The Neighborhood Podcast

Hermas, The Shepherd, And How A Parable Shaped Early Christian Debates

• Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

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Presenter: Rev. Dr. Kit Schooley

A vineyard without hedges. An angel who sounds like Christ. A slave who weeds beyond the brief and is named co‑heir with the son. We dive into The Shepherd of Hermas, a wildly popular early Christian text from Rome that many congregations cherished but the canon ultimately set aside. Across visions, mandates, and parables, Hermas wrestles with a problem the young church felt in its bones: how do ordinary people live free of sin after adult baptism is treated as a final crossing?

We start with the history—how the text spread in Greek, why its silence on Jesus’ name and the resurrection puzzled later readers, and what that reveals about the concerns of communities between 100 and 150 CE. Then we unpack the famous vineyard story, mapping its characters and symbols: the master’s absence, the faithful slave, angels as stakes, sins as weeds, commandments as dishes sent from the feast. By setting Hermas beside Isaiah’s lamenting vineyard and Mark’s violent tenants, we trace a striking evolution from failure and rejection to formation and hope. No tower. No hedge. The field lies open, and holiness looks like patient work that blesses others.

Along the way, we explore why Hermas nearly made it into the New Testament, how Eusebius and Athanasius shaped the canon and the Trinity debate, and why this “wordy” book kept winning hearts anyway. The payoff is both historical and practical: a window into Rome’s pro‑Israel posture and a template for spiritual growth where obedience, initiative, and generosity confirm our calling. If you’re curious about early Christian literature, canon history, or how moral life takes root in community, you’ll find a rich guide here.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share this episode with a friend who loves early church history, and leave a review with your favorite insight from the vineyard.

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Setting The Stage In Rome

SPEAKER_02

Let's begin. I'm trying to figure out where in my notes I am at 25 minutes through the session. I can remember in college a class that would start 25 minutes late was a thrill. Because it was only going to be that much shorter. So let's see what we can get done. Maybe we go to 5 after 12, is that alright? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Or 10 after 12.

