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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2025
The past decade and a half has brought a blossoming of studies on the Shepherd of Hermas, an influential Christian apocalyptic text from the second century ce. Most have been produced by specialists in Western Europe and North America publishing in German, French, Italian and English, but others writing in historically overlooked locales and languages are also contributing. Both groups reflect an increasing diversity of perspectives and approaches, which stands in tension with the sort of scholarship on the Shepherd that has typically appeared in the modern period. Despite the resurgence, precious few book-length projects have tackled research questions beyond those bounded by historical-criticism until Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas (Berlin 2022) was edited by Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier, who rank among the most path-breaking scholars presently exploring this text. Their edited volume is a wide-ranging, invigorating contribution to knowledge that should fuel innovative work on the Shepherd and, by extension, early Christian literature in the future.
1 Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier, ‘Introduction’, in Harkins and Maier, Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, 1.
2 Angela Kim Harkins, An embodied reading of the Shepherd of Hermas: the Book of visions and its role in moral formation, Sheffield 2023.
3 Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the spirit of Christ: spirit possession and exorcism in the early Christ groups, New Haven, Ct 2020. See most recently his ‘“As if by love possessed”: spirits and possession in the Acts of Thomas’, in Nicole M. Bauer and J. Andrew Doole (eds), Ideas of possession: interdisciplinary and transcultural perspectives, New York 2024, 86–103.
4 See also Jung H. Choi, ‘“Earn the grace of prophecy”: early Christian prophecy as practice’, unpubl. ThD diss. Cambridge, Ma 2016, 65–95, and ‘Gender, race, and the normalization of prophecy in early Christianity and Korean and Korean American Christianity’, in Mitzi J. Smith and Jin Young Choi (eds), Minoritized women reading race and ethnicity: intersectional approaches to constructed identity and early Christian texts, Lanham, Md 2020, 89–109.
5 Lipsett, B. Diane, ‘Scrutinizing desire: Hermas, metanoia, and manliness’, in her Desiring conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth, New York 2011, 19–53Google Scholar.
6 See also Tagliabue, Aldo, ‘Experiencing the Church in the Book of Visions of the Shepherd of Hermas’, in Grethlein, Jonas, Huitink, Luuk and Tagliabue, Aldo (eds), Experience, narrative, and criticism in ancient Greece: under the spell of stories, Oxford 2020, 104–24Google Scholar.
7 Cf. Jason Robert Combs, ‘Epiphanies in second- and third-century Christian literature: discourse, identity, and divine manifestations’, unpubl. PhD diss. Chapel Hill, NC 2016, 201–3.
8 Wilson, Brittany E., The embodied god: seeing the divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church, New York 2021, 95–14610.1093/oso/9780190080822.003.0004CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Angela Kim Harkins, ‘Entering the narrative world of Hermas's visions’, in Harkins and Maier, Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, 120.
10 In addition to Batovici's oeuvre see Travis W. Proctor, ‘Books, scribes, and cultures of reading in the Shepherd of Hermas’, this Journal lxxiii (2022), 461–79.
11 Harkins and Maier, ‘Introduction’, 1.
12 Frances Flannery, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney A. Werline (eds), Inquiry into religious experience in early Judaism and Christianity, Atlanta, Ga 2008; Colleen Shantz and Rodney A. Werline (eds), Linking text and experience, Atlanta, Ga 2012. Combs alone engages these works.
13 The bibliography is vast, but an important touchstone is Ann Taves, Religious experience reconsidered: a building-block approach to the study of religion and other special things, Princeton 2009. See now also Christina M. Gschwandtner, Ways of living religion: philosophical investigations into religious experience, Cambridge 2024.
14 Aldo Tagliabue, ‘Experience through narrative in the Shepherd of Hermas’, in Harkins and Maier, Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, 150.
15 Nancy T. Ammerman, ‘Lived religion as an emerging field: an assessment of its contours and frontiers’, Nordic Journal of Religion and Society xxix (2016), 83–99.
