deep place and since they were since they bore those Spirits find a place in the structure of the Tower they needed the angel said to come up through the water in order to be made alive for otherwise they could not enter the

(1:14:03) kingdom of God unless they set aside the deadness of their former life four said he before he Bears the name of the Son of God the man is dead and whenever he receives the seal he sets aside the deadness and receives life so the water is the seal therefore they go down into the water dead and they come up alive so this seal was proclaimed to them and they used it to enter the kingdom of God so the shepherd here is saying pretty clearly that um uh you know this metaphor of baptism as uh ending your old life your old life is dead to you you go under the water and you come back out into new life that

(1:14:49) that is essential for salvation you can't enter the kingdom any other way you can't become part of the church any other way according to the shepherd and it also signifies it washing away of of your former life of sin but um in this kind of conception that The Shepherd of Hermes has it really requires once you have been baptized that you are supposed to live an absolutely perfect life be therefore perfect you know kind of a um a conception of Christianity so you are supposed to at that point not do any

(1:15:25) of these uh you know listening to the the bad angel on your shoulder and instead you're supposed to always listen to the good Angel because if you fall you're you know you're really in trouble because you've already used up baptism so like I say Hermes teaches therefore the baptism is necessary but also stresses that disciples need to live fully spotless lives lest they become rejected and kicked out of the Tower so that I think is speaking to in especially these early Christian communities some of them especially twin

(1:15:59) horums of a baptismal dilemma so like I say this text isn't as harsh as some so the donatus more or less said once you've once you've renounced Christ because of uh because you gave in during a persecution you can't come back that you're already damned we're not letting you back in all of your you're not going to get reordained to Bishops who did that or are out and so forth The Shepherd of Hermos is giving some home with hope that repentance is still going to be possible for those who fall after baptism so

(1:16:30) there may be some kind of a a jubilee a redeeming moment when there's going to be additional time for repentance before a kind of a literal end of the world The View though that Christians needed to live a perfect life also led many early disciples to delay their baptism until their deathbed so because you feel like you're not going to be able to avoid all temptation and live a perfect life you say okay well I I'm I'm a Believer in this Christianity but I know my own weaknesses so I'm going to put off baptism and certainly we have the example even a couple centuries later than this of this custom

(1:17:10) continuing where the emperor Constantine one of the very most famous converts to Christianity did this very thing so he held off being baptized until quite late in his life so that he could avoid committing all kinds of new things that he would be considered sin that you have to do almost because you're the head of a government that is imposing life and death on people and having to fight in wars and so forth nevertheless as we also saw with the shepherd of Hermes being baptized is essential to Salvation

(1:17:46) so what happens if while you're spending all this time putting off being baptized you accidentally die of an accident or a stroke or something like that and you don't have a chance to be baptized well then now you really lost and so that had the that counter Horn of the Dilemma had this effect of starting to push the baptism age down which is why we ultimately get to the trend of infant baptism just to make sure that uh when children die so readily in ancient and medieval worlds and are unlikely to you know half of them don't make it to

(1:18:23) adulthood and so forth that that you have to make sure that they're baptized and so these are competing Trends and ultimately it's the infant baptism one that that wins out so The Shepherd of Hermes I think in just the amount we've looked at tonight shows already kind of a remarkable diversity of early Christian communities so it's written in Rome but it doesn't make any mention of Peter or Paul it's not interested in epistolic Authority at all it's not even interested in the authority of scriptures the text as we saw it doesn't quote

(1:19:00) Jesus and it instead promotes and presents a very unique christology of the Holy Spirit and Son of God where the holy spirit is he is the Son of God in some way in a complicated way and so I think the more we study early Christian texts like The Shepherd of Hermes closely the more diversity of thought is actually evident a lot of the things that become uh you know Doctrine a lot of things that become creedal a lot of things that become the Orthodox Catholic and Nicene Christian conception going forward are not formulated at all in these early

