The 100-Foot Beast an Early Christian Saw in Visions (Shepherd of Hermas)

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MYS432: There was a book early Christians read aloud in church right alongside the Gospels. Church fathers quoted it as Scripture. One of the most important Bibles ever copied bound it in after Revelation. Almost nobody has heard of it now.

The Shepherd of Hermas was written by a former slave in Rome who says an angel dressed as a shepherd moved into his house and stayed for the rest of his life. In it, an elderly woman who turns out to be the Church shows him a great tower rising on top of open water, every stone in it a different kind of Christian. A hundred-foot beast comes rolling at him out of a cloud of dust. And running underneath all of it is a question that genuinely frightened early Christians: once you have been baptized, can you be forgiven again?

Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli continue the Lost Scriptures series with its strangest entry — the one book on the list that is Christian rather than Jewish, written after the apostles rather than centuries before them, and long enough that if it had made the New Testament it would be the longest thing in it. Longer than Matthew. Longer than Luke. Longer than Acts.

Irenaeus quotes it and calls it “the scripture.” Clement of Alexandria and Origen treated it as divinely inspired. Tertullian liked it, then joined a rigorist movement and started calling it “the Shepherd of the adulterers.” The Muratorian Fragment allows it for private reading and bars it from being read publicly in church, on the grounds that it was written too recently — a claim Jimmy argues is not just wrong but chronologically impossible.

So who was Hermas? The book is unusually personal about him. He had been a slave, sold as a young man to a Roman woman named Rhoda; he was freed at thirty or later, under the law Augustus wrote to keep citizenship from being handed out like candy. He made money and lost it. He had a wife who did not control her tongue and children who had betrayed their parents. This is not a polished theologian at a distance. It is an ordinary, worried Roman Christian who kept getting scolded by heaven.

The episode works through the five Visions in order — Rhoda’s accusation, the little book Hermas copies letter by letter, the great tower, the beast, and the arrival of the shepherd himself — then turns to the question of dating, an argument from how rare the name “Hermas” actually was, and what a modern Catholic should make of a book that so many early Christians took for Scripture and the Church ultimately did not. Jimmy ends with a proposal he says he has never seen anyone else make.

Plus mysterious feedback on whether buzzards really do vomit in mid-air, whether Jesus worked a miracle before Cana, and what the white stone with the new name on it actually means.

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Links for this episode:

Chapters:

  • 0:00:12 – Intro
  • 0:01:44 – The Lost Scriptures series
  • 0:02:52 – What kind of book is the Shepherd?
  • 0:04:00 – Who was Hermas?
  • 0:07:09 – When was the Shepherd written?
  • 0:08:18 – Who called it Scripture?
  • 0:11:14 – The Muratorian Fragment
  • 0:13:25 – How long is the Shepherd?
  • 0:14:11 – Vision 1: Rhoda and the elderly woman
  • 0:22:33 – Vision 2: The little book
  • 0:28:08 – Who is the elderly woman?
  • 0:29:45 – The Sibyls and the Sibylline Books
  • 0:33:29 – Clement, Grapte, and the dating clue
  • 0:35:43 – Vision 3: The great tower
  • 0:43:01 – Why the tower is built on water
  • 0:45:03 – The stones and what they mean
  • 0:54:58 – The seven women who hold up the tower
  • 0:57:56 – A sermon aimed at the rich
  • 1:00:25 – Why the woman grows younger
  • 1:01:00 – Vision 4: The hundred-foot beast
  • 1:08:15 – The four colors of the beast
  • 1:09:24 – Vision 5: The Shepherd appears
  • 1:13:30 – Thank you to Patrons
  • 1:14:02 – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
  • 1:14:45 – Sponsorship opportunities
  • 1:15:29 – Reason Perspective: Dating the book early
  • 1:17:08 – Why the Muratorian Fragment doesn’t fit
  • 1:19:43 – Is Hermas greeted in Romans 16?
  • 1:22:59 – The odds it’s the same Hermas
  • 1:28:41 – Faith Perspective
  • 1:29:22 – Forgiveness after baptism
  • 1:37:42 – Is the Shepherd private revelation?
  • 1:39:52 – Bottom Line
  • 1:41:43 – Further Resources
  • 1:42:25 – Mysterious Feedback: #421 What Mary Knew, God’s Choices, Autism, and Names in the Afterlife
  • 1:42:45 – Feedback: Buzzards really do puke in flight
  • 1:44:07 – Feedback: Did Jesus work a miracle before Cana?
  • 1:45:18 – Feedback: The white stone and the new name
  • 1:47:47 – Feedback: Climate science
  • 1:50:32 – Your mysterious feedback
  • 1:51:06 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
  • 1:51:11 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
  • 1:52:09 – Next Time: Patron questions
  • 1:52:45 – Share the show, write a review
  • 1:52:55 – Get your Mysterious merch
  • 1:53:03 – Show notes
  • 1:53:11 – Become a Patron
  • 1:53:23 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
  • 1:53:38 – Outro

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