other · 145 · Rome
Hermas was a freedman at Rome who says he had been sold as a slave in his youth, farmed near the Via Campana, lost his property and his family in a persecution, and was given a series of visions: an old woman who is the Church, growing younger as he understands more; a tower being built out of stones that fit or do not; and finally an angel dressed as a shepherd, who dictates twelve mandates and ten similitudes. Its urgent question is post-baptismal sin. The answer it gives — one further repentance, offered once, and no more — was radical enough to be argued over for centuries. The Muratorian Fragment, listing what may and may not be read in church, says that Hermas wrote it quite lately in our times in the city of Rome while his brother Pius sat in the chair, and that it should be read privately but not publicly among the prophets or the apostles: which is a rejection that concedes almost everything. It was bound whole into the Codex Sinaiticus after Revelation, Irenaeus quotes it as scripture, and Jerome says it is almost unknown among the Latins while it is read publicly in some churches of the Greeks. Jerome also identifies its author with the Hermas Paul greets in Romans 16, which would put him a century too early — that identification, and the two Hermases the lists of the Seventy carry, are set out in the gloss on this page.
To ask, on behalf of everyone who had lapsed after baptism, whether there was a second repentance — and to be told there was one, and only one.
A book so widely read that it was bound with the New Testament, and so nearly canonical that the man who ruled it out had to explain why.