Let's Get Weird!

I will say it reads a little differently than a lot of the other texts. I mean, it starts out with a story about seeing a girl naked. Yeah.

Oh yeah.

And moves on from there.

You could just label it “Let’s Get Weird.” Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

It’s a beautiful day. Uh, it’s a fun life. We’re, uh, we’re out here combating, and I feel fine.

Well, that’s, that’s, uh, what more can you ask for?

What more can you ask for? Yeah. Uh, we got a fun show coming up today. Uh, in the latter half of the show, we’re going to be talking about, uh, uh, we’re gonna do an Is It Canon? And no, it’s not. Uh, you’ve probably never heard of the Shepherd of Hermas. But, uh, or Hermes, I think is how it’s pronounced if it’s on a bag. Uh, but, uh, first we’re gonna actually do a, uh, it’s a chapter and verse. We’re just gonna go straight for the first chapter of Hebrews. Yeah, it means a bunch of things. It has implications. I read it and I was— I’ll be honest, I’m not 100% sure what direction we’re going in this conversation. So I’m excited to learn about that. Yeah. So I think we should just dive right into chapter and verse. So here we are in Hebrews 1.

It’s the first chapter. And we should start by saying, uh, or I’m going to start by asking you, do we know who wrote this? What, Hebrews?

We do not. No, there, there have been a variety of propositions, none of them are taken particularly seriously. There are folks out there who think Paul the Apostle wrote Hebrews. He didn’t. That’s not really something to be taken seriously.

This is not a Pauline epistle?

No, no, no, no, no. And some other names that have been thrown out there, Apollos is an early Christian that some people thought, Priscilla or Aquila, this is a couple that’s mentioned in the New Testament. Basically, if there’s somebody who sounds like they fit the bill and has been mentioned in the New Testament, somebody out there has probably suggested they are the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But no, we don’t really have any idea who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews.

And what Hebrews? What? Which Hebrews are we talking about here? Do we, uh, like, all of the epistles are to, like, I’m used to epistles going to the people of Corinth, you know what I mean? Or like a city or a place. Like, I, I don’t even know who the intended Hebrews are in this case.

Well, here the idea is it’s being written to, uh, probably Jewish folks, Jewish Christians. Uh, it is— a lot of the passages that are being interpreted here are being interpreted in kind of a rabbinic style. So, so, uh, but the point is to say that the Christian gospel and Jesus supersede or are greater than what is the Jewish tradition that is being inherited.

Okay. Yeah, that’s actually clear once you read it. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s kind of a letter to people who haven’t caught on yet to the fact that Jesus is awesome. You better, you better get with it. Yeah. And it starts with sort of— it almost feels— I will say this now that since we’re thinking about it in those terms, it feels defensive. You know what I mean? It feels, it feels like it’s like, no, but we— is how it starts.

Yeah. Yeah. And it may be it may be attempting to push back against a Judaizing movement, the idea that followers of Jesus still have to be, you know, fully engaged in the Law of Moses and have to be following all these rules, which is something that, you know, we probably see in the Gospel of Matthew. Some folks think we see it in the letter of James, but this is probably coming in the last 3 decades of the 1st century CE, so somewhere between like 70 and 100 CE. So it’s not the last text that’s being written, but it’s fairly late in the tradition. And whether or not this is what kind of moves the needle the most towards a separation between Judaism and Christianity, I don’t know if there’s a strong case to make for that, but it wouldn’t be particularly surprising. Um, but, but yeah, it’s trying to convince folks that Jesus is the Messiah.

This is the one we’ve been waiting for. This is the one who’s been prophesied, uh, about. If you’re on the fence regarding the identity of Jesus, uh, yeah, Jesus— everything points to Jesus, and Jesus is the man.

So yeah, yeah, uh, it starts out by sort of declaring that God had this Son, and, and that a Son is better than angels. Son trump— it like, we’re building a hierarchy here. Yeah. And, uh, and angels are below. Like, it’s God, and now we’re slotting in Jesus above angels.

Yeah. And, and this is interesting because there’s— there are all kinds of ways that, um, that this speaks to some of what’s going on in this time period and even after. Because you have in this time period, no doubt, but but definitely in the centuries after, in late antiquity, you have angels as kind of intercessors for people to God. You have all kinds of curses and blessings, and you have bowls with text on them, and we’re invoking the names of all these angels. Greco-Roman period Judaism saw this explosion of contemplation of names and missions and personalities and and hierarchies associated with angels. And so they become kind of the mediators between heaven and earth.

And yeah, I remember 1 Enoch going crazy about the angels.

