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.

The roots of Harkins and Maier’s volume can be traced to a joint session of the Inventing Christianity and Religious Experience in Antiquity programme units at the 2018 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, where four of the eleven essays, plus a response by Maier, were presented in earlier forms. In their introduction, Harkins and Maier swiftly name the ‘fresh perspectives’ reflected – and the similarly fresh ‘methodological angles’ pursued – within it, explaining that collected essays ‘offer new ways of thinking about the question of lived experience of religion as it relates to the Shepherd and its relationship to other ancient writings’.Footnote ¹ This focus warrants the book’s publication in De Gruyter’s Ekstasis series, edited by John R. Levison. The emphasis on religious experience and the Shepherd resonates particularly well with Harkins’s ongoing research activity in that area, which includes an impressive recent monograph that offers an ‘enacted reading’ of the Visions section.Footnote ² Maier, for his part, has worked broadly and creatively on the Shepherd since the late 1980s. These editors are eminently qualified to coordinate the contents of the volume’s three sections, focusing as they do on experience, firstly of the self, secondly of the divine and thirdly of the text of the Shepherd.

In section i, ‘The Shepherd, the Self, and Subjectivity’, Giovanni B. Bazzana leads with a presentation of Hermas’s religious experience in the Mandates as possession, integrating insights from cultural anthropology and extending his work on spirit possession in early Christianity.Footnote ³ Jung H. Choi then explores the prophet’s depiction in the Shepherd as passive, spirit-controlled agent who must paradoxically cultivate self-control, finding instructive similarities and differences in Origen’s Contra Celsum 7 and Homilies on Numbers 14–17.Footnote ⁴ The section’s third essay, by B. Diane Lipsett, builds upon her previous study of manliness and metanoia in the Shepherd by analysing through the lens of gender Hermas’s loquaciousness and the ubiquity of dialogue in the text with a view to the transformation of self toward which it aims.Footnote ⁵ Maier rounds out the section by using affect theory to explain how aspects of the imagery in the Visions and Similitudes, particularly that of the tower, help refashion the implied audience in a happier direction.

The volume’s second section, ‘Visions and Experiences of the Divine’, is the largest of the three, comprised of five essays. Luca Arcari first situates Hermas within an ancient ‘psychotropic economy’ analogous to the modern one theorised by Daniel L. Smail and describes the various psychotropic mechanisms that transform Hermas and others in Visions 1–2. Harkins offers a foretaste of her then forthcoming monograph, pitching an ‘enactive reading’ of the text as an antidote to similarly situated and trained specialists’ habit of interpreting Hermas’s visions myopically and thereby missing how they prepare readers to respond to the Shepherd’s wider ethical teaching. Aldo Tagliabue then argues that the Visions as narrative immerse the reader in a world that enables their experience of the Church in sequential and still timeless ways.Footnote ⁶ Jason Robert Combs’s essay reads the arrival of the shepherd figure in Visions 5 as an epiphany, contending that the vision reflects a polemic against pagan ones by imagining how an ancient Christian might react to them.Footnote ⁷ Finally, Brittany E. Wilson explores the multiple forms and manifestations of God in the Shepherd, chiefly in connection with Jewish textual traditions, drawing upon the idea of ‘divine fluidity’ developed by Benjamin Sommer and extending her own previous work on related topics.Footnote ⁸

The book draws to a close with two studies grouped under the heading ‘Experiencing the Shepherd as Text’. In the first, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow analyses the central role that ‘the book’ plays in Visions 1–2, especially in the characterisation of ‘lady church’. In the second, Dan Batovici explores the ‘kaleidoscopic’ ways that late antique Christians might have experienced the text in liturgical, legal and other kinds of manuscripts, where implicit appeals to the Shepherd are highly fragmentary, often diluted, occasionally misattributed and yet, for some, still implicitly authoritative.

