An Apocryphal text from the New Testament?

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things, Dan?

Dan Beecher They're going. We're rocking and rolling.

Dan McClellan Getting out of here.

Dan Beecher We're having a good time, and I am looking forward to this one. We got an Is It Canon today, and we're going to be talking about... It is a book that I have never heard of, and I assume that most of our viewers have also never heard of it, so I'm pretty excited to dive into it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Let's just jump in with Is It Canon? And the book that we're talking about, The Shepherd of Hermas?

Dan McClellan Of Hermas.

Dan Beecher It's a Shepherd, H-E-R-M-A-S.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Because Hermas is not a shepherd himself.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher So Hermas is, apparently, if we're just going to take it at face value, a former slave. A slave.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher A person who was sold into slavery, and to a woman. Is the name of the woman Rhode? Is that what I'm reading correctly?

Dan McClellan You can transliterate it a few different ways, but Rhoda is how I usually see it.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, maybe we give a little broad, 30,000-foot view before.

Dan Beecher Oh, fine.

Dan McClellan Because verse one, we can look at verse one and get an awful lot of data here.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But Hermas is the main character. And then the shepherd of Hermas is a figure that comes in as kind of the spirit guide, the psychopomp- Yeah ... if you will, to kind of lead the second two-thirds of the book.

Dan Beecher The Ghost of Christmas Past, I feel.

Dan McClellan Basically, yes. "Come in, man, and know me better"- Yeah ... is what the shepherd famously doesn't say. But this is a fascinating text that I think more people should know about because there were an awful lot of people who thought this text was canonical in early Christianity- Okay ... for the first couple of centuries.

Dan Beecher So situated in time.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher When was this written?

Dan McClellan It was probably written, I think scholars would say you've got to cast a pretty wide net just because a lot of things are not clear here, but I think some scholars would say the earliest it was written was probably somewhere between 70 to 90 CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then the latest, maybe around 150 CE.

Dan Beecher So situated well within the range of other books that are definitely canon.

Dan McClellan Yes. There's significant overlap between the compositional window for The Shepherd of Hermas and several other texts that end up making it into the canon.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And we see folks who treat it as inspired scripture. In fact, the Clements of Alexandria, in his Stromata, repeatedly cites The Shepherd of Hermas, and here talks about how some of the stuff was inspiration. He's talking about this, "Therefore, it is in a divine manner that the power which spoke to Hermas by revelation," and Rhoda, the church, the woman, is this power he's talking about. "By revelation said, 'The visions and revelations are for the double-minded who ponder in their hearts whether these things are or are not.'" So this is an influential early Christian who says, "This is inspired," and goes on to quote it a number of times. You have other folks who seem to treat it as inspired scripture. It is included in Codex Sinaiticus.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is one of our earliest, if not our earliest, codex that contains more or less the entire New Testament, and it included the Epistle of Barnabas, or the Letter of Barnabas, and then at the very end, The Shepherd of Hermas. And you have others who quote part of the first chapter of The Shepherd of Hermas, which talks about creating things from things that are not, as evidence of creation ex nihilo, although that's not really what it is.

Dan Beecher Oh, really? Because when I read it, I was like, "Oh, that seems pretty clear."

Dan McClellan But it's not what's going on, and we can talk a little bit about what's going on there- Okay ... when we get to that passage. But, yeah, it was debated. You have other folks like Tertullian coming in at the end of the second century CE, who say, "Nah, this is not really canonical." Origen thought it was inspired, but doesn't include it in his list of New Testament texts. Eusebius treats it as one of those secondary texts. So it almost has kind of an apocryphal status, but by the time you get to the end of the fourth century and the actual firming up of a canon, it gets left out.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So when it comes to the New Testament, the two texts that came the closest to being included but were ultimately left out were the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas. So this is as close as you get to a New Testament apocryphal text that a lot of folks thought should've been in there.

Dan Beecher I will say it reads a little differently than a lot of the other texts.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I mean, it starts out with a story about seeing a girl naked.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher And moves on from there.