Yeah, awful lot about angels. And the idea here seems to be that, no, we’ve got something better than that. And I was looking at the Greek and I was kind of surprised by some of the alliteration here because Hebrews 1:1, the first verse, it has how many words in it? 5, 10, 12 total words, even including definite articles. And 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them begin with the letter P. So there’s a lot of alliteration. You’ve got polumeros, polutropos, palai, patrasin, prophetais. It is a very kind of— there’s definitely a prose thing going on here. That doesn’t come through in translation. But yeah, you have, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets. But in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he created the worlds.” And so it’s like, yeah, we used to do things with prophets.

By the way, angels ain’t no thing. And you imagine that we would go into talking about why Jesus is better than the prophets, but no, we go into why Jesus is better than angels.

It does quickly pivot. Off of the prophets. Yeah, it does. In verse 3, it’s all about his glory. It says he— this is in reference to Jesus— he is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. Uh, when he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on High. Having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Yeah, and this is interesting because there is a tradition of a head angel who is endowed with the divine name. Yeah. You know, this pops up later in rabbinic literature with Metatron. Metatron is the Adonai Katon, or the lesser Adonai, whose name is the same as his master’s. And you have in, I think it’s Sanhedrin 38b, where a certain heretic comes to Rav Idit and says, hey, in Exodus 24, Adonai says, come up to Adonai. Why doesn’t Adonai say, come up to me? And Rav Idit says, oh, you, you silly heretic, the Adonai in the passage is not the actual Adonai, that’s Metatron. Because— and then quotes Exodus 23:21, my name is in him. Therefore, this angel Metatron carries around the divine name. And so can be referred to by the divine name. And, and we have something similar going on here because it seems to me that, you know, you have in, in the, the hymn in Philippians 2, you have in the Gospel of John, you have in a number of places this idea that Jesus has been given the divine name.

Yeah. And so the, in my opinion, that’s kind of riffing on the name-bearing angel tradition and is kind of borrowing from it. And here the author seems to be saying, “Angels?

Nah.

Jesus has a better name given to him than these silly angels." And so it’s almost kind of appropriating that claim and saying, “No, the angels don’t have the name. It’s Jesus who has the name.” And then you get verses 5 through 14, which I think are going to be the meat of our discussion here. Yeah. Where it’s basically the— this segment is labeled in the NRSV-UE The Son is superior to angels. Yeah. And we basically just get a bunch of quotations of passages from the Hebrew Bible about how Jesus is better than the angels.

And can I just say, when I first read this, I didn’t know where these quotations were from. I had to look it up, but I assumed that they were New Testament quotations because they all sound and they’re all made to sound like they are about Jesus specifically.

Yeah.

And then when I went and looked them up, I’m like, oh, oh no, these aren’t originally about Jesus. They’re just being leveraged. Yeah. In a different way. And it’s a very confusing device to me.

Well, and this is how these passages would have worked in Greco-Roman period Judaism, which was very— and this is even coming after, I think you could probably say Greco-Roman period Judaism over around 70 CE. That’s where the temple is destroyed, and this is coming after that. But in this time period, they’re reading things very messianically, and particularly in the Septuagint. And so anything that seems to have a kind of squishy unknown referent, where we’re not sure who this is, or we might be sure who this is. We’re going to talk about one verse where if you look up the original, it says, “This is who I’m talking about.” Right. And it’s not the Messiah. Yeah. But the things are being reread messianically. And so I think that’s what the author is doing here. According to the tradition that they have inherited, these passages get read messianically, even though that’s not what they were originally doing.

Well, yeah, I mean, the first thing that we find is in verse 5, it says, for, for to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’ And I think I can be forgiven for assuming that that was a New Testament reference.

Yeah.

Where is that? What is, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’?

This is from Psalms 2. Okay. And it’s verse 7, which says, if we go look at the Psalm in the NRSV-UE, it says, ‘I will tell the decree of the Lord,’ or of Adonai. ‘He said to me,’ ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ And this is talking to the Davidic king. And so the idea really is that the king is the one who, uh, is kind of adopted into divinity. Uh, it might be an enthronement idea that on the, the ceremony of, of the king’s enthronement is the, the event of the adoption of the king by God. Uh, there’s, there’s a wonderful book written by, um, by John Collins and Adela Collins, uh, called King and Messiah as Son of God, which reviews how the king and the Messiah could be conceptualized as the Son of God.

And so Psalms 2 is a part of this, plays into it. Yeah. But if you’re reading this messianically, the Davidic king is long gone. There’s no hope of really any return. And so the tradition gets renegotiated and we’re not looking for a human king. We’re actually looking for a Messiah who is coming in the Davidic line. And, you know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you see two different kinds of messiahs. You see the Messiah ben David, the political kingly messiah, and then the Messiah ben Yosef, the priestly messiah. And so Jesus is kind of combining the two because later on in Hebrews, you’re gonna talk about how Jesus is the priest after the order of Melchizedek. Uh, but here we’re appealing to rhetoric that has to do with the king from Psalms 2:7.

