THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
shown by many details; and the fact that he worked from an independent source not only demonstrates that the poor Latin of the Milan text is not that of the original author, but increases confidence in the substantial fidelity of the text as we have it. But even after a collation of the newly found extracts, there are still questions which can be solved only by conjecture. The most important of the hypotheses naturally formed is that the fragment is a translation of a Greek original. This was early suggested by Muratori and S. de Magistris, both of whom assigned its original composition to a Greekwriting author — the former to Caius of Rome and the latter to Papias; and the theory, supported in recent days by Hofmann, Tregelles, Westcott, Salmon, and Kuhn, is now the prevalent though not the universal one.
II. Place, Date, and Authorship: The designation of Rome not only as urbs Roma in 1. 76 but as urbs alone in 1. 38 indicates a western origin; and so (assuming the substantial completeness of the text) does the fact that James and Hebrews are not even mentioned. The circumstantial solemnity with which the position of Pius at the time of the writing of the Shepherd of Hermas is described is intelligible only if the author was writing, not indeed in Rome for Romans, but in or for a western church in some way connected with Rome. The date rests largely on the sentence already referred to (73 sqq.) : " The Pastor [i.e. Shepherd], moreover, did Hermas write very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while his brother bishop Pius sat in the chair of the church of Rome " (ANF, v. 604). If the words " very recently," by contrast with the epoch of the prophets and apostles, would allow the lapse of a considerable time between the writing of the Shepherd and that of this document, "in our times" is conclusive for the birth of the author before the death of Pius (not later than Easter, 154). The author took a lively personal interest in the position of the Shepherd in public worship; and this was not a question of the fourth and fifth centuries, but one vigorously discussed in the west about 200. The earlier date assigned by some, about 170 or 180, is improbable, if only because the writer speaks as a member of the Catholic Church which has definitely cast out not merely the parties of Valentinus, Basilides, and Marcion, but Montanism as well; and this was first true in Rome about 195, in Carthage not till after 203. The apologetic tone in which he speaks of John's Gospel and epistles implies that he was aware of the attacks made upon the Johannine writings by the Alogi, while he seems to know nothing of that of Caius, directed against the Apocalypse alone. This question and that of the relation of the Shepherd of Hermas to the canon were closely connected with the Montanist movement and the discussion stirred up by it in regard to discipline and to the place of prophecy in the Church. If the document was written within the region of Roman influence, it can scarcely have been written before 200-210. This excludes several suggested names for the author, such as Papias and Hegesippus. Caius is excluded by the fact that he was a bitter opponent of the Apoca-
lypse, which is mentioned with reverence in the Fragment as a work of the apostle. More plausible than this is Lightfoot's suggestion of Hippolytus; but against it are (1) the author's total silence as to Hebrews, in which Hippolytus was much interested; (2) the opinion that the Apocalypse was written before the Pauline epistles, while Hippolytus apparently held, as did Irenseus, that it was written under Domitian; and (3) the education possessed by the author, which is not that of Hippolytus. For the present, then, all that can be said is that a member of the Roman church, or of some Catholic community not far from Rome, wrote in Greek about 200-210 a synopsis of the writings recognized as belonging to the New Testament in his part of the Church. As the beginning of the Milan manuscript is missing, it is not known what sort of a work that was from which the compiler took what exists, or whether a similar survey of the Old Testament preceded it. To judge from internal evidence, the Latin version can hardly have been made before 350, possibly not till the fourth century.
III. Contents: This document is not a canon in the original sense of the word, a mere catalogue of titles, but is a survey of the entire New Testament, with historical information and theological reflections appended.
Although the description of only the third and fourth Gospels is complete and only a line of what went before has been preserved, it is i. Gospels generally admitted that Matthew and and Acts. Mark had been discussed. Of uncanonical gospels, such as were mentioned by Irenaeus and Origen in similar contexts, nothing is heard. The exclusive validity of our four Gospels for the author and his environment is perfectly apparent. The apologetic way, however, in which he speaks of the agreement of these four in all essentials, and the fact that this comes immediately after the account of the origin of the fourth and is followed at once by a defense of John's assertion of his own credibility in I John i. 1-4, show that this whole passage is a reply to the position of the Alogi toward the Johannine writings. Both here and in what is said about Mark and Luke, the relation of the evangelist to the facts he relates is emphasized. If the word beginning the first line is completed in the most probable way, the author says that Mark was not an eye-witness of all to which he testifies, but wrote his Gospel on the testimony of one or more who were, though some of the facts had come within his own experience. Of Luke it is said without qualification that he was not an eye-witness but dependent like any other historical writer on his investigations. Outside of his designation as a physician from Col. iv. 14, all that is said of him seems to be taken from the introduction to his Gospel. A brief but graphic description of the origin of the Fourth Gospel is given in lines 9-16, intelligible only as an excerpt from a longer account, and probably to be traced back to the Gnostic Leucius. In lines 34-39 the author goes on to the Acts, mentioning for the first time the address to Theophilus, but quoting it from Luke, not from Acts. The inference that Luke meant