Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 9.12.6 (89.6)

Summary: The Son of God is the one entrance to the Lord.

Greek text · Lake, LCL 25:250

Εἶδες, φησί, τὸν ὄχλον τὸν οἰκοδομοῦντα τὸν πύργον; Εἶδον, φημί, κύριε. Ἐκεῖνοι, φησί, πάντες ἄγγελοι ἔνδοξοί εἰσι· τούτοις οὖν περιτετείχισται ὁ κύριος. ἡ δὲ πύλη ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν· αὕτη μία εἴσοδός ἐστι πρὸς τὸν κύριον. ἄλλως οὖν οὐδεὶς εἰσελεύσεται πρὸς αὐτὸν εἰ μὴ διὰ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ.

English · Claude translation

Did you see,” he said, “the crowd that was building the tower?” “I saw, sir,” I said. “They,” he said, “are all glorious angels; by these, then, the Lord is walled around. And the gate is the Son of God; this is the one entrance to the Lord. No one, then, will enter to him in any other way than through his Son.

About this passage

Source

Lake, LCL 25:250 · Kirsopp Lake, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2, LCL 25 (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1913), 138–305 · Greek text: K. Lake, The Apostolic Fathers (LCL, 1912-1913), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library and published by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin), CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Lake, LCL 25. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-26 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Lake (LCL 25, 1913), and from the ancient Latin version where Lake prints it because the Greek is lost (from Sim. 9.30.3); made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2 (1885) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made)

Topics

Christology

Cite this passage

Herm. Sim. 9.12.6 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/herm-sim/9/12/6/).

Plain text

Herm. Sim. 9.12.6 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/herm-sim/9/12/6/).