Dating And Transmission Of The Shepherd

Why It Stayed Outside The Canon

Sin, Repentance, And Adult Baptism

Angelic Guide And Coded Christology

The Vineyard Parable Read Aloud

Tracing The Parable From Isaiah

SPEAKER_02

Don't give me too much liberty. I'll take it. So we arrive at Hermos and his angel the shepherd, and we are in a place we've never been before in this month of these. We are in Rome. We are in the West. We're no longer in Israel. We're no longer in Syria. We are no longer in Africa. We have arrived. Where the church will arrive about 300 years later, arrived in force after Constantine decides that there's going to be a Bible and so forth. But we're here in Rome, and if you've only read the very beginning of this writing, you realize we're also going to have a personal testimony. Think of the New Testament. Any personal testimonies in there? No. No. But we're going to have someone who actually goes on and on and on. He has created a document that he probably revised four or five times in his lifetime. It comes in three parts. You saw that probably somewhere. The first two parts are about confession and about sin. And then the last part is this kind of fascinating parable, which we'll take most of our time on today. Looking at how this parable began in the Old Testament, flowed through the New Testament, and then Hermos here does his own take on this parable. Most of us have heard a lot. But let's go back and say a little more about this whole document before we get to that. This document is dated probably the year 100 to the year 140. It probably wasn't finished until after 140, but it comes in many different, it comes in two Greek versions, the Koine Greek that the New Testament was written in, and then later on, some 40, 50 years later, we have found it in the more, shall we say, modern Greek, the modern Greek of the year 150. So it was established almost throughout the entire Christian world. You may not remember the name from what we did in October, but Athanasius, the bishop of Carthage, or Alexandria, depending he was deposed and then brought back again. It was Athanasius who first argued when Constantine tried to set up the Bible, Athanasius argued that we had to have a tripartite God, a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Athanasius campaigned for this book to be not in the Bible, but to be kind of a separate section that if you were going to become a Christian, you had to read all 27 books, and then you had to read these seven more. Some of these on here you may recognize, you've probably heard of some of them, not all of them. But just think, in order to join the church, you had a lot of reading to do. Now we're talking about the year 350 or so. You had a lot of reading to do, and there weren't libraries scattered everywhere, so getting this reading done probably took you several years because you had to wait until some of the items were passed on to you from somebody else who was also planning to join the church. So it was quite an intellectual process to become a Christian, at least in Athanasius kind of sense of how you would do it right. Okay, so we have these seven writings, none of which we've taken a look at except for the last one on the list, The Shepherd. It was one of the most widely circulated documents in the entire Christian world. Most Christians had seen it. That would, of course, make it a candidate to be included in the New Testament, but it had a couple of problems, and we'll get to those in a minute or two. Many regarded this document as sloppy, imprecise, not well focused, having a God in which he did sort of magic, God did magical things, and then also, if you were read through enough, you may have stumbled across that as far as Hermos was concerned in the year 140, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit were really the same thing. So we had God the Father and God the Son with the Holy Spirit. So we only had a two-person God. But we're only in 140. We haven't arrived to the later, the later arguments that Athanasius pushed that we should have a three-person God. Alright. Some claim that Hermos, this guy, was the brother of Pope Pius I. Pius was the tenth Pope. He was Pope around the year 140. And so here we have Hermos, who starts out at the very first line, says, I was sold into slavery, yet his brother is the Pope. I don't see how anybody can explain that. It makes, it sort of boggles the mind, doesn't it? But it tells you sort of the status of the Christian world at that time. Pope Pius in Rome. Rome was not the center of the church. He was supposedly the head of the church, but the church was more in Constantinople. So we have a period that most of us can't imagine. A period in which there's not this kind of uniformity. There's not this kind of order structure for the church. We're in the Wild West of the Church, except in probably the Wild East. The question of whether in, well, so then the other thing about this document, the document is mostly about confession of sin. And Hermas starts out with the fact he was sold into slavery. He had this owner who was, what? A woman. Very interesting. This woman was his mistress, I guess the word would be. And Hermos is told by this owner that he's got a lot to account for because he's pretty heavily washed over in sin. And so most of this writing is about the way sin works and about repentance. The other thing that you have to kind of factor in is we're in a period where there is no infant baptism. All baptism is of adults, and all baptism is understood to be kind of the final act. You have arrived. You are now free of sin. And whatever age you're baptized at, from that moment until you die, you are to remain free of sin. Think of that task. All of us, no more sin allowed. Sorry, you've all been baptized, and now you just have to be very upright. And so Hermas goes on this constant search for how he and his community can be taught to