This judicious guidebook provides a valuable introduction to the Shepherd of Hermas, useful for researchers at both the beginning and advanced levels. The book comprises two parts. Part i, ‘Introducing the Shepherd of Hermas’, begins with an overarching introduction to the Shepherd (chapter i), before delving more deeply into its textual transmission (chapter ii), reception history (chapter iii) and provenance and readership (chapter iv). These chapters may offer less to the advanced scholar of the Shepherd, but will be particularly useful for beginning researchers looking for a general orientation to the text and its history.

Chapter ii's overview of the manuscript history of the Shepherd is particularly helpful, rightly supporting Lookadoo's claim that the Shepherd ‘is one of the most widely attested early Christian texts’ (p. 25). Chapter iii nicely supplements this textual history through an overview of the early reception of the Shepherd, from roughly the second through the fifth centuries. Lookadoo rightly concludes that the Shepherd was ‘widely, though not universally’ regarded as authoritative among early Christian readers (p. 52), pointing to early favourable reception among Church Fathers as well as its inclusion in early copies of the New Testament (for example in the Codex Sinaiticus). The Handbook's treatment here proves informative and inspirational: Lookadoo subtly calls for scholars to recognise the early and enduring significance of the Shepherd, and thus accept it as integral to understanding early Christianity.

Part ii, ‘Studying the Shepherd of Hermas’, provides closer analysis of the Shepherd's images and metaphors (chs v, xi, xii), major characters (ch. vi), relevant literary contexts (chs vii, viii), theology and Christology (chapter ix) and views on sin and repentance (ch. x). This part of the book will be especially useful to scholars seeking a deeper dive into the Shepherd's intricacies. Lookadoo's tracing of parallels with Jewish and Greco-Roman literature represents the strongest and most distinctive aspect of the Handbook, distinguishing it from past introductory treatments that have primarily viewed the Shepherd through intra-Christian literary lenses. Lookadoo is judicious here, pointing to compelling parallels without stretching the connections into claims of dependence (see, for example, p. 116). ‘The Shepherd is a text that is fully at home in a Greco-Roman literary setting’, Lookadoo fittingly concludes (p. 118). The Handbook's careful identification of parallels with literary texts, moreover, serves as a corrective to previous treatments of the Shepherd, which have dismissed the literary nature of the text in favour of a purely ‘oral’ provenance.

Lookadoo's attempt at reaching a dual audience at times leads to uneven results. The Handbook includes some rather self-evident claims (for example that ‘Jews had a particularly strong influence on early Christians’, p. 111; the statement that ‘authority’ in the Shepherd ‘legitimizes the message that is shared’, p. 107) that will perplex the more advanced reader. On the other hand, Lookadoo's finely-detailed distinctions between terms (for example, the discussion of ‘multisemy’ versus ‘polysemy’, p. 73) may remain unclear to beginning readers. The Handbook leaves some areas relatively underexplored: for example Lookadoo discusses the role of a certain Clement in helping Hermas disseminate the Shepherd, but does not include discussion on previous scholarly speculations that this person may have some connection to the otherwise-known Christian figure, Clement of Rome (pp. 104–5). The logic behind the organisation of part ii, with its close analyses of specific chapters or verses (chs v, xi, xii) bracketing more general treatments of themes and contexts (chs vii–xi), is never satisfactorily explained, though it does not detract from the individual chapters’ utility.

These relatively minor criticisms should not diminish Lookadoo's overarching achievement: this is an eminently useful guidebook to a piece of early Christian literature that merits more serious attention. Lookadoo throughout deftly interweaves reviews of previous scholarship with his own perspective, never allowing the latter to dominate. Similarly, the Handbook nicely balances the contextualisation of the Shepherd against its cultural backdrops alongside due attention to the text's distinctive features. The Handbook's greatest credit is that it takes the Shepherd seriously as a piece of Christian literature. Lookadoo fully appreciates the complex and innovative aspects of Shepherd, never dismissing it as too ‘simplistic’ or the product of an ‘uneducated mind’ (as have previous commentators), but recognising it as a text worthy of detailed study. This will surely inspire future readers to approach the Shepherd similarly; they would do well to start their investigations under Lookadoo's guidance.