The Shepherd of Hermas is an early Christian book of visions, commandments, and parables, written in Rome between roughly 90 and 150 AD by Hermas, a freed slave. Its revelations arrive through two heavenly figures — an elderly lady who turns out to be the Church herself, and an angel of repentance dressed as a shepherd — and its great theme is the second chance: whether a Christian who fails after baptism can be restored. For two centuries it was among the most widely read books in Christianity, and it came closer to entering the New Testament than almost any other work finally left out.
The Shepherd is not an obscure text that scraped along the margins. Irenaeus cited it as scripture; it sits, bound in with the New Testament, in one of the oldest Bibles in existence. This guide covers who Hermas was, what his strange and tender book says, how near it came to the canon, why it fell away — and what it shows about everyday Christians in ancient Rome that no other book quite does.
The Shepherd of Hermas is a Christian apocalypse — a book of revelations — but unlike anything else in the genre. Where the Book of Revelation deals in cosmic warfare and the Book of Enoch in fallen angels and heavenly journeys, the Shepherd's revelations concern household matters: money, honest speech, troubled marriages, and whether a believer who has stumbled can begin again.
Its author introduces himself with disarming candor. Hermas was sold as a slave and brought to Rome, where he was bought by a woman named Rhoda; he later gained his freedom, married, raised children, and prospered in business — by his own admission, not always honestly. He was not an apostle, a bishop, or a scholar. He describes himself as a man who talks too much, struggles to be patient, and worries constantly about his family. That ordinariness is the book's signature. It is also enormous — longer than any single book of the New Testament — and divides into three parts: five Visions, twelve Mandates (commandments), and ten Similitudes (parables). Scholars date it to between about 90 and 150 AD, many concluding it grew in stages across those decades.
The book opens with an unforgettably human scene. Hermas sees his former owner Rhoda bathing in the Tiber and helps her out of the river, and a thought crosses his mind — how happy a man would be with such a wife. Nothing more. But later, drifting into a trance on the road, he sees Rhoda appear from heaven and accuse him: the passing desire itself was a sin, and he must pray for forgiveness.
While Hermas is still reeling, an elderly lady in shining garments appears, seated in a great white chair, holding a book. Hermas takes her for the Sibyl, the famous pagan prophetess. He is wrong. She is the Church, he is told — created before all things — aged because the spirit of believers has grown old and tired. Across the visions that follow she becomes steadily younger: as repentance renews the church, her face, then her body, then her whole bearing turn youthful again. It is one of the loveliest allegorical devices in early Christian literature.
Two further visions carry the book's central images:
In the fifth vision the book's namesake arrives: a man in shepherd's clothing — white goatskin, a bag on his shoulder, a staff in hand — sits down beside Hermas and reveals himself as the angel of repentance, assigned to live with him for life. This shepherd dictates everything that follows.
The Mandates are the shepherd's commandments, and they read like a moral handbook for people with jobs, spouses, and tempers. Believe that God is one. Speak the truth — Hermas is stung when the shepherd observes that his business dealings have not always met that standard. Be patient, because ill temper drives the divine spirit out of a person. Give simply to everyone in need. Test anyone claiming to prophesy by how they live — humble and quiet, or taking fees and giving oracles on demand?
Running through all twelve is Hermas's favorite vice-word, dipsychia — "double-souledness," the divided heart that half trusts God and half doesn't. And at the center, in the fourth mandate, sits the teaching that made the book famous and contested at once: a believer who falls into serious sin after baptism has one — exactly one — further repentance available. To modern ears that sounds severe. In the second century, when some teachers held that grave sin after baptism could never be forgiven at all, it was heard as mercy.
The Similitudes are parables the shepherd shows Hermas rather than tells, walking him through each image and questioning him about it. Three stand out:
The tenth similitude closes the book quietly: keep the commandments, cleanse your household, and the shepherd will stay under your roof.
All five Visions, twelve Mandates, and ten Similitudes in clear modern English. Members read free.
