The Shepherd of Hermas: A New Translation and Commentary by Michael J. Sviegel and Caroline P. Buie (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Shepherd of Hermas: A New Translation and Commentary by Michael J. Sviegel and Caroline P. Buie
• Chance E. Bonar

Michael J. Sviegel and Caroline P. Buie, translators
The Shepherd of Hermas: A New Translation and Commentary
Foreword by Carolyn Osiek
Apostolic Fathers Commentary Series
Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023
Pp. xxxv + 423. $55.00.

Michael Sviegel and Caroline Buie’s translation and commentary of the Shepherd of Hermas dares to offer a deep dive into a text that scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity often briefly explore before turning their attention elsewhere—due to boredom or confusion, and other times due to a brief expedition in order to mine the text for details related to Christology, history of the canon, or Roman ecclesiastical history. In doing so, Sviegel and Buie offer a robust analysis of the Shepherd that will ideally assuage boredom with the 114-chapter text, clarify points of perplexity, and offer accessible sections of relevant comments for readers who are focusing their attention on particular passages or themes.

Sviegel and Buie’s Shepherd of Hermas is divided into two main sections: a set of introductory articles (3–55), and an intertwined translation and commentary (61–370). Unlike other volumes in the Apostolic Fathers Commentary Series, they note that the Shepherd is too long to be broken effectively into a translation and subsequent commentary. Accordingly, Sviegel and Buie offer comments after each of the five Visions, ten Mandates, and twelve Similitudes that constitute the Shepherd.

The introductory articles have three main foci: an introduction to the Shepherd itself, a discussion of how the Shepherd uses other Jewish and Christian writings, and the theology of the Shepherd. These subsections explore a range of typical topics asked about the Shepherd: its manuscript history, readership in antiquity, canonicity, date, authorship, genre, theology, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Sviegel and Buie provide a history of scholarship on each of these topics, as well as their own stances. For example, they suggest that the Shepherd’s composition was in response to first-century c.e. persecution in Rome (34), as well as follow through with the hypothesis that Hermas was Pope Pius I’s brother to date Hermas’s first visionary experiences to the 90s c.e. (21). The introduction’s strengths are, simultaneously, its potential weaknesses. It rehearses and answers traditional questions that plague Shepherd studies raised by theological and canonical concerns, but it does not explore with the same depth questions that may emerge from social- or cultural-historical concerns: for example, the role of gender or slavery in the composition of or narratives within the Shepherd. Additionally, the brief attention paid in the introduction to the Shepherd’s readership from the fourth century c.e. onward (24–25) may give readers the impression that the Shepherd had petered out of use, although patristic testimony (e.g., Eusebius, Athanasius, Didymus), continued manuscript production in a range of languages, and verbatim adaptation (e.g., Pseudo-Athanasius’s Praecepta ad Antiochum) suggest that the Shepherd continued to be used in ecclesiastical, catechetical, and monastic spaces well into late antiquity. [End Page 482]

The translation of the Shepherd offered by Sviegel and Buie is well crafted and readable. As they point out in their note to the translation (59–60), their tone is informal and “at times, playful.” This comes through in their treatment of the Elder Lady’s description of a self-controlled Hermas as “the straight and narrow” (63) and their translated description of Hermas’s sinful children as “going hog-wild with sexual perversions” (78). One prominent translational choice Sviegel and Buie make concerns pneuma: they translate it variously as “breath” (Mand. 3), “disposition” (Mand. 5 and 10), or “spirit/Spirit” (Sim. 5). They offer extensive justification for these translation choices, as they highlight for readers how this fluid term applies to a range of spiritual characters and experiences internalized within the human body. One point of notable difference between Sviegel and Buie’s translation and other English translations of the previous decades is their treatment of doulos in the parable of the vineyard in Sim. 5. While most English translations of the Shepherd translate doulos as “servant...