Robert D Heaton

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 as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation—achieved, in Hermas's eyes, by the individual's cultivation of virtues.

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 Jesus Christ himself, rather than principally to his exemplary virtues.

Scholarship on the New Testament canon regularly relies on criterial and reception-historical methodologies to antedate the Christian scriptural collection well before its first advocacy as a “rule” of scripture in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius of Alexandria (367 CE). Pushing back against these narratives and associated tendencies, this article prefers a functional or forensic approach to the institution of a twenty-seven-book New Testament and highlights evidence demonstrating how the Athanasian episcopal canon was amplified, amended, and accepted in the Christian East and West in the decades following its promulgation. Against suggestions that the canon existed as early as the second century, this handling of data on the New Testament, a scriptural instrument set forth with authoritative and exclusionary intentions, fits the guidelines of creative discourse and historical redescription so as to credit Athanasius, in the fourth century, as the inventor of the canon regnant into the present day. Among other foci, tracing the fortunes of a subcanonical category of books shows the potential for new histories of familiar canonical evidence that may ensue, especially those that plumb the possibility of dissent to the Athanasian scriptural boundaries or augment our awareness of the place and value of such an established standard within institutional, monastic, academic, imperial, and even so-called heretical contexts in and beyond the fourth century.

Introductory textbooks on early Christianity and the New Testament rightly cite Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter (367 CE) as the first list containing the exact 27 books now counted within the scriptural collection of Christians everywhere. Rarely, however, do these discussions include any consideration of the after-effects of the “certain kind of canon” proposed by Athanasius (Brakke 1994, 398), from the process by which the embattled and oft-deposed bishop’s scriptural boundaries were eventually accepted, and the repercussions of his artificial appeal to a canonical precedent, to possible avenues of recourse taken by dissenters to the episcopal canon.

Weighing the suitability of “invention” for the New Testament canon and its implications, this paper briefly examines the rhetorical appeal to ancestral transmission both within Athanasius’s crucial festal letter and among other would-be definers of Christian scriptural instruments, from Papias and Irenaeus to Eusebius and Jerome, an appeal that creates an idealized and fictionalized—but irrefutably orthodox—genealogical line into which the definers can locate themselves. It then unveils the path by which Athanasius’s scriptural collection was amended, affirmed, and ultimately ratified by other influential writers of the church, novelly focusing on the initial reiteration and eventual rejection of his third category of books valuable only for catechumens, not canonized for the salvation of the faithful. As this third category vanished from canon lists in the fifth century, a “gentlemen’s agreement” resulted in a New Testament collection possessing a veneer of antiquity, but which ultimately restricted the acceptable version of early Christianity and excluded popular texts such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache from becoming constituent elements of the official Christian story and from achieving a significant remembrance in the centuries to come. Finally, this essay concludes with a reflection on the criterial logic of prior generations of modern scholarship that has tended only to reify—or reinvent—canonical boundaries without supplying any functional or operative process for the inclusion or exclusion of books at the border. Instead, I locate the invention of a constrictive New Testament canon among the needs of a disharmonious fourth-century church that struggled for orthodox uniformity on numerous matters, ranging from Christology and heresiology to apocalyptic authority and ecclesiology.

Recent scholarship on the Shepherd of Hermas has found it difficult to locate this expectation-confounding text within their narratives of early Christianity. For instance, Larry Hurtado’s 2016 Père Marquette lectures attempted to consider why individuals would adhere to Christianity at such great social and political costs, tentatively preferring its unique beliefs in a loving god and eternal life as probable clues. However, stringent doctrinal beliefs and an emphasis on immortality are mostly absent from the Shepherd, and at any rate would have to be reckoned subsidiary to the idea of eternal belonging offered by its most persistent parable and cosmic image—that of the Church as a tower under construction and incorporating all who persevere for the “Name.” More recently, an edited volume with nearly 20 contributors writing about trends in the second century somehow only found reason to mention the Shepherd twice, even while outwardly claiming to eschew a story of great men, of “hierarchies and institutions,” and of orthodoxy and heresy (James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu, 2017). Recognizing the surprising popularity of the Shepherd in pre-Constantinian Christianity and lamenting its absence in such narratives, this paper proposes that Hermas offered his readers a more appealing sense of communal belonging and a more coherent ‘catholic’ identity than did other modes of communicating the Christian experience, which were often occupied (among other exigencies) with establishing the propriety of hierarchies. In contradistinction to other texts, the Shepherd addresses the problems plaguing the Church, from lapsed members to a conceptual lacuna in understanding its very existence, from an exhortation to egalitarian participation, rather than monarchical control. Although the Shepherd recognizes various leaders in his midst, he cannot claim to be among them, and instead speaks as a representative of what Ramsay MacMullen has called the “95 percent,” the “second church” mostly unattested by epigraphic remains (2009). Hermas acknowledges that all who take on the “Name” have some personal responsibility in order to win their places among the tower, to not be double-minded, to become temperate and well-mannered, and so on. Therefore, this paper seeks the remains of Hermas’s cohorts in the underclass of slaves, widows, the poor, and the sub-establishment attracted to Christianity while simultaneously attempting to offer further possibilities from Hermas’s perspective toward Hurtado’s controlling question: why on Earth would anyone become a Christian in the first three centuries CE?