Get The Shepherd of Hermas →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryCloser than almost any book that was finally left out. The evidence is striking:
Then there is the Muratorian fragment, the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, conventionally dated to the late second century. Its verdict on the Shepherd may be the most revealing sentence in the history of the canon: the book was written recently, in the fragment's own times, by the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome — and therefore, while it ought indeed to be read, it "cannot be read publicly to the people in church." Read it at home; just not from the pulpit. The Shepherd was, in effect, the first officially recommended non-biblical book.
The honest, history-framed answer has two parts — and neither involves suppression.
First, the date. As the church formalized its canon, one criterion mattered above almost all others: a New Testament book had to come from the apostles' generation. The Shepherd, as the Muratorian fragment noted, was written well after that — and everyone knew it, because the book never pretends otherwise. Hermas claims no apostolic credentials at all. A work could be admired, edifying, even quasi-inspired, and still fail that test. The Shepherd did.
Second, the repentance controversy. The book's central teaching — one further repentance after baptism — landed in the middle of the early church's fiercest pastoral debate. Rigorists thought it far too lenient: around 200 AD, Tertullian, arguing that adultery after baptism could not be absolved, dismissed it with contempt as a shepherd of adulterers. Later generations, building more structured systems of penance, moved past its one-chance framework from the other direction. A book at the center of a live controversy made an awkward candidate for a canon meant to settle arguments.
So the Shepherd was reclassified rather than banned. Eusebius, cataloguing Christian books in the early fourth century, placed it among the disputed works — while noting it was still read publicly in many churches and used to instruct beginners. In 367 AD, Athanasius's famous Easter letter, the first document to list exactly the 27 books of the New Testament, named the Shepherd — alongside the Didache — as not canonical but appointed by the fathers for reading by newcomers to the faith. Not scripture, not heresy: recommended reading. Once it lost its place in worship, though, scribes gradually stopped copying it — the quiet fate that met most of the books that fell outside the canon.
Because Hermas was neither a theologian nor a leader writing for posterity, his book preserves what almost no other early text does: the texture of everyday church life in Rome within living memory of the apostles. In its pages you meet wealthy believers embarrassed by their poorer brothers, leaders squabbling over precedence, deacons who embezzled funds meant for widows and orphans, hospitable bishops, doubting Christians, and families — like Hermas's own — strained by a faith that could cost everything in a persecution.
The low-to-the-ground perspective shows in other ways. The book never quotes the Gospels by name; its one explicit citation is from Eldad and Modad, a Jewish book now completely lost — a reminder of how much wider the ancient bookshelf was than our surviving one, a theme explored in our guide to the lost books of the Bible. And its language about the Son of God is warm but unsystematic, written generations before the councils standardized theological vocabulary — precisely why historians treasure it as evidence of how ordinary believers actually spoke.
For all its ancient popularity, the Shepherd had a narrow escape. No complete Greek copy survives. Codex Sinaiticus, recovered from an Egyptian monastery in the nineteenth century, preserves roughly the first quarter; a fifteenth-century manuscript from Mount Athos supplies most of the rest; papyrus fragments fill gaps. The final chapters exist only in ancient Latin and Ethiopic translations — every complete edition today is a reconstruction. For a book once more common than some Gospels, it is a sobering illustration of how completely a text fades once it stops being copied.
If you want polished theology or apocalyptic fireworks, this is not that book. If you want to overhear the early church talking to itself — about money, doubt, failure, forgiveness, and what to do when a baptized believer wrecks their life — there is nothing else like it. It is the closest surviving thing to the voice of an ordinary second-century Christian, and it is unexpectedly moving: an anxious freedman being told, at length and with patience, that he and his troubled family can start again.
A practical path: read the five Visions first — short, vivid, and carrying the story of Rhoda, the lady, the tower, and the beast. Then go straight to the parables of the elm and vine and the willow tree, the book's finest. Save the long ninth similitude and the Mandates for a slower second pass. And read it in modern English; the Victorian translations in free circulation are accurate but heavy going. From there, the wider world of early Christian writings outside the canon — what scholars call the apocrypha — opens in every direction.
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