Dan McClellan You could just label it, "Let's get weird," because it gets really weird. And it's divided up into three books.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the first book is usually referred to as the Visions, and there are five visions, ranging from one to seven chapters each. And then the fifth vision is really an introduction of the second book, which is the Commandments, and there are 12 commandments. And then the 12th commandment introduces the third book, which is the Similitudes. And the Shepherd gets introduced when we move from the Visions to the Commandments, and the Shepherd kind of shows up, and is like, "The lady is clocking out, and this is now night shift. I'm up, so I'm taking over." But also, I think the name Hermas drops off at that point as well.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan We don't hear about Hermas after that, but Hermas is narrating the story. And we can go to verse one of the first vision, and you mentioned that he was sold into slavery. It starts off, "The one who raised me sold me to a certain Rhoda at Rome." And so we can say a few things about this. "The one who raised me," he doesn't say my parents.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And what's probably going on here is that this Hermas was probably an orphan or left out for exposure or something like that. And so they would've initially been raised by somebody who probably would've treated them as an enslaved person. I was going to say, yeah.

Dan Beecher I just assumed that he was born into slavery.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I think most scholars would say if we had to choose, we would probably say he was orphaned or exposed or something like that. Somebody picked him up and said, "Cool, got a kid.

Dan Beecher Free kid."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then, if they did not use Hermas as slave labor when he was growing up, they sold him as slave labor. And then it goes on to say, "Many years later, I became reacquainted with her and began to love her as a sister." And so many years later makes it sound like she must have either manumitted him or- Yeah ... sold him off again. And somehow he got free and then suddenly runs back into her or something.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And feels this sisterly love for Rhoda.

Dan Beecher Sisterly until one sentence later.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then, "After some time," so we're skipping ahead a lot, "After some time, as she was bathing in the River Tiber, I saw her, gave her my hand, and brought her out of the river. Seeing her beauty, I thought in my heart how happy I would be if I had such a wife, both in regard to beauty and manner. I wanted only this, nothing more." Now, I mentioned to you before we started recording, I have seen nutria swimming around in the Tiber. I would not trust a person coming out of the Tiber River. Certainly wouldn't be like, "Here, take my hand."

Dan Beecher Wow. I might throw a robe- The Tiber was nicer back then.

Dan McClellan I'm sure it was somewhat nicer. But they still occasionally dug somebody up and burned their corpse and threw them in the Tiber. Just kidding, that's from centuries after that.

Dan Beecher But, yeah.

Dan McClellan That's a questionable river in my experience.

Dan Beecher Okay. Dan does not trust the Tiber.

Dan McClellan But yeah, he's walking along and he's like, "What's this? A naked lady? Oh, it's Rhoda, my former master, and then someone I loved in a sisterly manner, who suddenly I have a certain kind of feeling for- Yeah ... a few feet below my head." Anyway, moving on.

Dan Beecher I mean, yeah. The version that I've been looking at- Mm-hmm ... is slightly different than yours. But yeah, it is interesting because the wording that I see is, he thinks to himself, "I would be a happy man if I could but get a wife as handsome and good as she is."

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Which seems to me as purely innocuous a thought as a human being can have seeing a beautiful woman nakedly emerging from a river.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That feels like as pure of a thought as you can have, or as non-sexual a thought as you can have.

Dan McClellan What it makes me think of is, "Wow, that sure is a pretty lady down there. I wonder if she dates one of the Yankees." I don't know that reference, but- You don't know that reference?

Dan Beecher Okay, then.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher Oh, I got it.

Dan McClellan I think I- Oh, you got it now?

Dan Beecher Is it Chris Farley? Yeah, it's Chris Farley.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Anyway, but it is not an innocuous thought- No ... that he had.

Dan McClellan Because- It turns out it's a highly problematic thought ...

Dan Beecher turns out he is in trouble- Yes ... about this thought.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And we obviously don't have time to go through this whole book.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher It is a very long book. But yeah, he has a vision.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Do you want to just quickly explain- Yeah ... what the vision is and- Yeah.

Dan McClellan So he gets sleepy and he's like, "You know what? I've got to confess my sins." So he's praying, and he has a vision, "Heaven opened, and I saw that woman upon whom I had set my heart greeting me from heaven with, 'Hello, Hermas.'" "Looking up at her, I said, 'Lady, what are you doing here?'" "But she answered, 'I was taken up in order to reproach you for your sins before the Lord.' I said to her, 'Will you- "Now reproach me?" "No," she said, "but listen to what I am about to say to you. The God who dwells in the heavens and created what is from what is not, and increased and multiplied it for the sake of God's holy church, is angry with you because you sinned against me."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So he's like, "Uh, what are you talking about?"

Dan Beecher He says, "I've always been real nice to you. What do you mean?"