These eleven chapters together represent a stimulating addition to early Christian studies. Although exceptions certainly exist, much scholarship on the Shepherd seems parochial, even insular, with analyses divorced from wider discussions ongoing in the humanities and social sciences. The current volume cannot plausibly be accused of that shortcoming. It effectively connects, on a sustained basis, a corner of its field with cutting-edge developments in areas such as, to name only a few, affect theory, book history, cognitive literary theory, critical masculinity studies, cultural anthropology, ethnography, intersectionality, intertextuality, manuscript studies, neurohistory, phenomenology of narratives and space and reception history. And it demonstrates to fellow researchers in classics, ancient history, comparative literature and theology and religious studies, for example, how revitalising insights can be wrought from old texts by reading intentionally against the tide of historical-critical scholarship. The volume thereby confirms the vibrancy of current work on the Shepherd, done as it increasingly is by diverse and diversely located interpreters.Footnote ⁹

Its major merits notwithstanding, the project calls for constructive critical engagement, as is true for any of similar significance, beginning with a few structural observations. First, the relative size of the book’s three sections is somewhat unbalanced: the third section on the Shepherd as text is comprised only of the essays by Kartzow and Batovici, whereas the other two sections each have at least double that number. Such an arrangement risks the perception that these two scholars share a provincial interest, which would be unfortunate, since book culture is currently one of the most vibrant research areas in early Christian studies, to which analyses of the Shepherd are increasingly contributing.Footnote ¹⁰ Second, the volume has no conclusion, which represents a missed opportunity, particularly for a collection of this calibre. Based on the overall strength of the essays, it would have been helpful for their editors to identify and briefly explore what they imagine to be promising avenues opened by their volume for future research on the Shepherd and by extension early Christian literature. Instead, the book closes with a relative whimper after its short section iii.

A more significant potential criticism relates to the book’s lack of governing theories or dominant methods linking its constituent parts. Counter-intuitively, one of the crucial but undefined concepts is religious experience, or experience that can be deemed religious, which is signalled in the book’s title, heralded in the introduction and employed throughout. Within the broader conceptual universe of religious experience, the introduction suggests that the volume extends ‘a growing [scholarly] interest in the study of experience in ancient religion’.Footnote ¹¹ Across its contents, though, what does or does not qualify as an experience of ancient religion (and why) is usually unstated and thus unclear. Bazzana and Tagliabue are among those who come closest to offering an explanation. Others simply refer to experiences of spirit (Lipsett) or revelation (Harkins) or epiphany (Combs) or the divine (Wilson) in passing as presumably – although, a critic might add, not self-evidently – religious in nature.

Defining religious experience is understandably difficult, not least because the idea is widely debated, as are the best ways of analysing it. But the work of scholars of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity over the past few decades, such as that reflected in the ground-breaking Experientia volumes,Footnote ¹² could well have informed whatever decisions about theory and method the contributors ultimately made. So too could the insights of religious studies scholars working on experience more broadly.Footnote ¹³ Clear definitions are a desideratum, because, given the volume’s wide-ranging scope, its reader frequently wonders whose (religious) experience is or could be in view: is it Hermas the putative or implied author’s, Hermas the character’s, the implied readers’ of the Shepherd whether in antiquity or the present, the reader of the edited volume’s, etc.? At one point or another, the implied answer to each of these questions seems to be ‘yes’, but that answer’s accuracy hinges on a robust, expansive definition of religious experience that is assumed but virtually nowhere given.

A similar lack of clarity extends to qualifying experience of religion as ‘lived’, which is also counter-intuitive, since the volume’s introduction names ‘lived experience of religion’ as centrally important. Readers of this Journal will likely assume that idea to be synonymous with ‘lived religion’, an assumption confirmed as reasonable by the fact that a contributor explicitly names lived religion as the book’s focus.Footnote ¹⁴ Like religious experience, it too has emerged as a significant subfield in religious studies, often emphasising what researchers are not interested in, namely elites and institutions.Footnote ¹⁵ Nevertheless, the volume’s essays evince little substantive engagement with the major approaches to lived religion, let alone its critics. For example, the field-shifting contributions by leading scholars, such as Robert Orsi,Footnote ¹⁶ Nancy T. Ammerman,Footnote ¹⁷ David D. HallFootnote ¹⁸ and Meredith B. McGuire,Footnote ¹⁹ who admittedly focused on the modern period but whose results have propelled studies of other eras, are nowhere discussed. Even the scholarship of Jörg Rüpke, who has produced a singularly important body of work on ‘lived ancient religion’, a good portion of it in direct connection with the Shepherd, is hardly engaged;Footnote ²⁰ only Bazzana and Arcari cite him on something directly related to the topic. Most essays do not even mention lived (ancient) religion at all, via Rüpke or anyone else. One alone refers to lived religion specifically.Footnote ²¹ Other contributors do cite an earlier essay on the topic by Harkins.Footnote ²² It was heavily influenced by the work of Armin W. Geertz on ‘bio-cultural’ approaches to the study of religion,Footnote ²³ as is her 2023 monograph.Footnote ²⁴ Largely missing from discussion, though, is engagement with the wider scholarship that has shaped the analysis of ‘lived’, ‘popular’ or simply ‘ordinary’ aspects of early Christianity over the past generation and the attendant debates over how such studies should be framed and undertaken.Footnote ²⁵ Here one sees a parallel to the limited theoretical discussion of religious experience in Harkins and Maier’s edited volume, despite its centrality.