16 Orsi, Robert, ‘Everyday miracles: the study of lived religion’, in Hall, David D. (ed.), Lived religion in America: toward a history of practice, Princeton 1997, 3–21Google Scholar, and The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 3rd edn, New Haven, Ct 2010. Orsi only appears in the block quotation of Rachel Wagner discussed by Harkins, ‘Entering the narrative world’, 130.
17 Nancy T. Ammerman, ‘Golden rule Christianity: lived religion in the American mainstream’, in Hall, Lived religion in America, 196–216; Everyday religion: observing modern religious lives, Oxford 2007; ‘Finding religion in everyday life’, Sociology of Religion lxxv (2014), 189–207; and Studying lived religion: contexts and practices, New York 2021.
18 Hall, Lived religion in America.
19 Meredith B. McGuire, Lived religion: faith and practice in everyday life, Oxford 2008. See also McGuire's earlier monograph, Ritual healing in suburban America, New Brunswick, NJ 1988.
20 The most substantial representations of Rüpke's research in this area are Jörg Rüpke, Von Jupiter zu Christus: Religionsgeschichte in römischer Zeit, Darmstadt 2011; On Roman religion: lived religion and the individual in ancient Rome, Ithaca, NY 2016; and Pantheon: Geschichte der antiken Religionen, Munich 2016.
21 Tagliabue, ‘Experience through narrative’, 150.
22 Harkins, Angela Kim, ‘Looking at the Shepherd of Hermas through the experience of lived religion’, in Gasparini, Valentino and others (eds), Lived religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: approaching religious transformations from archaeology, history and classics, Berlin 2020, 49–7010.1515/9783110557596-004CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is cited by Maier, Tagliabue and Combs.
23 Geertz, Armin W., ‘Brain, body and culture: a biocultural theory of religion’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion xxii (2010), 304–2110.1163/157006810X531094CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Religious bodies, minds and places: a cognitive science of religion perspective’, in Laura Carnevale (ed.), Spazi e luoghi sacri: espressioni ed esperienze di vissuto religioso, Bari 2017, 35–52.
24 Harkins, Embodied reading, 6–10.
25 The essays by Nicola Denzey Lewis, Georgia Frank, David Frankfurter, Lucy Grig, and William Klingshirn collected in Studies in Late Antiquity v (2021) offer a helpful way into and through some of these debates.
26 Knibbe, Kim and Kupari, Helena, ‘Theorizing lived religion: introduction’, Journal of Contemporary Religion xxxv (2020), 157–60 at p. 15910.1080/13537903.2020.1759897CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Janico Albrecht and others, ‘Religion in the making: the lived ancient religion approach’, Religion xlviii (2018), 568–93 at p. 570.
28 Knibbe and Kupari, ‘Theorizing lived religion’, 166.
29 Iverson, Kelly R., Performing early Christian literature: audience experience and interpretation of the Gospels, Cambridge 2021 10.1017/9781009029209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 McGuire, Meredith B., ‘Individual sensory experiences, socialized senses, and everyday lived religion in practice’, Social Compass lxiii (2016), 152–6210.1177/0037768616628789CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Betts, Eleanor (ed.), Senses of the empire: multisensory approaches to Roman culture, London 2017 10.4324/9781315608358CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Choat, Malcolm and Yuen-Collingridge, Rachel, ‘The Egyptian Hermas: the Shepherd in Egypt before Constantine’, in Kraus, Thomas J. and Nicklas, Tobias (eds), Early Christian manuscripts: examples of applied method and approach, Leiden 2010, 203Google Scholar.
32 Jonathon Lookadoo, The Shepherd of Hermas: a literary, historical, and theological handbook, London 2021, 217–22; Chance Bonar, ‘Hermas the (formerly?) enslaved: rethinking manumission and Hermas's biography in the Shepherd of Hermas’, Early Christianity xiii (2022), 205–26, and ‘Enslaved to god: slavery and divine despotics in the Shepherd of Hermas’, unpubl. PhD diss. Cambridge, Ma 2023.
33 Wendt, Heidi, At the temple gates: the religion of freelance experts in the Roman Empire, New York 2016 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190267148.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rüpke, Pantheon, 303–34.