An Embodied Reading Of The Shepherd Of Hermas

"This book uses cognitive literary theory, specifically the approach known as enactive reading, to investigate why a work that was exceedingly popular among elite readers in antiquity has failed to receive the same reception by modern scholars. The study focuses on the first section of The Shepherd known as the Book of Visions, which narrates Hermas's visionary experiences in first-person voice"--

Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.

Jonathon Lookadoo guides readers through the early Christian apocalypse known as the Shepherd of Hermas, providing a clear overview of the numerous literary, historical, and theological insights that this text contains for those researching early Christianity. Dividing his exploration into two sections, Lookadoo first introduces the Shepherd by providing an overview of the text to those with limited familiarity, while also focusing on critical issues such as authorship, date, and the Shepherd's complex manuscript tradition and reception history. He then moves to examine the interpretation of particular passages in detail, and by close exploration of theological and literary features he is able to contextualize the Shepherd alongside contemporary contexts. This volume covers the important thematic issues in the Shepherd, and also provides a fresh perspective that arises from a thoroughly textual focus; in so doing, Lookadoo enables readers to engage both with the Shepherd itself and the scholarship that surrounds the text.

This volume contains studies that explore the content and meaning of the Qumran manuscripts of the Aramaic Books of Enoch, the Book of Giants, and related literature. The essays shed new light on the lexicon, orthography and grammar of the Aramaic scrolls, as well as their relationship to schematic astronomy in ancient Mesopotamia. Contributors examine the origin of the angelic tradition of the Watchers, the textual and literary relationship of the Aramaic scrolls to the Book of the Watchers, and the culpability of humanity in the spread of evil on earth according to the myth of the fallen angels.

The Shepherd of Hermas is one of the oldest and most well-attested Christian works. Its popularity arguably exceeded that of the canonical Gospels. Many early Christian thinkers regarded the Shepherd as authoritative and cited it in their own writings, even though its status as Scripture was controversial. The far-reaching influence of the Shepherd during the first few centuries is attested in part by the many languages in which it was copied: Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, Middle Persian, and Georgian. The early dating and wide dissemination of the Shepherd of Hermas offers us access to a period when canonical boundaries were elastic. This volume treats religious experience in the Shepherd, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. It complements a growing body of literature that explores the text from social-historical perspectives. Leading scholars approach it from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including critical literary theory, anthropology, cognitive science, affect theory, gender studies, intersectionality, and text reception. In doing so, they pose fresh questions to one of the most widely read texts in the early church, offering new insights to scholars and students alike.

The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.

"This book focuses on God's body in the New Testament. While there are various views in the New Testament regarding God's body, the present work argues that Luke-Acts stands out as an important example of a New Testament text that portrays God as visible and corporeal. According to Luke, God is a visible, concrete being who can take on a variety of different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes. Luke's portrayal of God instead finds more affinity with Greco-Roman traditions that conceive of the divine in corporeal terms, and above all, with the God found in the pages of Jewish Scripture. Moreover, Luke's depiction of Jesus as an embodied being has both similarities and dissimilarities with Luke's depiction of Israel's God and points ahead to future controversies concerning Jesus's divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed, in Luke-Acts and beyond, questions concerning God's body are intimately intertwined with Christology and shed light on how to understand Jesus's own visible embodiment in relation to God"--