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The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata
From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon
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2023
Summary
Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as 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. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2023
ISBN-Print
978-1-6669-2186-1
ISBN-Online
978-1-6669-2187-8
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
338
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
List of Tables and Figures No access
Preface No access
Acknowledgments No access
A Note About Style No access
Introduction No access
The Shepherd of Hermas No access
Initial Christian Approval of the Shepherd No access
The Contested Usefulness of the Shepherd in the Third and Fourth Centuries No access
Passing the Test? No access
Constrictive Trends Forging Fourth-Century Christianity No access
Athanasius of Alexandria and the Four Constrictive Trends No access
