Hermas (freedman)

Hermas was a well-to-do freedman who lived in Ancient Rome. He was a brother of Pius, Bishop of Rome about the middle of the 2nd century, and Hermas was an earnest Christian. Some later writers confuse him with the Hermas mentioned in Romans xvi, 14. Hermas the freedman was the character and, by some estimations, the author of the work titled The Shepherd of Hermas, which, in the early Church, was often classed among the "Scriptures," i.e., among what we call the canonical books of the New Testament.

These three are (a) the Muratorian fragment, (b) the Liberian catalogue of popes, in a portion which dates from 235 (Hippolytus?), (c) the poem of Pseudo-Tertullian against Marcion, of the 3rd or 4th century.

The statement that Hermas wrote during his brother's Pius pontificate may similarly be an inference from the fact that it was in a list of popes, against the name of Pius, that the writer found the information that Hermas was that pope's brother. He may have been an elder brother of the pope, who was probably an old man in 140 AD. Hence it is quite possible that Hermas might have been past thirty when Clement died, at the time of his first and second visions.

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