Collection

The Shepherd of Hermas

Hermas

Written in Rome by a freed slave who was neither cleric nor scholar, this early Christian book records a sequence of visions, moral commandments, and parables given to a householder troubled by his own sins and those of his family. An old woman who is the Church, and later a shepherd who is the angel of repentance, guide Hermas through images of a tower built from living stones, angels of righteousness and wickedness contending in the heart, and a barren vine propped on a sturdy elm. Out of this dreamlike material comes a single insistent teaching: that a Christian who has fallen after baptism may yet repent once more and be fitted into the wall. Anxious, domestic, and strange by turns, it circulated in the early churches as scripture before settling just outside the canon.