arola (a) that the church of his time had corrupted itself, and had become deeply tainted with worldliness; (b) that a time of great tribulation was at hand, in which the dross should be purged away; (c) that there was still an intervening time, during which repentance was possible and would be accepted; (d) that he was himself divinely commissioned to preach that repentance.
Date and Authorship.—Antiquity furnishes authority for three suppositions: (a) the author was the Hermas to whom a salutation is sent in Rom. xvi. 14; or (b) brother to Pius, bp. of Rome at the middle of the 2nd cent.; or (c) contemporary with Clement who was bishop at the very beginning of that century or the end of the preceding. The first may be set aside as a highly improbable guess of Origen. The author shews no wish to be taken for the apostolic Hermas, but distinctly speaks of the apostles as all dead. A forger could have found many more suitable names than Hermas, one of the least prominent in N.T., and of which, except in connexion with this book, there is no trace in ecclesiastical tradition. If our view of the book be correct, the author had no motive for antedating it. His prophecy announced tribulation close at hand and only a short intervening period for repentance. To represent such a prophecy as being already 50 or 100 years old would be to represent it as having failed, and in fact The Shepherd did lose credit when it had been so long in existence. Hermas seems to have thought that, if the worldliness of the church could be repented of and reformed, it would be possible to keep it pure during the brief remainder of its existence. He announced therefore forgiveness on repentance for sins of old Christians prior to the date of his revelation, but none for those of new converts, or for sins subsequent to his revelation. To date his revelation 50 years back would have defeated his own purpose and made his message inapplicable to those whom he addressed. Again the acceptance of the book by the church of Rome is inexplicable if it were introduced by no known person, containing, as it does, revelations purporting to have been given among themselves and to a leading member of their church. If the first readers of the work of Elchesai or of the Clementine homilies asked, Why did we never hear of these things before? these books had provided an answer in the fiction that the alleged authors had only communicated them under a pledge of strict secrecy; in this book, on the contrary, Hermas is directed (Vis. iii. 8) to go after three days and speak in the hearing of all the saints the words he had heard in his vision. Elsewhere he enables us to understand how this direction could be carried out. We learn (Mand. 11) that certain persons were then recognized in the church as having prophetic gifts, and that at the Christian meetings for worship, if after prayer ended one of them were filled with the Holy Spirit, he might speak unto the people as the Lord willed. The simplest explanation how the Roman Church came to believe in its inspiration seems, then, to be that it had previously admitted the inspiration of its author, that he held the position of a recognized prophet as in the East did Quadratus and Ammia of Philadelphia (Eus. H. E. v. 16), and that he really did publicly deliver his message in the church assembly. As the 2nd cent. went on, the public exercise of prophetic powers in the church seems to have ceased, and when revived by Montanus and his followers had to encounter much opposition. The ensuing controversy led the church to insist more strongly on the distinction between the inspiration of the canonical writers and that of holy men of later times, and the Muratorian fragment exhibits the feeling entertained towards the end of the cent. that the list of prophetic writings had been closed and that no production of the later years of the church could be admitted.
But if, as we think, the Hermas of The Shepherd is not a fictitious character, but a real person known in the church of Rome in the 2nd cent., we incline to follow Zahn in relying more on his connexion with Clement than with Pius. Zahn places The Shepherd c. 97; but if we assign that date to the epistle of Clement we ought to allow a few years for that letter to have obtained the celebrity and success which the notice in Hermas implies. That notice need not necessarily have been published in the lifetime of Clement, for Hermas is not instructed to deliver his message immediately, but only after the completion of his revelations, and this may have been after Clement's death.
Are, then, any indications of date in the book inconsistent with such an early date?
There is much affinity between the leading ideas of Montanism and of the book of Hermas, especially as to the fall of many in the church from the ideal of holiness. The question was asked, Was it possible to renew such again to repentance? In both our Lord's second coming was eagerly looked forward to, and a knowledge of God's coming dealings with His church sought for from visions and revelations. But the teaching of Hermas is less rigorous than the Montanistic, and all that is special to Montanism is unknown to him.
Hermas directs his efforts almost exclusively to combating the relaxation of morality in the church; he scarcely notices doctrinal errors, and no reference to Gnostic doctrines can be found in his book, unless it be a statement (Sim. v. 7) that there were some who took licence to misuse the flesh on account of a denial of the resurrection of the body. But these false teachers seem to have been all in the church, not separate from it. In the passage which seems most distinctly to refer to Gnostics (ib. ix. 22), they are described as "wishing to know everything and knowing nothing," as "praising themselves that they have understanding, and wishing to be teachers, though they were really fools." Yet, he adds, "to these repentance is open, for they were not wicked, but rather silly and without understanding." The seeds of Gnosticism had begun to spring up even in apostolic times; but we cannot think that Hermas would have written thus after Gnosticism had become dangerous to the Roman church.
Hermas rebukes the strifes for precedence among Christians (Vis. iii. 9; Mand. ix.; Sim. viii. 7), and it is difficult to find in his book