be free of sin. It's quite a job. And he perseveres, you might say. So this document is divided into three portions, probably three sections of Hermos' life. The first section are these visions. You don't have all of these. I didn't, it's a hundred pages long. I wasn't going to do that. But there's a bunch of visions, starts out, that's the beginning of the document you have. And then the middle of the document are the orders, the mandates, how you are to stay free of sin. And then finally, we get to the, I'm not sure how you pronounce this word, the similitudes, the parables. Is similitudes the right way in English? Is that an English word? Okay. I feel relieved. The writing's main concern then is how to get free of sin and how to teach the local congregation to do that also. The thesis is that life can only be improved by conversion and then changed behavior. Well, that's not so unique to us. We understand that kind of part of conversion. Baptism turns you into somebody you weren't before. Interestingly, in this document, there are things that don't occur. The word Jesus never occurs. The word passion never occurs. The word death never occurs. The word resurrection never occurs. Probably this is the fact because, let's leave Jesus aside for a minute, those were not issues the church had wrestled with yet. Of the death and the resurrection, the whole sense of how resurrection was simply had not been settled. You had all kinds of notions of whether Jesus was or was not resurrected. If he was resurrected, what happened to his body? You're familiar with all these questions because they've gone through your head too. But the church was not focused on that. The church was just focused on getting cells, cadres, groups organized and set. And the first issue evidently the young church faced was the issue of sin. And so this document is a sort of reminder of where the church was in, let's say, the year 150. The other thing that's true of this document is that in great contrast to everything else we've talked about before, we are now in a pro-Israel setting. In Rome, they saw themselves as formerly Hebrews and now Christians. The Hebrews were not to be criticized. The Hebrews were to be seen as, you know, our forebearers, that we all were Jews at one time and now we've come to be Christians. The other things we've had a look at, we're trying to get away from this whole Jewish business, partly because even by the time this document is written, there are no more Jews coming in. The Jews have come to a kind of agreement that this Christian business really is not an extension of Judaism. It's an incorrect way to go. And if you choose to be Christian, you're not welcome in the synagogue. So in the West, things are very different than they were in the East. Alright, let's see if there's anything else that my brain did not conjure here. So we're coming now to this great middle portion where God sends an angel. God has done a lot of angelic things in this writing, but he sends Hermas an angel to get him through this whole struggle about how to go from a sinful life to a pure life, whatever the quick word would be, an Orthodox life. And this angel is going to give him assignments and so on and so forth. And if you've read the middle section of this, there's a lot of struggle where Hermos talks to the angel and he doesn't understand what the angel is saying. And of course, the angel is a sense God's voice. You know, communicating with one of God's chosen Hermas. When I said there is no reference to Jesus, well there's no word Jesus in there, but this angel is meant to suggest that the angel is Jesus' voice. Now why Jesus never, his name never shows up is a mystery to me. But we have in here in kind of coded language all the names we would have expected to have found. It's just they come with a different language. There's this angel who you're supposed to think of as Jesus rather than, well, as a as somebody from God, that would be Jesus, wouldn't it? But we've always distinguished Jesus from angels. Well, here we don't have that distinction. Angels are what is kind of part of the parlance of this culture. This angel is called the most holy angel, you may have remembered. So Hermas is a storyteller. And Hermos, the question is, is he a biblical thinker? Does is his writing worthy of being selected for one of the, what turns out, 250 years, 220 years later, what turns out to be the 27 chosen? Well, it's not chosen, and the suggestion was Hermos was just a little wordy. A hundred pages. Could you imagine somebody having to sit down and copy a hundred pages in order to pass it on for another person to read? It's just kind of wild. Needless to say, it would take a while. Probably only the four Gospels were as well read and understood and kept and known. Alright, so let's go to this final section because that's what I want to take the time of today. This is the fifth parable. I will give you all the rest of the fifth parable. And this parable is the parable of the vineyard. But this vineyard has different characters in it. The slave is who Jesus. The vines are the people. The plants, the stakes, pardon me. We'll get to the plants in a minute. The stakes that hold up the vines are the angels who hold up God's people. The weeds, and there's a lot about weeding in this parable. It goes on and on and on. It's a lot about weeding. Well, it would, because the weeds are the sins that grow amongst the vines. Then we have the food, the dishes, are the commandments. And finally we have the master who disappears for a long period of time. The master is God. And when the master comes back, that's judgment day. So we have this absence of the master of this vineyard. He goes away, and when he comes back, it echoes stories from the New Testament. When he returns, that's when the judgment happens. So that's the parable. I'm becoming aware that I didn't give you the parable. Did I? No. Oh well, yeah.