Yeah, okay. Uh, I’m still— it’s so interesting, I’m still sort of hung up on this, uh, you know, this Psalm talking about, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” and then later all of the, the, the Jesus stuff being like, “My only begotten Son.” Yeah, it, uh, it— if you’re not reading carefully It’s, yeah, I don’t know. It’s just interesting because the way that the New Testament talks about these phrases or uses these phrases, it’s pretending that these phrases have never been used before.

Yeah. Or, you know what I mean, have not been used in other ways. Right. But yeah, yeah. And you have the whole Son of God thing is also somewhat Greco-Roman. ‘Cause you have, like the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, Mark 1:1, the good news or the gospel, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. And then whether or not the Son of God line is there is a text critical thing. But we have inscriptions, the Priene Inscription, for instance, talks about the good news of the coming into the world of the god Augustus, who is, who is also a son of God. And this predates the Gospel of Mark by almost a century. Um, and so, yeah, they’re— it’s kind of dovetailing the Jewish idea of a king as son of God with a more Greco-Roman idea of an emperor or a king as son of God, and, and kind of, um, treating that idea as encapsulating both of these by elevating the Son of God over both of them.

So, yeah, it’s a renegotiation for sure. And then I think that—.

Go ahead. I was just going to say, presumably within the psalm, there’s no divinity imparted as the Son of God.

That’s an open question. I think there were a lot of scholars who would say that there is a sense in which the king is divine. Now, not the God of Israel. It’s not a Trinitarian notion of divinity, but that there could be a sense in which the king is divine. Certainly, the king was understood to be in some sense divine in the nations around Israel. And as we’re going to see, the king gets called God in another Psalm. So, yeah.

All right. Well, let’s keep moving then. What are we on? 6, Verse 6?

Yeah.

And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, “Let all God’s angels worship him.” Of the angels, he says, “He makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire.” Where are these from?

Well, so first we have “let all God’s angels worship him,” which is an artifact of the Septuagint’s translation of a passage from probably Deuteronomy 32:43. Now, if you look up Deuteronomy 32:43 in a Bible today, it’s not going to say anything about this. But based on the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scroll fragment, we know that the Hebrew originally said, “Worship him, all gods.” And this actually is something that we find in Psalms 97:7. It says the exact same thing, “Worship him, all gods.” I think that Psalms 97:7 is quoting this original version of Deuteronomy 32:43. But when we go into the Septuagint, we have two different versions of the one statement. None of them exactly match, but it has, “Do obeisance to him, all sons of God.” And then, “Rejoice all the nations with his people.” And then it says, “And strengthen him, all the angels of God.”

And okay, yeah, so, so we got gods which then get reinterpreted as either sons of God or angels of God. And then in Hebrews they decide to go with the angels and say, let all God’s angels worship him. So the Son is greater than the angels because the angels have to worship the Son, right? Of course, that’s only if you’re looking in the Septuagint. If you’re looking in the Hebrew, it’s just Elohim. Right. And, and the “worship him” is not directed at the Messiah. In Deuteronomy 32:43, it’s directed at Adonai, the God of Israel.

So this is where it got interesting, because for me, because this chapter repeatedly kind of conflates Jesus with God, or like continually, like kind of, but also speaks about Jesus in very separate terms. So I can understand like this, this is the first time I’ve read something and just been like, I can’t— like, if I were in an argument, if I were imagining an argument between a Trinitarian and a non-Trinitarian, they could both make strong cases from just this chapter, it feels like to me.

Yeah, yeah. And there are an awful lot of people who think of this chapter as like one of the most— one of the highest Christologies in the whole New Testament. But I mean, it is problematic because if we go back to the Hebrew Bible, it’s clearly not talking about any mediator, any Son or anything like that. It’s just the Song of Moses telling all the other gods of the nations to worship Adonai. Right. And when you are reading it in the Septuagint translation, that’s kind of lost. And so the author of Hebrews doesn’t think that it’s talking about that. The author of Hebrews thinks it’s God telling the angels to worship the Son, and that’s just not what’s going on. And then the next verse is, “Of the angels he says, ‘He makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire.’” And this is Psalms 104, which in the translation from the Hebrew, it says, “You make the winds your messengers,” and the Hebrew there is malachav, which is actually his messengers, “fire and flame your ministers.” So how this is relevant to the question of the Son’s relationship to the angels is meh.

Well, it goes on.

So it says, “Of the angels,” he says, “he makes the angels winds and his servants flames of fire, but of the Son,” he says, and then here’s another quote, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and your scepter of righteousness, the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” Yeah. And I was lost. I will admit, I read that and I was like, how is that making a point? I don’t know what the point is that’s being made here.

Well, I think the point is that this is God talking to Jesus in the second person. And so when it says, “Your throne, O God,” this is the Father calling Jesus God. Okay. So this is— Oh, wow. Yeah, all right. Yeah, ‘cause all of these are about what God’s saying. Verse 5, “Did God ever say?