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then, it says, "Laughing, she said to me, 'The evil desire arose in your heart. Do you not think it is an evil thing if an evil desire arises in the heart of a just man? It is a sin, a great one.'" So basically, he did wrong in jonesing for- Yeah ... for her Tiber water-drenched form.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And she's there. She has been taken up, and is there to call him to repentance. Yeah, he gets chewed out a little bit, and we have this interesting... Then suddenly, the lady's really old.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And here, the lady is kind of representative of the body of the church, the church community, and where the sins that have beset the church community have aged the woman. And then later on, she's rejuvenated because there is repentance that is going on.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so, there's an awful lot of finger-wagging about repentance going on in these visions. The visions are intended to help people feel bad about themselves. But there's also a concern to build the triumphant church and kind of establish the community of believers and distinguish them from the reprobate men of the world. So, Hermes is kind of chastised and has to figure out what's going on here and has to be a part of the good ones.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I guess one of my questions is, if the woman is actually a metaphor, if she is the church or whatever- Mm-hmm ... who is Hermes? Presumably, also a metaphor.

Dan McClellan What- I think it's probably just a metaphor for the hearer or the reader.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Right. Put yourself in Hermes' shoes. Surely, you have lusted after a woman you have drawn from the waters of the Tiber, so- Right.

Dan Beecher Who hasn't?

Dan McClellan You can read yourself into Hermes' shoes.

Dan Beecher So, yeah.

Dan McClellan And then in the fifth vision, which is taking place three weeks later, we get the introduction of the angel of repentance, who has come in the guise of a shepherd.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And the shepherd might be symbolic of Jesus. But here's something interesting. The name Jesus and the title Christ are never mentioned once anywhere in the entire text.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But we do have this angel of repentance who is like a shepherd, who basically delivers to Hermes the commandments, which take up the content of the second book. And these commandments are commandments about faith in God, avoiding evil speaking, giving alms in simplicity. Basically, we're getting back to the rules for the church, kind of similar to when we talked about the Didache, where there were a bunch of rules that- Mm-hmm ... the apostle can stay two days, but on the third day, that means he's a bad dude, and you've got to get him out of there. And there's an interesting one that is actually the source of some of the opposition to the canonization of The Shepherd of Hermas, because there were some early church fathers who treated The Shepherd as a wicked book, as an adulterous book- Oh ... because there is instructions for a Christian husband who has divorced his wife because of adultery. If she's committed adultery and he's divorced her, it instructs him to reconcile and forgive her and remarry her if she repents.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is at odds with the ethics of many of the Christians of this time period who said, "No, that's the end of the story." "The one thing that merits divorce is adultery. And so, to take back an adulterous wife is to advocate for adultery." And so, this is one of the reasons that there were some Christians who condemned The Shepherd of Hermas, is because it advocated for forgiving a repentant, formerly adulterous woman.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, that comes in one of the commandments.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The other commandment, other topics within the commandments are things like honesty and sexual purity- Mm-hmm ... and not slandering people. Just sort of nice standard things.

Dan McClellan Yeah, pretty run-of-the-mill sets of commandments.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then we get to these similitudes, and there's an interesting one that came up recently in a video that I did where somebody was asking about what the first similitude means when it says, at one point, it talks about wealth and what you're supposed to do with wealth.

Dan Beecher Mm. And it says instead of- Hoard it like a dragon.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Like a troll under a bridge.

Dan Beecher That's right.

Dan McClellan You've got to hoard that stuff. Well, what the first similitude says is, "Instead of lands, therefore buy afflicted souls according as each one is able, and visit widows and orphans, and do not overlook them, and spend your wealth and all your preparations which you receive from the Lord upon such lands and houses." Now, the question here is what does that mean, buy afflicted souls?

Dan Beecher Yeah. There's an argument that has- It's an especially weird construction from a book that starts out with slavery.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher A book that starts out with, "I was sold to someone."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It feels like a weird metaphor to say, "Go out and buy souls."

Dan McClellan Well, and the author never says that was a bad thing.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The author was just like, "Yeah, the one who raised me sold me, and then a little while later, she did it for me big time."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's odd. And so there is an argument that has been made that this is talking about buying enslaved folks to manumit them, which would sound like a condemnation of the practice of buying, selling, and owning other human beings, enslavement.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan I don't think that's what's going on here.

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's not how I interpreted the idea.