unknown

Similarity. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

So what I want to do is maybe I should read you the parable.

unknown

Let me see. Let me see.

Mark’s Version And Its Failure Theme

Hermas’ Hopeful Turn And No Walls

SPEAKER_02

A certain man had a field and many slaves. And he planted a certain part of the field with a vineyard. And selecting a faithful and beloved and much valued slave, he called to him and said, Take this vineyard which I have planned, stake it until I come, and do nothing else to the vineyard. Attend to this order of mine, and you shall receive your freedom from me. So the slave will be given a whole life if the slave does the right thing. The master of the slave departed for a foreign country. When he was gone, the slave took, staked the vineyard. When he had finished the staking of the vines, he saw the vineyard was what? It was full of weeds. He then reflected, saying, I have kept this order of my master. I will dig up the rest of the vineyard, and it will be more beautiful when dug up. He took, therefore, dug up the vineyard, rooted out all the weeds that were in it, and that vineyard became very beautiful and fruitful, having no weeds to choke. After a certain time, the master of the slave. Of the field returned and entered into the victory that seeing the vines were suitably supported on stakes, and the ground, moreover, dug up, and all the weeds rooted out, and the vines were fruitful, he was greatly pleased with the work of his slave. And calling to his beloved son, who was his heir, and his friends who were his counselors, he told them what orders he had given that slave and what the slave had performed, and they rejoiced along with the slave at the testimony which his master bore before. And he said to them, I promised this slave freedom if he obeyed the command which I gave him, and he has kept my command and done, besides the good work to the vineyard, pleased me exceedingly. In return, therefore, for the work he's done, I wish to make him co-heir with my son, because having good thoughts he did not neglect them but carried them out. With this resolution of the master, his son and friends were very well pleased that the slave should be co-heir with the son. A few days later the master made a feast, sent to his slave many dishes from his table, and the slave receiving those dishes that were sent, took them what was sufficient for himself, and distributed them amongst his fellow slaves, and his fine still greater favor with his master for having so treated them. His master heard all these things that were done, greatly pleased. And the master called together his friends and his son, reported to them the slaves' proceeding with regard to the dishes he had sent. And they were more satisfied that the slave should become co-heir with the son. Alright, I gave you three separate pages. One has a short passage from Jeremiah. Another one has a short passage from one of the Gospels. And then the third one has a part of the passage from Herman. Now, one of the great criticisms of this writing was that it was just not very Christian. And probably until the 20th century, it was seen as a kind of just useless writing. And then for reasons I don't understand, in the 20th century, scholars started to fall in love with it. And one of the parts they fell in love with was this parable we just read, because they could trace this parable from the Old Testament through the New Testament. It's almost as if that was this parable we've just read was an improvement on its predecessors. So let's have a look at its predecessors. We're starting with Isaiah here. And if you wish, if you're at a table, you can take these pages and simply. I couldn't figure out how to do this in one page. That's my computer skills are limited. So if you just sit them down sort of one after the other, you can see how this story grew. Start from the one marked table on Isaiah 5, 1, and 2. They're mixed up. Well, let's pause. And let's not have this weeds in here with the vineyard. I take it some of you don't have an idea. Oh, you don't have anything.

SPEAKER_01

Last week we ran out early on some of those.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I handed them all out last week. And I only made I'm trying, I've gone through two reads of paper of the church just to do this.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, is that the first one? Good. So that's Jared.

Popularity, Wordiness, And Exclusion

SPEAKER_02

I'll read the Isaiah passage and then the other two get longer, and we'll just do differently with those. But here in Isaiah, maybe the year, I don't know, 580 before the Christian era, Isaiah writes this, the fifth chapter. I will sing now to the beloved, a song of my beloved concerning my vineyard. My beloved had planted a vineyard in a high and plentiful place, and he set up a hedge around it, and set with stakes, and planted with choice vines, and built a tower in its midst, and built a wine press in it, and he waited for it to produce grapes. But it produced. So that's the genesis of this story. Let's just tag several of these elements so we can remember them as we move along. What's the same, right? What are the parts that are the same as the one we've just read from Hermos? We have a master, master, field, we have a field, a slave, band, stakes, vineyard, stakes, weeds. But then we have flowers. Well, weeds. But we have a tower, right? The tower being for maybe watching over it, like guarding it, maybe. But it doesn't produce. So we the couple of things in Isaiah that we aren't going to find as we move along are this tower and the failure of the lines. Okay? So that's where anybody that was going to take this story, that's what they had to begin with. Let's move on now to its first kind of revision, which we find in Mark. Mark writing in about the year 70. Mark clearly having read Isaiah. Here's a story about Jesus, or I mean, how did any of the gospel writers get their information? We really don't know, although we'll look at it next week. But somewhere Mark came up with this story or took the Isaiah story and rewrote it. We'll never know. But Mark's story, you have Mark before you? Let's just, I'll ask you to read through it and let's talk about the things that show up in Mark's story that weren't in Isaiah, or the things that, you know, the other way that aren't in Mark that were in Isaiah. Have a look at this five verses.

SPEAKER_01

A lot of killing.