I address my verses to the king. Okay, my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe. And then we have in the second person the psalmist addressing the Davidic king, and, uh, it starts in verse 2. You are the most handsome of men. And, um, and in the Hebrew, this is bene adam. This is the children of humanity. This is— you are the most handsome human, right? So this is not talking about any divine Messiah. Grace is poured upon your lips, therefore God has blessed you forever. Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your glory and majesty. In your majesty, ride on victoriously for the cause of truth and to defend the right. Let your right hand teach you dread deeds, your arrows are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies. The peoples fall under you. Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever. And so here the psalmist is addressing the king and in the vocative case calls the king God.

“O God.” Interesting. And so it’s just Elohim. And this is not to say that the king is the very God of Israel, but to recognize the divine nature of the king because of his position. This is a relational deity, not necessarily— and you know, you have this elsewhere. You have this in Exodus 7:1 where God tells Moses, “I will make you a god to Pharaoh.” And you have other examples of that even in John 10 when the people accuse Jesus of blaspheming because even though he’s a human, he makes himself divine. Jesus says, “Hey, your own scriptures say humans can be gods. Look at Psalms 82 where it says, ‘You are gods.’” If the humans to whom the word of God came can be called gods, you can’t get on my case for saying I’m the Son of God. So you have examples of humans being referred to using divine terms, which is what’s going on here.

And then in verse 7, “You love righteousness and hate wickedness. Therefore God, your God,” has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. And there are ways to reinterpret this, like, “Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.” You could say, “Your divine throne, your throne is of God, and it will endure forever and ever.” And then you’ve got, “Therefore God, your God.” You know, that could be apposition. Therefore the God, your God, that is to say, your God. Right. Or it could be using the vocative again and saying, “Therefore you, God, the God of you, that God up there, the other God has anointed you.” You are the subordinate God to another God sort of thing.

By the way, I should just clarify one phrase that I didn’t necessarily understand. You said this is to a Davidic king. Does that mean just a king in the line of David?

Yeah, I think the idea in the Psalms here is that this is talking about, uh, king in the line of David. This, this would have been written well after, uh, David was alive. Um, but the idea is that David’s— because David’s rule is, um, you know, divinely appointed and, and approved and everything like that, everyone who’s coming in that line is, is a part of the same thing, which is why it doesn’t explicitly name it as only David. But, uh, probably any king who’s operating within that line. Or if it’s written in the exilic period, or at least after the Davidic line was broken, it could be just kind of fantasizing about a Davidic line. Okay. Um, but yeah, so, so when it says, of the Son he says, your throne, O God, is forever and ever, that’s a reinterpretation, right? And the passage did not refer to the king as the very God of Israel. And so we don’t really need to read the author’s quotation of the Septuagint’s version of this as identifying Jesus as the very God of Israel either.

There are other ways to understand what it means to call a human God, Elohim or a theos, and those other ways make more sense of what’s going on here. Because, you know, you would— I mean, the author doesn’t have to go through all these quotations if the author is saying, well, Jesus is God. You don’t need to be like, well, God said Jesus was better than the angels. You can just say, well, Jesus is God. Obviously Jesus is better than the angels because God created the angels and the angels are all subordinate to him.

Yeah, yeah, it does seem like this is— yeah, the argument here is not Jesus is God. The argument is Jesus is below God, but above all the other sort of heavenly beings. Yeah. Or divine beings. It goes on. Let’s see. I mean, it basically goes on from there. The next quote is, it says, in the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth and the heavens. This one kind of took me for a— threw me for a loop. So this is, again, this is the author of Hebrews saying that this is something that God said of the Son. So he says, and basically God said of the Son, “In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.” They will perish, but you will remain.

They will all wear out like clothing, like a cloak you will roll them up, and like clothing they will be changed, but you are the same and your years will never end. So is this saying somehow that Jesus created the earth? Because that’s kind of what I’m reading. What I’m reading is that God is saying of the Son that— and God is calling, at least according to the author of Hebrews, God is calling Jesus Lord and saying, “You founded the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands.” Yeah, this is from Psalms 102.

I’ll just read what we’ve got here, where it’s starting in verse 24. It says, “O my God, I say, do not take me away at the midpoint of my life. You whose years endure throughout all generations, long ago you laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure. They will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.”

And, um, so this is a psalmist speaking to Adonai himself.

Yes, in, in the Psalms, this is definitely, uh, the psalmist speaking to, uh, God. Now let me see if the, the word for Lord there is because in Hebrews it says, “In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth.” And Psalms 102 doesn’t— okay, so in the ancient Greek translation, it includes Kyrie, it includes Lord. That’s not in the Hebrew. Interesting. It just says, “Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth.” Where is that? Yeah. Lefanim, in the before times, the earth you established. So we have Kyrie, which is the vocative of Lord. And so this is not a substitution for the Tetragrammaton. This is just saying Lord in the secular sense, which the psalmist seems to be treating as a reference to Jesus.