From a survey of the use of the Latin terms religio and superstitio in Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, and others, this research indicates that elite Roman discourse increasingly began to use superstitio, a term well-established to indicate religious oddities circulating in Roman society, against foreigners, and especially those foreigners perceived to pose a threat to its sociopolitical life. In searching for factors that influenced the shape of Christian heresiology—a worldview of religious truth and falsehood that disallowed others from claiming a particular identity, separating “orthodoxy” from “heresies”—this research picks up where scholar Robert Royalty, who has recently explored Jewish and early Christian materials for a genealogy of heresy, has left off. Christian heresiology, particularly as manifested in the systematic genre of heresiography, arose in popularity beginning in the 2nd century CE and bears this important similarity to Roman rhetoric of difference: both demarcated the boundary between an in-group and various out-groups, marking those in the latter as insufficient in thought or deed while bolstering a dominant identity rooted in righteousness, virtue, and absolute truth. Examining Roman writings from the 1st century BCE to the early 2nd century CE, this research identifies an emerging discursive trend among philosophers and historians of the Roman imperium while simultaneously proposing a wider cultural basis for the origin of Christian heresiology than is normally allowed. It also explores whether we can posit a definitive genealogy for heresiology, given the broad influences upon the numerous early Christian theologians setting out to define orthodoxy.

This is a version of the introduction to my dissertation. It will vary from the copy eventually released from embargo by ProQuest, as I have brought a number of footnotes and other details forward from the latter chapters for the sake of clarity, adding roughly a page to the introduction. As such, the TOC no longer aligns with the file, but is included as a means toward comprehending the flow of the work.

--------------------------

With its roots in the first century CE and claims to special revelation from various apparitions, the Shepherd of Hermas portended an alternative Christian trajectory to the prevailing Christocentrism. But some in the second, third, and fourth centuries also deemed it compatible with the synoptic Johannine-Pauline metanarrative for Christianity, such that prominent bishops Victorinus, Eusebius, and Athanasius labored to depict it outside the scriptures of the New Testament. While their data and other early patristic writings presage the Shepherd’s frequent appearance among scholarship on the biblical canon, this often manifests as little more than a curiosity, absent a proper context for the book’s popularity and subsequent omission from the canon.

In the first study of such length on the extracanonicity of the Shepherd, this dissertation contextualizes Hermas’s book as interested not merely in the limits of repentance for grave postbaptismal sins. Hermas also prophetically propounded an alternative aretological scheme of Christian salvation—one in which the Son of God was primarily a virtuous exponent, rather than a savior. Still, certain Christians received the book as scripture, and a critical reevaluation of patristic reception reveals that occasional elite, localized, and idiosyncratic judgments against the Shepherd failed to hamper its wider approbation, particularly in Egypt, until the irruptive intervention of Athanasius.

Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter (367 CE) has long been acknowledged for its milestone New Testament, but this investigation expands the traditional focus on Athanasius from canon list to canonical designs. The Alexandrian bishop’s eventual imposition of scriptural boundaries was forged deep into a divisive career struggling against alternative doctrines, forms of authority, and modes of Christian piety. Crucially, this dissertation argues that Athanasius wielded four constrictive forces under evolution since the second century—heresiology, Christology, openness to prophetic authority, and ecclesiastical organization—to isolate the Shepherd of Hermas as an incompatible and unwelcome source for Christian doctrine and unity. This focus on the ecclesiastical- political dimension of the canon, an instrument declared by fiat and accepted over time by an episcopal “gentlemen’s handshake,” heralds new potential for future canon research not offered by the dead ends of the so-called canonical “criteria.”

While the work contained in this section does not feel entirely ready for primetime, I decided it would be a shame to keep these term papers and other major projects tucked away on my hard drive. Thus, my goals here are to demonstrate the range of topics my coursework has covered, to put forth for scholarly consumption some ideas I consider novel (or not expressed elsewhere in the course of research), and to expose the groundwork for continuing projects intended for publication/dissemination.