Eusebius, Athanasius, And The Trinity

SPEAKER_02

There seems to be another important quality here, the killing, the disobedience. The fact that this vineyard sort of fails, right? It falls down. What else strikes you about?

unknown

Well, say a little more.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, he, you know, he lined up what the Jewish people had done to Jesus, basically. And the prophets.

Intertestamental Books And Reception

Teaser: Next Week’s Gospel Of Thomas

SPEAKER_02

So you see that killing is an illustration of, well, Hermos would call it sinfulness, but an illustration of the kind of political part of the story. And it's about failure. I mean, the whole thing altered and went bad. Now keep in mind, Jesus, according to Mark, Jesus is telling this story. And so what's Jesus' point? It's a point Jesus makes constantly in the Gospels. Why is Jesus telling this story about the failure of a vineyard? What do you suppose? Jesus is always on about how he isn't recognized. Only later will the disciples get it. The parable seems to fit Mark's theme of Jesus was, dare I say it, a voice crying in the wilderness, quoting Isaiah. So we have a parable in Mark that fits Mark's, wherever Mark got the image of Jesus, it fits the image of Jesus that Mark is proposing. So we move from that a kind of failed vineyard that doesn't have a tower, just by the way. And then let's look at Hermos, who's taken most of those elements and come out in a completely different place. We already read what happens. I mean, it gets in the Hermos story that the slave who is freed has become the co-inheritor of the vineyard. It's become sort of equal to Jesus, equal to the Son. Well, if you are in a way of seeing the world that suggests that once you're baptized, you're perfect and you'll be perfect for the rest of your life. That's pretty close to Jesus. So you sort of start to get a sense of where Hermos is going. But what do you see in Hermas versus any of the others? What strikes you about the way he's done that? There's no hedges. There's no hedges. So maybe the kingdom's open to all. Oh, isn't that interesting? There's no walls, there's no dividing. Yeah. Yeah. The vineyard's a safe place. You're saying they don't need any hedges to keep things. You don't need it. Yeah. Because the world or the the faith and the people of faith have created a world. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any other thoughts? So these twentieth century scholars that fell in love with Hermos claim that the reason they're in love with it is because of its picture of Christ. His picture of how Christ, the Son of God, would finally be seen for who he was compared with Mark's story, is nobody really thought much of him. They went and killed him. So we have this kind of interesting evolution of the gospel's telling us a story of this minority despised, often killed group of people following this Messiah. To Hermos' story about how everybody can make it. Everybody can be Christian and they will all be seen as Christ-like. And the world will, use Martin's words, the world won't have these walls, these boundaries. Being a person of faith is not a dangerous thing. Of course, we all know that's not true because the Romans were, depending on who was the emperor, the Romans were making a sport of killing Christians. And this went on for a couple of hundred, almost 300 years. So the Hermas story is also a little naive, maybe, innocent. And we're in Rome, where the killings always began. So that's even kind of more striking. This is a very complex writing. It's not always very sophisticated, and it's very wordy. It's like the preacher who goes on too long. I've known a preacher or two like that. I live with one.

SPEAKER_03

Not big.

SPEAKER_02

Oh no, she's not the preacher. So it's it takes a while to get through, and I think that's one of the reasons it never made it into the New Testament. There's just too much there that is kind of coded language. And it brings up the fact that one of the things I think that turns out to be brilliant about the 27 books that were chosen is almost all of them still work. They still apply. These stories in here, probably it's hard to sort out what the antecedents are. What was going on under the surface that made these writings be so contemporary to their times, so meaningful to their times. I mean, they were just constantly praised, but they have flaws, and the flaws kept them out of the New Testament, and maybe it's just as well. Because in some ways this is useful and interesting writing, but in other ways it you kind of get lost in it. It kind of meanders and suggests images that we aren't familiar with. Of course, I mean let's say it. There's a lot of images in the New Testament we aren't familiar with, and it takes a lot of work to sort out what is really being said here, so that's not so unusual. But this is probably more coded, more obscure than pretty much most of the stuff in the New Testament. Of course, there were a couple books in the New Testament that were always, I mean, talk about coded. How about we choose the book of Revelation? Talk about coding. Wow, it's really something.