Dan McClellan Yeah. There are a couple interpretations that I think would come first. Because there is no practice known from early Christianity of purchasing enslaved folks, even just enslaved Christians- Yeah ... in order to free them. As far as we know, that never happened. There were folks who would go around and pay fines in order to free people from prison.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan So kind of more in the vein of, "I was in prison, then you visited me." Kind of the true religion of James. The idea of buying afflicted souls would mean to pay to free imprisoned souls.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So that's one thing that it could be about. Another thing is that it could be just a poetic way to refer to general charity, because immediately after it says, "Visit widows and orphans."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And orphans and widows are kind of your standard symbols of the poor and the needy. These were the canaries in the coal mine of social justice. And so the idea may just be, "Hey, if you've got wealth, instead of buying up land, go spend it on helping the poor, and the needy, and the widows, and the orphans, and the foreigners, and the oppressed."

Dan Beecher Yeah. When I read that phrase, that afflicted souls phrase, to my mind, what it meant was you're buying them out of their affliction. You know what I mean? Go pay for them to no longer be afflicted.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You have the means to help them.

Dan McClellan And I think that's probably the best reading, or at least the intended sense that's probably sitting closest to the surface. I think the idea of imprisoned people paying for them to be freed, that certainly could work here. But I think both of those would take precedence over understanding this as a condemnation of the practice of slavery or an advocacy for paying to manumit enslaved folks, which if it was done at all, probably would've just been limited to Christians.

Dan Beecher I'm just going to brag a little bit and say that my ancestor, Henry Ward Beecher, used to buy people out of slavery and free them.

Dan McClellan Very nice.

Dan Beecher That's a Beecher tradition- ... but probably not a Hermas tradition.

Dan McClellan What time period was this?

Dan Beecher That was right during abolition, right before the... This was Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe- Right ... who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher A lot of really cool Beechers right around that area.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Very nice.

Dan Beecher Around that time.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's a great heritage. And I have family, my mom actually wrote a historical fiction book about it. We have a family that ran one of the stations on the Underground Railroad.

Dan Beecher Boom.

Dan McClellan So yes.

Dan Beecher So we're the cool white guys.

Dan McClellan We need to sign off now.

Dan Beecher And we're done. And we've ruined everything.

Dan McClellan All right. But yeah, we've got 10 similitudes. A lot of them have to do with fasting.

Dan Beecher Similitudes are just like parables, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And one of them is, "The vine is supported by the elm, so is the rich man helper or helped by the prayer of the poor."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So yeah, there are these similitudes that are supposed to do kind of the same things. We had a bunch of commandments, a bunch of thou shalts.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And now we're giving you a bunch of parables to help further kind of cement the idea that you should be a good person. And a lot of it has to do with alms giving. A lot of it has to do with maintaining the integrity of the Christian community. A lot of it has to do with being just, protecting the poor and the innocent from the unjust, and all of that kind of stuff. So ultimately, it's really advocating for... It's kind of constructing an early Christian communal ethos and ethical system, even though it's going about it in weird ways.

Dan Beecher Yeah. This feels a little like it was written by John of Patmos' better-adjusted brother or something.

Dan McClellan Still not all there.

Dan Beecher Still weird.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But not apocalyptic.

Dan McClellan Just be nice.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan If you're not familiar with it, it is worth a read.

Dan Beecher It's interesting, yeah.

Dan McClellan Just so you can get a sense. Because a lot of times when we reconstruct what early Christianity must have been like, we're really just taking our own experiences and kind of using them as the skeleton for trying to understand these things. Read this text and you will understand just how alien early Christianity should be to you.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan This is one of the more popular texts that just barely missed out on being canon, and it is a weird one. So, yeah, it is an alien world.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I'm guessing you would swap this out for Revelation if you were going back in time to try to influence the- Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan In a heartbeat, yeah. If somebody said to me, "If a naked lady came out of the tire, distributing swords," and said, "You get to swap out Revelation for one of these books," I would most likely take "The Shepherd of Hermas," depending on what books were available.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But certainly over Revelation, yeah.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Well, there you have it, friends. Thanks so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of keeping this show rocking and rolling, and keeping us and our families fed, you can go and join up and be a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get the after party, which is bonus content that Dan and I do every week. You can force us to answer your questions as a patron, and we will do it. So please consider becoming one of our patrons. If you can't do that, that's fine. Go out and give us five stars on the various places that you can do so. Share an episode if you think that this would be interesting to somebody that you know, or your Facebook feed or whatever. We always appreciate a share. And thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. Thanks to you for tuning in, and we will talk to you again next time.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.