The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon

The Shepherd of Hermas was a popular book among early Christians, but it was excluded from the New Testament due to political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives. It is a book meant to guide its readers toward salvation and portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself.

Format: Hardback
Length: 404 pages
Publication date: 15 April 2023
Publisher: Lexington Books

The Shepherd, a mysterious and underestimated book composed in the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, has been a subject of debate among scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized. However, the Shepherd was eventually excluded from the late-emerging collection of texts known as the New Testament. Heaton reevaluates the evidence for the Shepherd's popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture and proposes an interpretation of the Shepherd as a book meant to guide its readers toward salvation. Heaton suggests that the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures was a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. Despite the Shepherd's detractors' success in derailing its diffusion for centuries, its survival today attests to the dissent of many from the church's final judgment about Hermas' text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself rather than principally to his virtues.

ISBN-13: 9781666921861