Ultimately, then, ‘lived experience of religion’ functions implicitly and ambiguously in the book, not as a label for a distinct, recognisable assemblage of either religious phenomena, mediated through texts or theories accepted and methods adopted to analyse those phenomena but instead as a descriptor of the general shapes and emphases of research. Self-consciously or not, when analysing lived experience of religion and the Shepherd, contributors seemingly prefer eclecticism, sourcing selections of both theory and method from the humanities and social sciences, as is common in studies of lived religion.Footnote ²⁶ In doing so, they seek and study a wide variety of things because, whatever it is, religious experience is, well, widely varied. On balance, that expansive approach might better reflect the somewhat more recently developed continental European tradition of enquiry, particularly in the mode adopted by the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ project at Erfurt led by Rüpke, less so the (North) American one from which it arguably evolved in different ways.Footnote ²⁷ If that is the case, the eclecticism on display in this edited volume may well be not a bug to be squashed but a feature to be celebrated. All the same, the practice of not defining fundamental terms and analytical procedure has been recognised elsewhere as a pervasive problem in religious studies, in response to which scholars should clearly explain not only what they mean by the concept of lived religion or a similarly labelled thing, but also how and to what ends they study it.Footnote ²⁸ Those inspired by what Harkins and Maier have collected to pursue future research on the Shepherd should heed that challenge, so that their readers can more straightforwardly grasp what they think the relevant phenomena are, how they should be scrutinised, why they matter, etc.

One wonders what specifically Harkins and Maier, as editors, imagined that future research might look like. In the absence of any indication, a few possibilities come quickly to mind. Additional studies might discuss on a more theoretically founded basis than before how, for example, performances of the Shepherd in antiquity might have been experienced as religious (or not) by their audiences.Footnote ²⁹ Analyses of the interplay between the human senses and religious experience across the whole of the Shepherd, which to date have largely focused on ekphrasis and sight, could also be rewarding.Footnote ³⁰ With Harkins as guide, such study might invite ‘enacted readings’ of non-apocalyptic texts too, like apocryphal acts. Moreover, scholars of religious education could use the Shepherd – and in particular the tradition that reads it as ‘a catechetical text inside a catechetical text’ – as comparandum when analysing historic practices of catechesis and the religious experiences of the catechised.Footnote ³¹ Others might fruitfully connect the Shepherd with issues of concern in contemporary society, as Jonathon Lookadoo and Chance Bonar have done on mental health and enslavement, respectively.Footnote ³² Finally, scholars could explore more fully how the Shepherd reflects, or catalysed, the experience of religious innovation in antiquity.Footnote ³³

Even if all these potential avenues for research prove unproductive, Harkins, Maier and their fellow authors overwhelmingly confirm that the Shepherd can and should be analysed in fresh ways. The editors must be commended for recruiting a diverse slate of established scholars and rising voices representing multiple identities and perspectives, a significant feat at which coordinators of such volumes frequently fail. Their contribution to scholarship demonstrates that lived experience of religion is a multi-faceted, expansive lens with which to explore early Christian texts. One hopes that it prolongs the blossoming of studies on the Shepherd, encouraging others to shed new light on religion in antiquity and more recent periods from a variety of viewpoints.