And not as a reference to the very God of Israel. And let me see if, um, so when I said, my God, okay, so, um, yeah, it looks like the Septuagint— so in the, in the Hebrew it says, oh my God, I say, do not take me away at the midpoint of my life. And in Hebrew that is Amarti Eli. And Eli means my God. But if you don’t have the vowels right there, you could understand that to be, um, saying, uh, he said to me. Like, the consonants there are identical. He said to me versus, uh, my God I say, uh, or something like that. And, and I’m looking at the, the, uh, Septuagint of Psalms 101:25, and it looks like it says, um, he, uh, he answered him in the ways, tell me the paucity of my days, do not take me away at the midpoint of my days.

Verse 25. Yeah, it doesn’t mention God, uh, in the, um in the ancient Greek. And so we— and in fact, it does have the me, which suggests that the Greek translator has misunderstood Eli to mean to me or something like that. So God has been removed from the original Psalm, and we’re reinterpreting this as a reference to somebody else who, yeah, was founded the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. So it sounds like that’s talking about— the author of Hebrews understands that to be talking about Jesus.

I mean, just the language of it is surprising to me to hear. Like, what’s surprising to me is that the author of Hebrews sees that language and believes that that is God talking. Like, that is not the way that God talks about anybody else. That is very clearly the kind of language that other people use to talk about their god. Yeah, yeah.

And when you’re leveraging the scriptures though, they become kind of this just amorphous source of rhetoric, and you can make it be whatever you need it to be. You know, ripped from its context, it sounds an awful lot like it could be talking about the Son. When you go actually read what’s going on there, that’s not the case. And then verse 13, “And to which of the angels has he ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet?’” And now we’re going back to the Psalms, specifically Psalms 110, the most quoted Hebrew Bible passage in the entire New Testament.

Which one of these is God? Which one is not? But yeah, this is understood as God speaking to Jesus as Lord or the Messiah as Lord, the reality is that the “my Lord” in Hebrew is kind of just a secular way to refer to the king. The psalmist is saying God spoke to my Lord, meaning the king, and said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” And then in the Hebrew it goes on, “The Lord sends out from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes, your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces on the holy mountains. From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you.” And so this is just talking about, again, a Davidic king, and it’s just been plucked from its context, divested of that royal context, and shellacked with a more messianic interpretation that allows the author of Hebrews to say, yeah, this is talking about the Son.

You know what’s gonna—you know what’s gonna be my favorite part of this segment is that people are going to come at us and say, “You’re taking it out of context.” And this is literally about other—about the author of this work taking a whole bunch of stuff out of context. Like, I guess taking Bible verses out of context is a time-honored tradition that even happened in the Bible. Yes, it’s kind of always done.

Yeah, and it’s not even the New Testament. You can go look in the Hebrew Bible and see the Hebrew Bible taking other Hebrew Bible verses out of context. Yeah. To be renegotiating them. And then the final—

But Dan, you’re taking the Bible, the Bible taking the Bible out of context, you’re taking that out of context.

Well, and what frequently gets asserted is that, well, this is inspired. Right. And so whatever they said it meant, that’s right. Yeah. Even if it’s not what was intended in the original context, because they’re inspired, they get to make it mean whatever they want. And then verse 14, the final verse of chapter, “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” Which is just making it sound like angels are subservient, angels are no big thing.

The bellboys of heaven. Really? Yes, yes. All right, well, there you have it. Hebrews coming in hot with a bunch of—with a sort of legalistic take on Jesus’s divinity by misinterpreting a whole bunch of stuff. All right, well, that’s fascinating. I’m interested in that. I think that that’s—it’s always fun to hear the Bible coming in hot with Jesus’s divinity. As misquoted in other parts of the Bible. All right, we’re going to move on now to our Is It Canon? And the book that we’re talking about, the Shepherd of Hermas, of Hermas, of—it’s a shepherd, H-E-R-M-A-S.

Yes. And who is—Because Hermas is not a shepherd himself. No. So Hermas is apparently, you know, if we’re just going to take it at face value, a former slave, a slave. Yes. A person who was sold into slavery. And, and in to a woman—is the name of the woman Rhoda? Is that what I’m reading correctly?

You can transliterate it a few different ways, but Rhoda is how I usually see it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, maybe we give a little broad 30,000-foot view before—Oh, fine, fine. Because verse 1, we can look at verse 1 and get an awful lot of data here. But Hermas is the main character. And then the Shepherd of Hermas is a figure that comes in as kind of the spirit guide, the psychopomp, if you will, to kind of lead this, uh, the, the second two-thirds. The Ghost of Christmas Past, basically. Yes, yes. Come in, man, and know me better. Yeah, um, is, is what the, the shepherd famously doesn’t say. And so, um, but this is a fascinating text that I think more people should know about because there were an awful lot of people who thought this text was canonical in early Christianity for the first couple of centuries.