(1:19:45) time periods and we can see how difference believing fervent early Christians including an early Christian Prophet the author here of The Shepherd of Hermes views these very differently than how they're later understood um again while many of these themes overlap other early Christian texts for me as I was reading it to prepare for this lecture I felt it was different enough that it was a little surprising that the text was so popular with proto-orthodox Christians and they got as close as it did to making it into the

(1:20:25) New Testament there's a bunch of very strange stuff here but one of again instead of having Apostolic Authority one of the things that is interesting is that it is an example of writing by a Christian prophet and so one of the things that um we know from the early earliest Christian communities that these are spread around by Apostles that are speaking in the spirit and that there is an overlap between the role of apostle which is much bigger than just the 12 as we saw in our lecture on the historic Apostles and is very much overlapping with prophets that

(1:21:05) are speaking in the spirit these include people like Hermes here most of whose texts don't make it in and most of whom most of the text that we have that survive are ones that where the apocalyptic Prophet is writing in somebody else's name in other words pretending to be Peter so The Apocalypse of Peter or something like that uh another example of a one of these prophets is uh the Book of Revelation which is an apocalypse proper and that made it in because people uh early Christians some early Christians wrongly identified that with the Apostle John even though it is an unrelated uh

(1:21:49) Prophet John who is writing something very interesting so it is a and again that one only just barely made it into the New Testament so there are were a lot of this is maybe representative of a lot of early Christianity uh although it's not the largely Direction Christianity went it's still interesting to be able to look back and to see it so that is my look anyway at this one component of a lost Bible the interesting text of The Shepherd of hermas and so I'm going to get a glass of water and lindro can see questions that you guys may have had and I have

(1:22:29) please write more foreign so first off I want to thank people for their support So Brad Stewart Stephanie ceresi Philip dinoto Daryl Scott J.R exner David folds Michael Roger um I thank you all of you for your donations those are really appreciated that helps us to keep doing these uh thank you Michael also asks have you been invited on platforms with other Scholars like Bart Ehrman would I be open to it um I uh I have been on some other platforms uh I was on the The Myth Vision podcast I was on the um uh the Gnostic

(1:23:18) I think what it was called it's not it's a gnostic podcast anyway a gnostic investigator podcast um I've been on a bunch of obviously Latter-Day Saint Mormon tradition podcasts and so forth I'm very open to being onto the platforms I certainly would be very happy to be on BART airman's platform if uh you know he's he's a central scholar on this if he's would be interested to talking to me not because of my scholarship but maybe if he's interested just because um I have we have a very interesting Progressive uh Christian tradition

(1:23:51) church that that is open to all of the scholarship and doesn't and doesn't engage in apologetics we don't it's not essential for us to make strange apologetic claims that are non-scholarly so he might find that interesting and refreshing I'd be very happy to be on his channel if he was interested so yeah if people have um uh if you are of a podcast that has topics like this I am very open to uh going on and being in discussions with other uh people who are talking about these issues uh Julie uh by wesiski says uh

(1:24:29) if you had to choose one non-canonical text that could be added to the president Canon which would it be I would add the Gospel of Thomas so I I think that that one has the most um most value as far as what I'm interested in so the Gospel of Thomas has a whole collection of sayings of Jesus some of the earliest of which may be you know an independent witness I sort of believe as an independent witness of of Jesus and I think also in some cases Express things in a in a um an interesting and useful way and so I would bring that one into the cat and out of all of the If I Only Could add

(1:25:16) one um we don't we're not really and this we're not really sticklers about um Canon and so I'm I quote origen in church you know he's not okay in the Canon but I mean in other words we're I'm able we can talk about I mean we quote from the gospel Thomas we can quote from the Decay and so forth so um we um so I don't know if it's essential to have as as essential to have a Canon as it once was um we certainly you know we have it as a traditional Canon and then we also can look at the other Traditions but I guess

(1:25:47) if I were going to add to it that's the one I would Stephanie ceressity asks um is The Shepherd of Herman's in the Pauline tradition or more in the James the just tradition or ebi tradition so I would say it's much more in the James the just tradition and so it's definitely in the tradition of like Matthew as well in other words of of communities early Christian communities that are also um uh that are also both keeping to Jewish law they're not protected not keeping kosher in the way the later the rabbis later prescribe it but it's what what's going on for early Christians in the

