Journal of Early Christian Studies

Michael Sviegel and Caroline Buie’s translation and commentary of the Shepherd of Hermas dares to offer a deep dive into a text that scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity often briefly explore before turning their attention elsewhere—due to boredom or confusion, and other times due to a brief expedition in order to mine the text for details related to Christology, history of the canon, or Roman ecclesiastical history. In doing so, Sviegel and Buie offer a robust analysis of the Shepherd that will ideally assuage boredom with the 114-chapter text, clarify points of perplexity, and offer accessible sections of relevant comments for readers who are focusing their attention on particular passages or themes.

Sviegel and Buie’s Shepherd of Hermas is divided into two main sections: a set of introductory articles (3–55), and an intertwined translation and commentary (61–370). Unlike other volumes in the Apostolic Fathers Commentary Series, they note that the Shepherd is too long to be broken effectively into a translation and subsequent commentary. Accordingly, Sviegel and Buie offer comments after each of the five Visions, ten Mandates, and twelve Similitudes that constitute the Shepherd.

The introductory articles have three main foci: an introduction to the Shepherd itself, a discussion of how the Shepherd uses other Jewish and Christian writings, and the theology of the Shepherd. These subsections explore a range of typical topics asked about the Shepherd: its manuscript history, readership in antiquity, canonicity, date, authorship, genre, theology, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Sviegel and Buie provide a history of scholarship on each of these topics, as well as their own stances. For example, they suggest that the Shepherd’s composition was in response to first-century c.e. persecution in Rome (34), as well as follow through with the hypothesis that Hermas was Pope Pius I’s brother to date Hermas’s first visionary experiences to the 90s c.e. (21). The introduction’s strengths are, simultaneously, its potential weaknesses. It rehearses and answers traditional questions that plague Shepherd studies raised by theological and canonical concerns, but it does not explore with the same depth questions that may emerge from social- or cultural-historical concerns: for example, the role of gender or slavery in the composition of or narratives within the Shepherd. Additionally, the brief attention paid in the introduction to the Shepherd’s readership from the fourth century c.e. onward (24–25) may give readers the impression that the Shepherd had petered out of use, although patristic testimony (e.g., Eusebius, Athanasius, Didymus), continued manuscript production in a range of languages, and verbatim adaptation (e.g., Pseudo-Athanasius’s Praecepta ad Antiochum) suggest that the Shepherd continued to be used in ecclesiastical, catechetical, and monastic spaces well into late antiquity. [End Page 482]

The translation of the Shepherd offered by Sviegel and Buie is well crafted and readable. As they point out in their note to the translation (59–60), their tone is informal and “at times, playful.” This comes through in their treatment of the Elder Lady’s description of a self-controlled Hermas as “the straight and narrow” (63) and their translated description of Hermas’s sinful children as “going hog-wild with sexual perversions” (78). One prominent translational choice Sviegel and Buie make concerns pneuma: they translate it variously as “breath” (Mand. 3), “disposition” (Mand. 5 and 10), or “spirit/Spirit” (Sim. 5). They offer extensive justification for these translation choices, as they highlight for readers how this fluid term applies to a range of spiritual characters and experiences internalized within the human body. One point of notable difference between Sviegel and Buie’s translation and other English translations of the previous decades is their treatment of doulos in the parable of the vineyard in Sim. 5. While most English translations of the Shepherd translate doulos as “servant” in reference to those who are subservient to God and “slave” in reference to the unfree laborer in the parable, Sviegel and Buie characterize the parabolic laborer as a “servant” who serves a character labeled as both “master” and “landlord” (250–52). Such translational decisions, while helpful in the subsequent commentary on Sim. 5’s development of and reaction to servant Christologies, may obscure for readers the functions of slavery, manumission, and inheritance both in the parable itself and its multiple layers of interpretation offered by the Shepherd to Hermas.

Finally, Sviegel and Buie’s commentary provides a wealth of resources for readers of the Shepherd. Notably, they pay extensive attention to the Shepherd’s perplexing eschatology and provide charts and excurses throughout (esp. 90, 120–27, 137–40) to guide readers through the different opportunities for repentance and incorporation into a tower that represents the church (the most prominent visionary experience Hermas records in regard to both ecclesiology and eschatology). As part of this heavy emphasis on eschatology, Sviegel and Buie suggest that the Shepherd’s approach to a second opportunity for repentance emerges in response to the emergence of rigorists attested to elsewhere in the Apostolic Fathers (181–82). Additionally, the authors make the case throughout that the Shepherd participates in the Two Ways tradition (alongside Barnabas, 1 Clement, and Qumranic and New Testament writings) in its development of ethical, spiritual, and practical norms. Readers interested in unpacking the Shepherd’s relationship to the apocalyptic genre and to other first- and second-century c.e. Christian literature will find the emphases of the commentary especially fruitful.

Overall, Sviegel and Buie’s Shepherd of Hermas is a significant volume for both students and scholars interested in such a popular yet daunting piece of early Christian literature. The introductory material can be easily paired with sections of the Shepherd and other Jewish and Christian literature for classroom discussions of topics like the development of the New Testament canon, citational practices in early Christian literature, and the potential influence of persecution on writers of Christian texts. The intertwined translation and commentary, likewise, are beneficial for a classroom setting: certain sections of the Shepherd can be assigned in chapter-length portions, and it allows students to engage with a fresh English translation of an often mystifying text. [End Page 483]