So situated in time, when was this written?

It was probably written, I think scholars would say, you gotta cast a pretty wide net just because a lot of things are not clear here. But I think some scholars would say the earliest it was written was probably somewhere between 70 to 90 CE, and then the latest maybe around 150 CE. BCE.

So situated well within the range of other books that are definitely canon.

Yes, yes. There’s significant overlap between the compositional window for the Shepherd of Hermas and several other texts that end up making it into the canon. Right. And we see folks who treat it as inspired scripture. In fact, Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata talks about, repeatedly cites the Shepherd of Hermas, and, uh, here talks about, uh, how this—some of this stuff was, uh, inspiration. He’s talking about this, “therefore it is in a divine manner that the power which spoke to Hermas by revelation”—and Rhoda, the church, the woman, is, is this power he’s talking about—“by revelation said, ‘The visions and revelations are for the double-minded who ponder in their hearts whether these things are or are not.’” So this is an influential early Christian who says this is inspired and goes on to quote it a number of times.

You have other folks who seem to treat it as inspired scripture. It is included in Codex Sinaiticus, right, which is one of our earliest, if not our earliest, codex that contains more or less the entire New Testament, and it included the Epistle of Barnabas or the Letter of Barnabas, and then at the very end, the Shepherd of Hermas. And you have others who quote part of the first chapter of the Shepherd of Hermas, which talks about creating things from things that are not as evidence of creation ex nihilo, although that’s not really what it is.

Oh, really? Because when I read it, I was like, oh, that’s pretty—that seems pretty clear.

But it’s not what’s going on. And we can talk a little bit about what’s going on there when we get to that passage. But yeah, it was debated. You have other folks like Tertullian coming in at the end of the 2nd century CE who say, nah, this is not really canonical. Origen thought it was inspired, but doesn’t include it in his list of New Testament texts. Mm-hmm. Uh, Eusebius treats it as one of those secondary texts, so it almost has kind of an apocryphal status. But by the time you get to the end of the 4th century and the actual firming up of a canon, it gets left out. Right. So it, uh, the—when it comes to the New Testament, the two texts that came the closest to being included but were ultimately left out were the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. So this is as close as you get to a New Testament apocryphal text that a lot of folks thought should have been in there.

I will say it reads a little differently than a lot of the other texts. It’s, I mean, it starts out with a story about seeing a girl naked and moves on from there.

You could just label it, “Let’s get weird,” because it gets really weird and it’s divided up into 3 books. Yeah. And the first book is usually referred to as the Visions. And there are 5 visions ranging from like 1 to 7 chapters each. And then the fifth vision is really an introduction of the second book, which is the Commandments. And there are 12 commandments. And then the 12th commandment introduces the third book, which is the Similitudes. And the shepherd gets introduced when we move from the visions to the commandments, and the shepherd kind of shows up and is like, you know, the lady is clocking out and this is now night shift, I’m up, so I’m taking over. But also, I think the name Hermas drops off at that point as well. We don’t hear about Hermas after that, but Hermas is narrating the story. And we can go to verse 1 of the First Vision.

And you mentioned that he was sold into slavery. It starts off, “The one who raised me sold me to a certain Rhoda at Rome.” And so we can say a few things about this. “The one who raised me,” he doesn’t say my parents. And what’s probably going on here is that this Hermas was probably an orphan or left out for exposure or something like that. And so they would have initially been raised by somebody who probably would have treated them as an enslaved person.

I was going to say, yeah, born—It sounded—I just assumed that he was born into slavery.

Yeah. And it was probably—I think most scholars would say if we had to choose, we would probably say he was orphaned or exposed or something like that. Somebody picked him up. And said, “Cool, got a kid.” Free kid. Yeah. And then if they did not use Hermas as slave labor when he was growing up, they sold him as slave labor. And then it goes on to say, “Many years later, I became reacquainted with her and began to love her as a sister.” And so many years later makes it sound like she must have either manumitted him or sold him off again. And somehow he got free and then suddenly runs back into her or something. Yeah. And feels this, um, sisterly love, uh, for, for Rhoda.

The Tiber was nicer back then.

I’m sure it was somewhat nicer, but they still had, you know, they still occasionally threw, you know, dug somebody up and burned their corpse and threw them in the Tiber. Just kidding, that’s from centuries after that. But yeah, it is a—that’s a questionable river in my experience.

Dan does not trust the Tiber.

But yeah, he’s walking along and he’s like, “What’s this? A naked lady? " ‘Oh, it’s Rhoda, my former master, and then someone I loved in a sisterly manner, who suddenly I have a certain kind of feeling for. ’ Yeah. ‘A few feet below my head. ’ Anyway, moving on.

