The 100-Foot Beast an Early Christian Saw in Visions (Shepherd of Hermas)

**Dom Bettinelli** (0:00)
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You're listening to episode 432 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about the Shepherd of Hermas. I'm Dom Bettinelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Akin. Hey, Jimmy.

**Jimmy Akin** (0:31)
Howdy, Dom.

**Dom Bettinelli** (0:33)
Folks, be sure to stay around for the end of the episode. We'll have your feedback on our recent episode, number 421, What Mary Knew, God's Choices, Autism and Names on the Afterlife, and more patron questions. But first, there's a book that Early Christians read in their churches right alongside the Gospels. A number of the Church Fathers quoted a scripture. A famous Early Bible even bound it right in after the Book of Revelation.
It was written by a former slave in Rome named Hermas, who said an angel dressed as a shepherd came to live with him in his house.
In it, an elderly woman who turns out to be the Church shows him a great tower being built, and a 100-foot-long beast comes rolling toward him out of a cloud of dust. And its great theme is something that worried a lot of early Christians. Whether you can be forgiven after you've already been baptized. So what exactly is the Shepherd of Hermas? Who wrote it? Why did the early Church love it so much? And if it's not in our Bibles, what should we make of it today? That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. So Jimmy, this is the latest in our occasional series on lost scriptures. Books that some Christians once treated as scripture, but most today have never heard of.

**Jimmy Akin** (1:54)
Yeah, and The Shepherd of Hermas belongs in that same series. We've looked at several similar books before. We did that for the Book of Jubilees in episode 319 and the Book of Enoch, and in particular its Book of the Watchers in episodes 323 and 324 We covered the Ascension of Isaiah in episodes 332 and 333, and the Life of Adam and Eve in episodes 346 and 347 Then we did First Esdras in 364, and a brief look at some of the Lost Gospels way back in episode 5
The Shepherd is a little different than most of these, though. A lot of the Lost Scriptures we've looked at are associated with the Old Testament, like Enoch and Jubilees. But The Shepherd is a Christian book that was written after the time of the apostles, and for a while many Christians considered it one of the New Testament scriptures.

**Dom Bettinelli** (2:52)
The Shepherd is one of a group of early Christian writings that scholars call the Apostolic Fathers. What kind of book is it?

**Jimmy Akin** (3:00)
Well, for one thing, it's surprisingly long. It's built out of three different kinds of material, which are grouped in three sections. The first section is a series of five visions. The second section concerns twelve mandates, which are visions connected with commandments. And the third section is ten parables, which are also called similitudes, and their visions concerned with these parables. Today we're going to be focusing on the visions, the first section of the book.
The Shepherd is what's known as a Christian Apocalypse, though it's in the same general family as the Book of Revelation. We talked about Revelation in Episode 408, so people can look up that episode if they want to go deeper on that genre. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokaloupsis, which means unveiling or revealing, hence Revelation.
An angel basically pulls back the curtain and shows Hermas things that he couldn't otherwise have known.

**Dom Bettinelli** (4:00)
The book is named for its central human character, a man named Hermas. Who was he?

**Jimmy Akin** (4:06)
We can say a fair amount about him. The book is very personal. It's kind of like a spiritual memoir, and it reveals a good bit about who Hermas was. He tells us he had been a slave. He was sold as a young man to a Christian woman named Rhoda in Rome, but he was later freed, and that most likely happened at or after his thirtieth birthday, because in 84, the Emperor Augustus proposed a law which became known as the Lex Aelia Centia that required slaves to be thirty or more years old when they were freed if they were to become Roman citizens. The Romans wanted to reward loyal slaves who did good work by allowing them to become citizens, but they didn't want citizenships being handed out like candy, so they wanted the slaves to prove that they deserved citizenship by their service before they were thirty years old. And then they could be freed and become full Roman citizens, which was something most subjects of the Empire did not have. Because back then, not everybody was a citizen. It was a special privilege. That's why it was so special that St. Paul was a Roman citizen, and he was able to use his rights as a citizen to defend himself in legal contexts. Hermas also became wealthy either before or after he was freed, because poor people didn't have the money to buy papyrus, which was super expensive. I mean, every sheet of paper had to be handmade.