(1:26:27) first and early second centuries and so forth that much of the Jewish law they're keeping and then also um and also in the same way that we get from the the James Ian tradition where there is way less emphasis on um on Jesus as the Christ even though you know maybe or maybe because James is is Jesus's brother uh and and so instead we are thinking way more about this this kind of christological ideas and things like that without having it be a focus on Jesus that's very interesting I think in this text

(1:27:02) um and so and so I think that there is some overlap between that and the and the jamesian tradition um so we've got Johnny Lincoln uh said could I Define what the word similitude as used here is defined as so um so a similitude in this particular case would be a um like an allegory a metaphor a in some cases it's being used as a synonym for a parable but it's not really a parable it's more of an allegory because um in all these cases the the author uh Hermes here what he's doing is he's writing a long um I'm going to say allegory you know

(1:27:50) and because he's later tells you whatever one of the things that in it are so a parable um of Jesus for example Jesus is Parables proper um they they don't have any particular meaning the Lord is in the in the of the vineyard or whatever isn't always the Lord it does not necessarily what it means or um in the case of the of the prodigal son so the the father isn't necessarily the father in that case you can read it multiple different ways about who's who's who and who's what in that story because it's a parable it's causing you

(1:28:22) to um to just think in different ways and to engage in a dialogue with the author in this particular case these similitudes I think are um since the commentary is probably also written by the guy who is writing the allegory it's probably more or less an allegory and what he's meaning to have it mean is what he's saying it means when he gets to the dialogue with the angel so um Stephanie ceresi asks what did the word saint mean when Paul is using it or when the um or when the um uh Shepherd of Hermes here is using it

(1:28:59) Hermes is using it so there's no Catholic saints when he used the word did he coin the term so so yeah what it's meaning here is we don't have the word Christian and all at least necessarily yet and so um he's meaning it for uh the way I tend to use the word uh disciple which I tend to mean um which I would mean to mean church member the word essentially uh means like a person in Greek it means holy or set apart or consecrated and so what what Paul what Paul is using it he's saying that you who are been set apart as members of the Christian Community you who are set apart or made holy in that

(1:29:39) way um and so that's the saint so it doesn't mean what it later comes to mean so what it means later they refer we refer to the Saints uh and when we think about the early members of the Apostolic Church they're called Saints because they underwent persecutions in some cases they were uh they were executed for their faith and so unfred to the lion since it is and that kind of a thing and so as a result um as later Christianity developed they were seen as intercessors that you could it's being too removed maybe from even

(1:30:17) from Christ or certainly from the Creator you could maybe pray to a saint that has given their life and is now at among the blessed in the heaven you could pray to them you could get their attention and they could put in a good word with with Christ or with God or something like that and so that's how the the development of the veneration of the of the Saints comes about and that's how we start to think of the Saints which just originally just means the church members um as being these especially holy people and specifically like angelically holy and so forth people who are angels who

(1:30:51) are performing Miracles and things like that um and not angels in the sense of the original judeo-christian sense of the of the uncreated people who beings who are separate from humans that's the traditionally what an angel means but people who are with the angels that are actually human spirits um copper mcbratney says regarding the parable of the slave in the vineyard I'm baffled by how poorly the parable illustrates the intended meaning and how the text goes on to say so is it it is like the gnostics where uh is it like the gnostics where it's reading a secret reading into an orthodox story

(1:31:36) I have not heard any explanation where we're talking about that so so in other words when I was reading the authorship uh studies that all the different Scholars had I have not heard where anybody is making the case that The Parables or the similitudes or something like that existed first and then the commentaries and dialogues have been written around them I think everybody um uh believes that the is written by the same author and so in that case yeah it's um it's a it's a question about why it's so convoluted I agree with you that I felt that that was a um especially strange to make the the

