The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata

by Robert D. Heaton

2023 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.

International Income Taxation

by Robert J. Peroni, Charles H. Gustafson, Richard Crawford Pugh

2008 · CCH

Compiled by a team of distinguished law professors, the 2008-2009 edition of INTERNATIONAL INCOME TAXATION: Code and Regulations--Selected Sections serves both students and practitioners in accessing the laws and regulations for U.S. international tax. For students, the INTERNATIONAL INCOME TAXATION: Code and Regulations--Selected Sections is a popular companion to an international tax coursebook for use in undergraduate or graduate courses in law and business schools. For practitioners, the book is an exclusive convenient desk reference. Unlike the full multi-volume Internal Revenue Code and Income Tax Regulations, this single-volume reference travels well between home and office -- and between classroom and dorm. The book features a reader-friendly large 7-1/4 x 10 format with new larger type fonts for enhanced readability.