The Shepherd of Hermas and the Problem of its Text

[Steven Avery]

The Shepherd of Hermas and the Problem of its Text (1920)
Cuthbert Hamilton Turner
http://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/jts/021_193.pdf

Cuthbert Hamilton Turner, FBA (1860–1930) was an English ecclesiastical historian and Biblical scholar. He became Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford in 1920.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_Turner

"Yet even Aleph is not by any means a perfect text. The ancestry of the MS of Hermas must have come down through very ignorant hands, for the itacisms and such-like minor defects are far grosser than one commonly meets with: moreover the numerous corrections—partly by a contemporary hand, acting perhaps as the diorthota, but largely also by a hand of about the sixth century who must have had a different MS at his command—shew that the text was felt at a quite early date to call for systematic improvement."

Since they do not realize that Sinaiticus is a late manuscript, they write in a funny way, and you have to read between the lines.

But though Hermas certainly published his book in Greek, there may be reason to suspect that his own origins were less Greek than Latin. His brother’s name is purely Latin (Clement was the first, Pius was the second, Roman bishop to bear a Latin name) though his own is Greek: and there are features in his style which make one wonder if he is not writing in Greek but thinking in Latin.1

In addition to this, Barry Hofstetter commented on the funny way that the Greek Shepherd reads, as if it were not actually an ancient Greek text.