Graphic Bible · Scene 2 of 4

The shepherd explains repentance as great understanding to attentive Hermas.
AI-generated artwork interprets this work's literary visions and teaching, not authenticated historical events or portraits. Source and translation notes preserve the available edition's limits and review uncertainty. Reported literary teaching

Historical Library · Apostolic Fathers
Shepherd of Hermas — Mandate 4, section ii

The available POB edition is a partial translation, not a summary or the complete ancient work. Popular, not Scripture. Artwork interprets literary visions and teaching; it does not establish their portrayals as historical events.

Source and translation notes

The text names Hermas as its narrator. The illustrations do not identify a historical author or supply authenticated portraits.

Existing reader manuscript-image reference: Codex Sinaiticus. Working source: Lightfoot & Harmer 1891 (normalized OCR) · Greek

English witness: People's Open Bible provisional English rendering (Cartha Inc. and contributors) · CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — for POB project outputs; source editions retain their original licenses

Numbered reading units are modern paragraph divisions, not ancient verse numbers. The available units follow Visions, Mandates, and Similitudes; absent passages are not reconstructed.

  • The available edition begins mid-dialogue and ends mid-sentence in Similitude 8.iv; absent passages are not supplied.
  • Reading paragraph 2 [a]: Repentance and related expressions are read in this works own context; they are not restricted to feeling sorry, and no uniform Godward formula is imposed. Use repentance for moral change while preserving the works own teaching about baptism, forgiveness, conduct and the angel of repentance; do not impose a different tradition on it.

Shepherd of Hermas 30:2

Repentance Is Great Understanding

Story guide: The Shepherd describes repentance as understanding, joining recognition of wrongdoing with ceasing evil, doing good and humility.

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2Answering me, he says, "I," he says, "am appointed over repentance, and I give understanding to all who repent. Or does it not seem to you," he says, "that this very thing—to repent—is understanding? To repent," he says, "is great understanding. For the man who has sinned understands that he has done what is evil before the Lord, and the deed that he did rises up in his heart, and he repents and no longer does evil, but does good abundantly, and he humbles his own soul and afflicts it, because he sinned. You see then that repentance is great understanding."

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