(1:32:18) character in the parable of the Son of God be the Holy Spirit and then have the servant in the parable be the Son of God I think that that's very that's uh that's very strange so um I'm not sure why I mean the person maybe is like trying to have that idea of a parable that you like you say that's like the gnostics where you're maybe um trying to maybe obscure knowledge as much as as putting into mythology so maybe something like that Andre B Moray says regarding the VIN Vineyard parable a joke is not good when you have to explain it do you think the same applies

(1:32:59) to this there is too much explanation because The Narrative of Mythology is not quite good that I agree with you and that would be my that would be my complaint too so I was saying that I think that I could see why um there's some people and there's some Minds that really like this stuff and so I think that sometimes um you know somebody could go and write let's say an entire allegory of World War II where you're talking about you know you're calling the uh you know the the British or The Lion and the Americans or the you know there's different one eagle and another in a bald eagle and there's a bear and and so

(1:33:37) on and you're talking about what they do and you and you make everything mean something that happened in a very detailed like an overly detailed overly wrought and uh metaphor or allegory and then um and then you have to go through and describe what everything in the allegory means um there are some very elaborate allegories that that became pop top works of literature I'm thinking of like the Pilgrim's Progress is a it's a crazy elaborate allegory that became one of the most popular uh books of uh early modern times so so I think that sometimes that

(1:34:16) can be popular with people and so this is maybe why this is so popular but I sort of agree with you that if you have to explain a joke it's not a good joke if you have to explain allegory it's not that great an allegory and that I prefer um instead of a allegory that has a distinct meaning that you have to kind of explain to everybody oh that's what it means kind of thing I prefer a um a parable that doesn't have only one meaning but actually uh is a something that makes you start to think so that that engages you and and engages you with further thought

(1:34:53) faithful asks is Hermes a creative amalgamation of the anthropomorphic Converse Style of conversation between job and the angels with zoroastrian influence um so what I would say is that yes we we're starting to have this not necessarily job but I mean that could be one of the influences here we're starting to have uh you know uh this um literary style of the dialogue and so we can see the dialogue that happens in job so job is um you know people have suggested that you know we've had a whole lecture on this that it's actually a composite of a bunch of different texts but part of the

(1:35:37) text is that it's a it's a a crafted philosophical dialogue in the same way that Plato writes philosophical dialogues and so um this is maybe in the same kind of uh uh format and The Shepherd of Hermes being written in Rome uh being written in Greek also is aware and has lots of interactions with the uh Greco-Roman inheritance as well and so in addition to talking about all these Christian ideas it is also talking about for example the um the Sybil of Kumai which is a a pagan Roman Oracle and so forth so it is aware of this sort of

(1:36:28) um um Greco-Roman this Hellenistic conversation style of a dialogue and it's and it's like that um so it's probably more the Hellenistic influence than the zoroastrian influence but in any event is part of that um same kind of conversation Style uh Roan Wagner asks is there any other books by Hermes no so these are these are all the Hermes books and they're all put together as one as one book uh it's a lot of books because there's again the the Visions the the Commandments and the similitudes but they all kind of go together or or maybe

(1:37:05) there's an original book and there's additions to it fast flakes says if we added certain books to the Canon would we break it um yeah maybe so I mean that's it I would say right now one of the things about the Canon is we have a lot more books in the Bible than most people regularly read um I really in our church I think the only the only text that we take uh particularly seriously and like read the whole thing through or the are the gospels and acts and I feel like the we just mine the letters and things like that for quotations and people hardly look at Revelation anymore and that's

(1:37:49) kind of a thing so so this is why I was saying I don't really think it's you know whether a book is in the Canon or not there's a lot of books that we hard you know that are in the Canon that we hardly look at anymore and uh uh and so do all of these other books that are early need to be canonized um we could we could we have the ability in our church to canonize them if we want to uh I think that in some cases in order to do it we have to have a we have to have everybody be on the same page and and approaching the canon in a sophisticated way because the problem with it is that