SPEAKER_00

So this parable, the last we looked at is the positive reinforcement. The one in Mark is all the negative things. You know, you go too bad, you could, you know, you're in trouble.

SPEAKER_02

Well, if if you're the only member of a local congregation that has this document and reads this parable to the congregation, there's hope. You know, we might make it. In this world that, you know, we're trying to understand and you know, learn from the from whatever writings we have available. Yeah, it's a very hopeful thing. And if you want to read the other eight or nine parables, they're somewhat the same way.

SPEAKER_03

I mean, if you ever wanted, I have the hundred-page version, but this one was very this it was very popular, you said was you well known about this.

SPEAKER_04

So when it was left out, was there any reaction uh by the kind by the congregations about why did you leave out this so popular book for us?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, yes. But it and it was among several that were left out, the congregations got upset about. Uh so as I understand it, there was no one that kind of rose to a point where they had to say, oh, maybe we should have included it. Uh none of them rose to that. But what you see here is some books that are in the Intertestamental, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Dicay. These aren't so easy to find. But these almost made it. They almost made it more than Hermos almost made it. And part of that is because local congregations lobbied. But in the end, it wasn't democratic, and we didn't take a vote. Constantine said, okay, you have six months to sort out which are going to be the ones, and the folks that were leaders made that decision. Eusebias being the one that made that decision. Maybe an interesting thing that I have learned recently. There are two great voices, Athanasius and Eusebias. Eusebius was the one that Constantine picked. He said to Eusebias, you get it together, you produce a book. And Eusebius did. But one of Eusebius's. How's that one right? Um, was that we would have a Godhead made up of God and then of Jesus. So what's missing there? Athanasius' notion of God was we have had God, and we would have Jesus, and we would have the Holy Spirit. So interestingly, the one who finally determined the 27th was not a Trinity. But Athanasius, these two, Eusebius and Athanasius, were kind of mortal enemies. They argued about this all the time. So Eusebius gets to pick the 27, but Athanasius' notion of a Trinitarian God triumphs. Interesting. Just fascinating. So, yeah. Alright, five after 12. Some of these lesser books, though, made it into the Catholic Bible. Yes, those are the intertestamental books. So they raised to a level almost at the 27. Some more than others. And the ones you recognize are the ones that got more votes, so to speak, got more appreciation, and more lobbying from local congregations. Let's call it a day. Let me talk about next week. The documents are back there. Next week we come to probably the most fascinating document we'll look at. It's 113 sayings comprised by somebody who was named Thomas. This document this document was found in a cave in Egypt in 1945.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_02

And the material I've handed out to you has the front page. It talks about how it was discovered, what happened to it, how it got to us. So it is 113 sayings. About 85 of them are directly quoted in the Gospels. Yeah. So what I've given you is maybe 20 of them, 24 of them, with the particular gospel passage that it resembles. What I'd like to do next week is have you read through these. Pick a couple that you're just fascinated by for whatever reason. Either the way it models the gospel or the way it changes the gospel. And we'll talk about as much time as we have. We'll talk about an hour's worth of them. Maybe we can do six or eight. And talk about how mostly Matthew and Luke revised these sayings. These sayings are thought to have been written before Matthew and Luke wrote the Gospels. In other words, the theory is Matthew and Luke had this document. They had it. Although it wasn't called the Gospel of Thomas. All this is conjecture, but it's kind of fun to just think about that. And we'll look at how these sayings maybe evolved into the Gospels, or maybe these sayings were ruined by what Matthew and Luke did with them. And we can have our own opinions of that because we're not going to change the Gospels. But it's kind of fun to speculate why did they change this word or that word, make the saying have a different meaning, or maybe enhancing the saying to make it even more clear what they wrote in the Gospel. So each one of these I've given you has a gospel passage, one or two verses. Have a look at those. Pick a couple of favorites. We'll talk about them next week. It should be fun. It's fun to kind of get into Matthew and Luke's mind and see why they did what they did. Okay?

SPEAKER_04

I won't be here next week, but I can watch it on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02

You can watch that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Take care. Be good. And be safe free.