Giuseppe wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 4:25 am
MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 2:34 am
Giuseppe wrote: ↑Thu Sep 05, 2019 7:50 am
Please, note the difference: Hermas didn
't know Mark, but Mark
knew Hermas.
Hence Mark was written after Hermas.
.
On what basis do you say that, Giuseppe?
On the fact that Mark corrected Hermas by calling
Jesus, and
not the Spirit, as "beloved son" and "heir".
The contrary is not possible, since Hermas couldn't remove these titles from the Gospel Jesus to apply them to the Spirit,
had he known the Gospel Jesus.
But Mark
could remove these titles from the Spirit and apply them to Jesus, had he known Hermas.
That a relation exists between the two works is proved by the occurrence too-much-impossible-to-be-a-coincidence of "heir" and "beloved son" in a "parable".
I agree that a relationship of some kind exists (whether direct or indirect).
One issue I have with the rest of your statement is that Parable 5 in the Shepherd is a
mess. Multiple textual issues are present in the manuscripts, as well as weird statements which have prompted a variety of scholarly conjectural emendations.
Here is a difficult part, for example:
Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 5.5.5-5.6.1: 5.5 "Say on," he saith, "if thou desirest anything." "Wherefore, Sir," say I, "is the Son of God represented in the parable in the guise of a servant?" 6.1 "Listen," said he; "the Son of God is not represented in the guise of a servant, but is represented in great power and lordship." "How, Sir?" say I; "I comprehend not."
I am with Hermas on this one. The Son of God is most certainly represented "in the guise of a servant" in the parable:
Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 5.5.2-3: 2 "The estate is this world, and the lord of the estate is He that created all things, and set them in order, and endowed them with power; and the servant is the Son of God, and the vines are this people whom He Himself planted; 3 and the fences are the [holy] angels of the Lord who keep together His people; and the weeds, which are plucked up from the vineyard, are the transgressions of the servants of God; and the dainties which He sent to him from the feast are the commandments which He gave to His people through His Son; and the friends and advisers are the holy angels which were first created; and the absence of the master is the time which remaineth over until His coming."
But look at all the layers of symbolism heaped upon this parable. If the master's absence is the remaining time until his (= God's) coming, then is the servant (= the Son of God) exalted only at that coming? This would be a pretty extreme form of adoptionistic theology, but later in the text we get this:
Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 9.12.2: 2 "The Son of God is older than all His creation, so that He became the Father's adviser in His creation. Therefore also He is ancient." "But the gate," say I, "why is it recent, Sir?"
Okay, so what gives?
It appears to me that Parable 5 is a combination of multiple originally separate parables: one about a vineyard, another about a feast, and another about the master's absence, at least. The result is similar to the morass one finds in Matthew's parable of the wedding feast, as I have
argued elsewhere.
"The son is the Holy Spirit" in 5.5.2 is actually missing from most manuscripts. Scholars tend to accept it (from a single manuscript) as the
lectio difficilior, and they are probably right to do so. But the entire section is so difficult that the following may also be true:
Carolyn Osiek, The Shepherd of Hermas (Hermeneia), pages 177-178: The ambiguity results from awkward combining of different segments of interpretation and from later editing of different layers or editions of the text, as the narrative developed and the interpretations became more complex.
Furthermore, after such a distinction is made in this parable's interpretation between the Spirit and the Son of God, in another parable we find
this equation:
Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 9.1.1: 1 After I had written down the commandments and parables of the shepherd, the angel of repentance, he came to me and saith to me, "I wish to show thee all things that the Holy Spirit, which spake with thee in the form of the Church, showed unto thee. For that Spirit is the Son of God."
In short, I agree that it is weird that the Shepherd has applied the terms "beloved" and "heir" to a figure in the parable meant to represent the Holy Spirit, but there is more going on here than that, and it is
already weird that the son of the master in the parable does not represent the Son of God in the interpretation.