Hermas

Hermas was a freedman and Christian born in Aquileia, who lived at Rome in the second century. He was the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome about the middle of the second century. Their father, an Italian named Rufinus, was also, according to the Liber Pontificalis, a native of Aquileia. Some later writers identify him as Hermas of Dalmatia. He is the character and, by some assessments, the author of the work The Shepherd of Hermas, which in the early Church was sometimes classed among the canonical Scriptures. He has no day of commemoration in the calendar at hand.

A Greek source says he received no education, since while still a child he was sold as a slave and sent to Rome, and that in his work he claims the title of prophet. That he was the brother of Pius is said by three sources: the Muratorian fragment ("Very recently, in our own times, in the city of Rome, Hermas wrote the Shepherd, when his brother Pius, the bishop, sat on the chair of the Church of Rome, and therefore it ought to be read, but it cannot be publicly read to the people in church, neither among the prophets, whose number is complete, nor among the apostles, of the end of times"), the Liberian catalogue of popes, in a part from 235 ("Under his episcopate his brother Hermes wrote a book in which are contained the precepts which the angel delivered to him, coming to him in the guise of a Shepherd") and the poem of Pseudo-⁠Tertullian against Marcion, of the third or fourth century ("Then after him Pius, whose brother according to the flesh was Hermas, the angelic shepherd, because he spoke the words given to him"). The statement that Hermas wrote during his brother's pontificate may likewise be an inference from the fact that the writer found, in a list of popes, against the name of Pius, the information that Hermas was that pope's brother. He may have been an elder brother of the pope.

The Shepherd has been viewed as an allegory, similar to Pilgrim's Progress. Apparent autobiographical points "may be fact, or pure fiction, or fiction founded upon fact." It is not even certain that the writer's name was really Hermas. He is not to be confused with the Hermas mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans 16:14.