I mean, yeah, the version that I’ve been looking at is slightly different than yours. But yeah, it is interesting because the wording that I see is I would be— he thinks to himself, I would be a happy man if I could but get a wife as handsome and good as she is. Yes. Which seems to me as purely innocuous a thought as a human being can have seeing a beautiful woman nakedly emerging from a river. Yeah, that feels like as, as pure of a thought as you can have, or as non-sexual a thought as you taking a nap.

What, what it makes me think of is, wow, that sure is a pretty lady down there. I wonder if she dates one of the Yankees.

Um, I don’t know that reference. You don’t know that reference? No. Oh, oh, oh, I got it. I, I think I got it now. That’s— is it Chris Farley? Yeah, that’s Chris. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Anyway, uh, but, uh, it is not an innocuous thought.

No, he had— it turns out it’s a highly problematic thought. Turns out he is in trouble.

Yes. About this thought. Yeah. And we obviously don’t have time to go through this whole— no, it is a very long book. But yeah, he gets— he has a vision. Yes. Do you want to just quickly explain what the vision is?

And yeah, so he gets sleepy, and he’s like, you know what, I gotta confess my sins. So he’s praying, and he has a vision. Heaven opened and I saw that woman upon whom I had set my heart greeting me from heaven with, “Hello, Hermas! " Looking up at her, I said, “Lady, what are you doing here? " But she answered, “I was taken up in order to reproach you for your sins before the Lord. " I said to her, “Will you now reproach me? " ‘No,’ she said, ‘but listen to what I am about to say to you. The God who dwells in the heavens and created what is from what is not and increased and multiplied it for the sake of God’s holy church is angry with you because you sinned against me. ’ So he’s like, ‘Uh, what are you talking about?

I’ve always been real nice to you.

What do you mean? ’ Yeah. And then it says, laughing, she said to me, the evil desire arose in your heart. Do you not think it is an evil thing if an evil desire arises in the heart of a just man? It is a sin, a great one. So basically he did wrong in jonesing for her Tiber water drenched form. And she’s there, she has been taken up and is, is there to call him to repentance. And he’s— yeah, he gets chewed out a little bit. And we have this interesting— then suddenly the lady’s really old. And yeah, and now what it is— and here the lady is kind of representative of the body of the church, the church community, and where the sins that have beset the church community have aged the woman. And then later on, she’s rejuvenated because there is repentance that is going on.

And so there’s an awful lot of finger wagging about repentance going on in these visions. The visions are intended to help people feel bad about themselves. But there’s also a concern to build the triumphant church and kind of establish the the community of believers and distinguish them from the reprobate men of the world. So, so Hermas is kind of chastised and, uh, has to figure out what’s going on here and has to be a part of the, the good ones.

Yeah, I guess one of my questions is, if, if the woman is actually a metaphor, if she is the church or whatever, who is Hermas? I presumably also a metaphor.

Uh, I think, I think it’s probably just a metaphor for the hearer or the reader, right? Put yourself in Hermas’s shoes. Surely you have lusted after a woman you have drawn from the waters of the Tiber. So, uh, right, so you can, you can, you can read yourself into Hermas’s shoes. Um, So yeah, I, and I think the, the point of the— and then in the fifth vision, which is taking place a couple, three weeks later, we get the introduction of the angel of repentance who has come in the guise of a shepherd. And, uh, the shepherd might be symbolic of, of Jesus. But here’s something interesting: the word, the name Jesus and the title Christ are never mentioned once anywhere in the entire text. But we do have this angel of repentance who is like a shepherd who basically delivers to Hermas the commandments, which take up the content of the second book.

And these commandments are commandments about faith in God, avoiding evil speaking, giving alms in simplicity. You have basically, we’re getting back to the rules for the church, kind of similar to when we talked about the Didache where there were a bunch of rules that, you know, the apostle can stay 2 days, but on the 3rd day, that means he’s a bad dude and you got to get him out of there. And there’s an interesting one that is actually the source of some of the opposition to the canonization of the Shepherd of Hermas, because there were some early church fathers who treated the Shepherd as a wicked book, as an adulterous book. Oh. Because there is instructions for a Christian husband who has divorced his wife because of adultery, if she’s committed adultery and he’s divorced her.

It instructs him to reconcile and forgive her and remarry her if she repents. Okay. And this is at odds with the ethics of many of the Christians of this time period who said, “No, that’s the end of the story. That’s the one thing that merits divorce is adultery. " And so to take back an adulterous wife is to advocate for adultery. And so this is one of the reasons that there were some Christians who condemned the Shepherd of Hermas, is because it advocated for forgiving a repentant, formerly adulterous woman. Yeah. So that comes in one of the commandments.

Yeah. The other commandment, like other topics within the commandments, are things like honesty and sexual purity and not slandering people, just sort of nice, you know, standard things. Yeah, pretty run-of-the-mill sets of commandments.