(1:38:26) if several diverses have I'm sorry several of the texts have verses that are really problematic um lots of early Christians are worried about um about social Norm issues that are uh that are you know rooted in the first and second centuries that are therefore um rooted in this time period when they're focused on uh the spiritual has to renounce the Flesh and so they're really worried about sex and and so forth uh obsessed with it in a unhealthy way uh there are all kinds of you know things that are denigrating or controlling of women and you know other kinds of things that we have to be you know cautious of in these

(1:39:15) texts and if you included them in the Canon then there'd be another verse for somebody to quote out of context we already have a lot of those so in some ways the the danger isn't too important but that's something that I would just be thinking about if we were adding to the Canon uh Dan Howard thank you so much for your support I appreciate uh that Taylor ape asks isn't Jesus parable on the tares and wheat and Hermes on the weeding saying the opposite sure absolutely so except for but you depending on how you're reading it most people read the parable on the Terrors and wheat as

(1:39:53) um as that they're all that these are all people so most people read that and then and then they uh and then it's all harvested up together and the the tears are all burned and so in other words and the and the weed is put into the greenhouse and so in this particular case the parable we that's only one reading a lot of people read that Parable the terrorism wheat that way but that's a reading um in this particular case in Hermes the the weeds are are your sins and so it doesn't um so it doesn't mean the same thing because because what we're saying is that the servant Christ is is actually

(1:40:29) weeding the the sins of the people which is the vineyard um uh and removing sins and so in other words that's the that's the solving salvation of what uh what Christ or what the Son of God is doing for us and so in that sense it would it doesn't have the same meaning at all although you know on a Surface reading um the the parable of the of the wheat and the tares is don't weed anything we'll let we'll let it we'll work it out later you know and so forth uh so anyway they both have agricultural metaphors or agricultural um Parables using those same imagery but

(1:41:06) saying different things um Nomad asks do we know what your uh The Shepherd of Hermes has written and so we don't like I said it has to have been written sometime before 170 when um uh uh people irenaeus has a whole copy of it it's possibly um from the middle second century I think is the most common date maybe around uh 140 or so in its most recent format some of the reconstructions suggest that the earliest parts were written earlier than that there's a bunch of like I say weirdness about this text that makes me kind of feel like it's earlier but it's certainly let's say

(1:41:49) early second century and it has to be written before by 170. uh that Unitarian asks um Hermes seems like a catechism uh is it fair to say it's written to help people figure out how to structure uh Christian Life post Apostles post-apocalypticism like other Apostolic fathers so um you're you may well be that case and so certainly that's how it's used as at least that's how it's described so when so many of our earliest uh Church fathers the early Christian authorities that are talking about it they say this

(1:42:28) is being used in the churches to teach new Christians about Christianity so it's being used like you're saying as kind of a Christian training and even though it's not scripture or some of them wanted to say well it's not going to be scripture but we can still use it for that because it's very useful for that so you are not the only person who in reading this makes kind of had that impression because it certainly was being used for that purpose in the first and second centuries uh isvan says in some why was this left

(1:43:00) out of the New Testament in some I would say that uh it is doesn't have uh it doesn't have an Apostolic name attached to it so it's definitely not written by an apostle and that was really important as a criteria a Criterion well even though it is a false Criterion so so I think that that's one of the most important criteria of creating the New Testament and it was ended up being the one that they got the got the least and so because it's not one of those I think that that's you know if I was going to you know bring it

(1:43:36) down to one summation that's it but the other things that it had going against it included just like we just read this very um weird christology uh is it is it adopt is it support maybe adoptionism lots of the Proto Orthodox or fighting adoptionists off and they don't want to have any um anything that can support uh that christology and likewise um this there's a very mixed tier view of how what's the relationship of the logos or the Son of God and and the Holy Spirit in this and so that's probably just too confusing uh all around so

(1:44:17) thank you so much I hope you have enjoyed kind of our deep dive into what was maybe a pretty obscure text but I think an interesting one and it's interesting also because of uh what it teaches us about early Christian diversity