Scholars have long puzzled over the absence of the name Jesus and the title Christ in the Shepherd of Hermas, but this early, popular Christian book’s text has not been systematically probed to determine if its many surviving manuscripts may be overtly “Christened” in other ways. As part of the Codex Sinaiticus online digitization project, the recent Web publication of the final surviving leaf (Quire 95, Folio 8) of the Shepherd (containing portions of chs. 91-95 [Sim. 9.14.4 - 9.18.5]), yields 11 appearances of the word huios in its declined forms. Unexpectedly, none of these instances is treated as a nomen sacrum by the scribe, despite the fact that the Shepherd, with 60 percent of its uses of “son” appearing after ch. 88, may otherwise be seen to reach its Christological zenith at precisely this point. Further investigation of this curiosity reveals that throughout the 24 extant Greek manuscripts of the Shepherd up to the sixth century CE, only P.Mich. 129 assuredly treats the “son” as a nomen sacrum, and only in two cases at that. Later Latin and Greek manuscripts of the Shepherd demonstrate furthermore that this plene spelling tendency continued deep into the Middle Ages, in spite of numerous other words being abbreviated. While huios/fili never achieves the lofty status of the four near-automatic nomina sacra—God, Lord, Jesus, and Christ—the scribal aversion to sacralizing the “son” in the Shepherd requires attention and explanation. This paper features a wide range of manuscript evidence before discussing implications, both for the production-dissemination of Hermas’s text and the Shepherd’s later reception, including the possible relationship to its eventual extracanonicity.

Powerful Islamic states enshrine the essential aversion to the freedom of religion—otherwise recognized around the world as a human right—in the highest law of their lands, and these authoritarian governments often enjoy the diplomatic support of the West in general and the United States specifically. Under these draconian, fundamentalist laws, Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt respond regularly, though not universally, to expressions of disbelief with criminal punishments ranging from imprisonment and beatings to even death. This paper arises from my recent awareness of human rights abuses against self-professed atheists and others casting doubt on Islam or the Prophet Muhammad, and seeks to understand the grounds, rational or otherwise, for such punishments. After investigating specific cases of state suppression of or action against disbelief in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, this essay turns to ponder opportunities for more equitable treatment of non-believers, first considering examples from diasporic Islam and then examining the informed arguments of would-be Islamic reformers. I argue that the best hope for the advancement of authentic religious freedom in the Muslim-majority world comes from reform-minded scholars with a personal dedication to Islam. However, these scholars often hold thoroughly liberal or anti-authoritarian perspectives that predispose them against serving in more influential roles. Without Western pressure on the human rights front, fundamentalist regimes that continue to insist on traditional Islam as the basis for law and society will have a difficult time finding space for non-religious dissenters.

For the greater part of the 20th century, the nativity scene was exported from the church without challenge into American culture, including on publicly-owned lands and other spaces, in spite of the ostensible separation of the church and state due to Christianity’s overwhelming hold on the populace. Today, however, nativity scenes and other public displays of religion continue to be foisted upon a diverse public sphere as a relic of earlier Christian dominance, and an unwillingness to be separated from the imagined glory days of the past. Functionally, this is a denial of pluralism. Though my previous work has questioned the concrete existence of a public sphere today, surely if anything can be meant by the term, it would include displays of religion that continue to be erected, sometimes obstinately, on public plots of land. Thus, it is the primary argument of this paper that American Christian groups, in recognition of the modern pluralistic religious landscape and the public/private divide that exists for the benefit of all, should self-regulate their public displays of religion, such as the nativity scene, before a court order so forces them and unnecessarily, illegitimately heightens feelings of persecution.

My argument proceeds first by presenting a brief history of the nativity scene, which demonstrates that despite appealing to the foundational event of Christianity, it has only achieved such ubiquity in the second millennium of the common era. This is neither an argument against the nativity scene as a “religious practice,” nor is it meant to detract from the scene’s importance or significance to modern Christians, but rather is included here out of my personal historical and academic interest, given that it is a story I have not found told in full elsewhere. A third section covers the significant factors related to a generation-old case involving the public display of a nativity scene in our backyard of downtown Denver—Citizens Concerned for Separation of Church and State v. City and County of Denver—at which professors from the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver Department of Religious Studies served as expert witnesses. This case is followed by a search for “a better way” that might be implemented when negotiating between religious and non-religious interests, wherein I invite the input of Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Rawls, and Jeffrey Stout. Next, the fifth section returns to present-day nativity scene standoffs to examine developments in strategies and tactics of both Christians and their opponents. Finally, this essay concludes with further analysis and a closing recommendation that Christian groups, while they still maintain an upper hand socially and culturally, act charitably and respectfully in view of the original, Dec. 17, 1979 decision handed down in the Citizens Concerned case.