Yeah. Um, and then we get to these similitudes, and, and there’s an interesting one that came up recently, um, and a video that I did where, uh, somebody was asking about what this, the first similitude means when it says at one point, uh, it talks about wealth and what you’re supposed to do with wealth. And it says, instead of hoard it like a dragon, like a troll under a bridge. That’s right, you gotta hoard that stuff. Um, well, what the, the, the first similitude says is, instead of lands, therefore buy afflicted souls according as each one is able, and visit widows and orphans, and do not overlook them, and spend your wealth and all your preparations which you receive from the Lord upon such lands and houses. Now the question here is, what does that mean by afflicted souls?

Yeah, there’s an argument that it’s an especially weird construction from a book that starts out with slavery. Like, yeah, a book that starts out with, I was sold to someone. Yeah, it feels like a weird metaphor to say go out buy souls.

Well, and the author never says that was a bad thing, right? The author was just like, yeah, the one who raised me sold me. And then a little while later, you know, she did it for me big time. The— yeah, it’s odd. And so there is an argument that has been made that this is talking about buying enslaved folks to manumit them. Which would sound like condemnation of the practice of buying, selling, and owning other human beings, enslavement. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

Yeah, that’s not how I interpreted the idea.

Yeah, there are a couple things that— interpretations that I think would come first. Because there is no practice known from early Christianity of purchasing enslaved folks, even just enslaved Christians, in order to free them. As far as we know, that never happened. There were folks who would go around and pay fines in order to free people from prison. Oh, interesting. So kind of more in the vein of “I was imprisoned and you visited me,” kind of the True Religion of James, the idea of buying afflicted souls. Would mean to pay to free, you know, imprisoned souls.

These were the canaries in the coal mine of social justice. And so the idea may just be, “Hey, if you’ve got wealth, instead of buying up land, go spend it on helping the poor and the needy and the widows and the orphans and the foreigners and the oppressed.”

Yeah, I mean, when I read that phrase, that afflicted souls phrase, to my mind what it meant was you’re buying them out of their affliction, you know what I mean? Go pay for them to no longer be afflicted. Yeah, you have the means to help them.

And, and I think that’s probably the best reading, or at least the intended sense that’s probably sitting closest to the surface. I think the idea of imprisoned people, paying for them to be freed, that certainly could work here. But I think both of those would take precedence over understanding this as condemnation of the practice of slavery or an advocacy for paying to manumit enslaved folks, which if it was done at all, probably would’ve just been limited to Christians.

I’m just going to brag a little bit and say that my ancestor, Henry Ward Beecher, used to buy people out of slavery and free them. So very nice. That’s a Beecher tradition, but probably not a Hermas tradition. What time period was this? That was right during abolition, right before the— this was Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and stuff. A lot of really cool Beechers right around that area.

Yeah, very nice. That’s a great heritage. And I have family— my mom actually wrote a historical fiction book about it. We have a family that ran one of the stations on the Underground Railroad. Boom. So yes, so we’re the cool white guys. We need to sign off now.

And we’re done. We’ve ruined everything.

All right. But yeah, we’ve got 10 similitudes. A lot of them have to do with—

Similitudes are just like parables.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, like one of them is, “The vine is supported by the elm, so is the rich man helper or helped by the prayer of the poor.” So yeah, there are these similitudes that are supposed to do kind of the same things. We had a bunch of commandments, a bunch of thou shalts, and now we’re giving you a bunch of parables to help you further, to help further kind of cement the idea that you should be a good person. And a lot of it has to do with almsgiving, a lot of it has to do with maintaining the integrity of the Christian community. A lot of it has to do with being just, protecting the poor and the innocent from the unjust and all of that kind of stuff. So ultimately, it’s really advocating for— it’s kind of constructing an early Christian communal ethos and ethical system, even though it’s going about it in weird ways.

Yeah. Um, so this feels, this feels like, uh, it was written a little— it feels a little like it was written by, uh, John of Patmos’s, like, better adjusted brother or something. Still not all there, still weird, but like not apocalyptic. Just, uh, be nice.

Yeah, it is, uh, but I mean, if you’re not familiar with it, it is worth a read. It’s interesting. Yeah. Just so you can get a sense, because, you know, a lot of times when we reconstruct what early Christianity must have been like, we’re really just taking our own experiences and kind of using them as the skeleton for trying to understand these things. Read this text and you will understand just how alien early Christianity should be to you. How this is one of the more popular texts that just barely missed out on being canon. And it is a weird one.

So yeah, it is an alien world. Yeah. I’m guessing you would swap this out for Revelation if you were going back in time to try to influence the—

Oh yeah, in a heartbeat. Yeah. If somebody said to me, if a naked lady came out of the lake, you know, distributing swords, I would— and said, you get to swap out Revelation for one of these books, and I would most likely take the Shepherd of Hermas, depending on what books were available, but certainly over Revelation. Yeah. Interesting.

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