- mate date of its composition circa A.D. 140, and suggests
another author. Modern scholarship, however, considers that the work in question passed through several redactions, the first belonging to a yet earlier date. If this, as is probable, be the case, then certainly considerable portions of the little volume of the "Shepherd" belong to the reign of Trajan, and possibly to the period of the episcopate of Clement of Rome.[1]
But whether we adopt for the composition of the writing the year 140, or thereabouts, or with Duchesne and Harnack the earlier date of portions of the writing (the last years of the first century), there is no doubt whatever that the work containing the "Visions," "Commandments," and "Parables" of Hermas (generally known as the Shepherd) was accepted by the Christians of the second century as a treatise of very high authority. It was publicly read in the congregations along with the canonical (to use a later term) Scriptures, without, however, being put on a level with these sacred writings.
Gradually though we find its authority diminishing, sterner spirits, like Tertullian, misliking its gentle and compassionate directions in the case of the reconciliation of sinners, theologians too, who in the first years were less positive, less precise in their dogmatical definitions, soon began to see how speculative and even wild were some of the statements and definitions of the Persons in the Godhead. Thus the work became less and less an important piece in the arsenal of Christian theology. S. Jerome, for instance, openly flouts it when he writes of the Shepherd as "Liber ille apocryphus stultitiæ condemnandus." Others, however, of the highest authority in the Church in the third and fourth centuries, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius, seem to have ever held the Shepherd in great veneration.
The high place it held in the early Church is shown by its appearing in that most ancient MS. of the Holy Scrip-*
- ↑ So Harnack; Duchesne, in his Histoire ancienne de l'Église, vol. i. p. 225 (published 1908), generally adopts Harnack's conclusions respecting the early date. Lightfoot (vol. i. p. 360, Clement of Rome) also leans to the conclusion that the Clement of the Shepherd is the illustrious Bishop of Rome. This would postulate the earlier date for parts of the work.
