Tatian's Trashworld

A 2nd Century Cautionary Tale

Grok’s creation from the prompt, “Draw a portrait of Tatian the Assyrian in the style of a Byzantine Mosaic”

Dear Friends

Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!

I am continuing to work my way through the Fathers of the second century, and honestly I could spend all of my time writing about it. There are all manner of things worthy of notice and comment. I’m happy to report that I have finally actually read The Shepherd of Hermas, a document that for a time was widely read and used in some early churches and occasionally cited as Scripture. It didn’t make it into the canon, and there are a lot of reasons for that. The main one is that while it has some occasional nice moments, it is really not a good book.

If you read it immediately after Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, you will be stunned (as I was) at how primitive and unsophisticated it is by comparison. Its visions and allegories are … juvenile and obvious. Although the editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers do their best to rehabilitate The Shepherd and interpret it in the most generous light possible, they did not succeed in convincing me of its merits. The book is moralistic, almost (speaking anachronistically) Pelagian in its insistence that salvation rests on your works of obedience and the purity and resilience of your repentance. These are not spirit-empowered works, either, since the author thinks that if you sin the Holy Spirit leaves you. Everything—your reception of the Spirit, your salvation—is on you and your efforts. And you are essentially a morally neutral actor: The Shepherd literally invents, it seems to me, the cartoonish idea that each person has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and it is up to each one to listen to the right counselor. You won’t find much about grace, faith, union with Christ, or Spiritual empowerment in The Shepherd. My honest opinion is that reading The Shepherd of Hermas makes me feel exactly as I feel reading Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. Somebody trying really hard to write pious prose, but sounding amateur and theologically incompetent.

The more interesting question is why the book is so juvenile and primitive, when other contemporary works (e.g., Justin Martyr, Irenaeus) are theologically so comparatively sophisticated. My supposition is that it was intentionally crafted that way. You see, the author is pseudonymously writing under the name “Hermas,” and wants readers to think he is the same Hermas mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:14. And he succeeded. This is why some churches (particularly in the East) unquestionably accepted this book as having an “apostolic” veneer. They were fooled by it. It is now well accepted that the book is second century (internal evidence like anachronisms prove this beyond reasonable doubt). I suspect the author was trying to write in a simple, primitive fashion to give the book the “air” of being old and authentic.

At any rate, The Shepherd of Hermas was a difficult stretch that I cannot say I enjoyed.

That isn’t even what I wanted to talk to you about. See what I mean? There are so many things we could discuss about this literature!

I wanted briefly to mention Tatian the Assyrian (AD 110-172), a fascinating figure. He is included in The Ante-Nicene Fathers despite becoming a heretic in his later years; we’re told by a number of contemporaries that he left the church and started his own semi-gnostic cult called the Encratites. In his youth he studied in Rome with Justin Martyr, and the sole extant writing from Tatian is from his orthodox phase, the Address of Tatian to the Greeks. It is a bold and energetic read. There is much to note, but I’ll stick with just a few things.