Scholars often note that the highly symbolic language of Revelation places it in a heightened poetic register, but this sense of saturation in a sea of imagery can detract from observing specific poetic features in the author’s composition. Moreover, those interested in the hymns of Revelation easily recognize the poetic qualities of the book’s later hymns, passing over significant features appearing earlier. This study has sought to avoid these traps by being attuned to both stylistic and thematic elements of John’s earliest hymns, uncovering, for example, fresh observations about this Hebrew poet’s purposeful violation of Greek grammar in favor of a poetic doublet for the existence of God.

The hymnic units of Revelation 4-5, though ostensibly detailing John’s visions upon ascending to heaven in the spirit, convey his essential theological and Christological doctrines. The opening “Holy, Holy, Holy” usurps a common prophetic scene and sets the stage for John’s “Worthy, Worthy, Worthy,” which constitutes his primary concern. John teaches by means of modeling the truest possible worship—that which takes place in heaven, in God’s throne room, all the while countering competing claims to Lordship from contemporaneous “deities” or secular rulers. God’s worthiness to be praised is, as elsewhere, related to his creation and mighty works, but Christ’s worthiness owes completely to his redemptive death. For John, against higher Christologies that had already sprouted by the end of the first century, only on this basis did Christ become equal, and worthy of simultaneous praise, with his God who was formerly to be praised alone.

This paper intends to draw our attention back to the first century of the common era, before John’s apocalypse and indeed before the existence of a definitive apocalyptic genre at all, to understand what Paul may have meant to convey by the noun ἀποκάλυψις and the verb ἀποκαλύπτω. I contend that Paul’s 19 uses of the terms fall rather evenly into three broad categories, as related to (1) the partial revelation, generally of Jesus Christ or the gospel, in the recent past, (2) the full revelation of the divine plan in the anticipated future, and (3) revelations of a mundane, ordinary, everyday character that can apparently be received by anybody. Because Paul’s uses of ἀποκάλυψις and ἀποκαλύπτω are most heavily concentrated in the Corinthian correspondence, I also contemplate, with the assistance of contemporary Greco-Roman writings, how Paul’s audience at Corinth might have understood him. This endeavor attempts to ameliorate a bewildering lacuna in scholarship, which generally sidesteps acknowledging that Paul employs ἀποκάλυψις and ἀποκαλύπτω not only in the familiar senses of parousia, eschatology, and the revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal 1:12), but also in far more trivial contexts as well. Given that Paul’s writings represent the earliest documented strand of Christianity, I assert that scholars should not easily dispense of Paul’s sense of ordinary, everyday apocalypses in favor of a univocal concept of apocalyptic, and that greater specificity should attend the use of “apocalyptic” as a category in Pauline and early Christian scholarship.

Beyond the scanty historical details of Mark and Paul, the early Christian movement, when curiosity, apologetics, and a sense of proper biography combined to necessitate a more complete narrative for the life of Jesus of Nazareth, started with an essentially blank slate. Why is it, then, that figures of political power—King Herod in Matthew, and Caesar Augustus in Luke—should be invoked in these stories, when nothing yet on record hinted at such intrigue? My analysis seeks to demonstrate that the integral roles played by figures of power in the Matthean and Lukan pre-ministry narratives are overlooked and indispensable elements of their authors’ attempts to legitimize Jesus as Messiah and Savior for their respective audiences. In spite of differing stories and diverging orientations, the appearance of political power signifies and portends the evangelists’ ambitions not only to strengthen the case for Jesus’s import in the world, but also to contest the power held by these authorities. Both authors implicitly depict Jesus as an alternative ruler, effecting symbolic transfers of power while redefining their audience’s realities. Thus, Matthew’s Jesus is the legitimate king, and Luke’s Jesus is the true Savior, Lord, initiator of good news, and bringer of peace. Both evangelists invoke political power at the outset of Jesus’s life in order to inscribe in these narratives their high aspirations for his afterlife—their present lives.

As Dennis R. MacDonald has noted, the interpretation of Mark 14:51-52—and in particular, the identity of the νεανίσκος τις—“remains one of the greatest conundrums in the New Testament.” Though such a claim may be slightly overwrought, especially relative to the verses’ ongoing theological value, MacDonald aptly describes the overall state of scholarship on this mini-scene. Scott Brown, for example, contended that the author of Mark inserted the verses as a “deliberate enigma” for newcomers to the movement to solve, but on the other end of the spectrum, Donald Juel seems to suppose that the author inadvertently omitted further detail—possibly given that his initial audience understood the meaning of the verses given their general communal knowledge. Frank Kermode suggested that the passage was purposefully random and meaningless, thereby completing the interpretational circle and representing all semiotic possibilities. Either the verses are vital for catechumens but require that one seek special or secret information, or could be understood by virtually anyone who steps foot into the community. Or, they could be totally devoid of meaning.

This paper seeks to further plumb the depths of the interpretation of these verses, examining the concerns, categorizations, and criticisms that various scholars have brought to them. This is not intended to be a full exegesis, but rather a demonstration of the limitations of our hermeneutical and critical frameworks. In so doing, I suggest that the conclusions we reach and answers we offer have a lot to do with the tools and needs that we bring with us to the interpretive workbench. Finally, given this course’s immersion into the inchoate venture of performance criticism, especially in Thomas E. Boomershine’s "The Messiah of Peace," I dedicate a separate section of the paper to the insights that it advances and promises. I conclude with some additional thoughts about how this knowledge might be put to use in future studies.

In spite of recent decades of capable scholarship on so-called heretics of the early Christian period, theological education continues to reproduce the same arguments against insufficient forms of belief as were propounded by patristic heresiographers of the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries CE. One major instructive example of this tendency affects modern instruction on the Jewish Christian Ebionites, who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was merely the natural offspring of Mary and Joseph. Members of this sect claimed Jesus as the expected Messiah, but maintained their ancestors’ observance of the Mosaic Law and did not attribute their Messiah with any sense of divinity. For their beliefs and practices, the Ebionites earned the ire and heresiological attention of proto-orthodox bishops and theologians from Irenaeus to Epiphanius and beyond.
Classical theological heavyweights of the church and modern systematic theology, which combine to influence seminary education on the phenomenon of heresy to a far greater degree than academic appraisals of early Christianities, generally disregard the historical sect of Ebionites in favor of Christological typology and oppositional refutation. In this way, “Ebionism” can be demonstrated as inadequate when compared to the normative and definitive Christological statements approved at the ecumenical councils.
This thesis, which seeks to independently identify a body of epistemologically ascertainable evidence for Ebionite beliefs and practices, instead seeks a way forward for theological education on the constructs of orthodoxy and heresy. An examination and evaluation of patristic primary sources is followed by a modest reconstruction and biography of the Ebionites, against which the argumentation of systematic theology can be critically weighed. Finally, this project offers a series of recommendations for approaching the Ebionites and teaching heresy in a spirit of truth, honesty, and reconciliation, offering an important alternative to, and lessons from, the church’s historically uncharitable treatment of the Ebionites.

In spite of recent decades of capable scholarship on so-called heretics of the early Christian period, theological education continues to reproduce the same arguments against insufficient forms of belief as were propounded by patristic heresiographers of the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries CE. One major instructive example of this tendency affects modern instruction on the Jewish Christian Ebionites, who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was merely the natural offspring of Mary and Joseph. Members of this sect claimed Jesus as the expected Messiah, but maintained their ancestors’ observance of the Mosaic Law and did not attribute their Messiah with any sense of divinity. For their beliefs and practices, the Ebionites earned the ire and heresiological attention of proto-orthodox bishops and theologians from Irenaeus to Epiphanius and beyond. Classical theological heavyweights of the church and modern systematic theology, which combine to influence seminary education on the phenomenon of heresy to a far greater degree than academic appraisals of early Christianities, generally disregard the historical sect of Ebionites in favor of Christological typology and oppositional refutation. In this way, “Ebionism” can be demonstrated as inadequate when compared to the normative and definitive Christological statements approved at the ecumenical councils. This thesis, which seeks to independently identify a body of epistemologically ascertainable evidence for Ebionite beliefs and practices, instead seeks a way forward for theological education on the constructs of orthodoxy and heresy. An examination and evaluation of patristic primary sources is followed by a modest reconstruction and biography of the Ebionites, against which the argumentation of systematic theology can be critically weighed. Finally, this project offers a series of recommendations for approaching the Ebionites and teaching heresy in a spirit of truth, honesty, and reconciliation, offering an important alternative to, and lessons from, the church’s historically uncharitable treatment of the Ebionites.