shepherd: the person who feeds, leads, and guards a flock, and so the leader who is trusted with a people and answerable for them
At its root the word names an ordinary job. A shepherd walks a flock out to grass, keeps it together, brings back the ones that wander, and stands between the sheep and whatever would carry them off. That picture is the whole of the word, and every other use grows straight out of it.
But in the world of the Bible the picture had long been a title. Kings and gods were called shepherds of their peoples, from the law codes of Babylon to Greek poetry, where a chief is regularly the shepherd of his people. Israel's Scriptures use it the same way, with two edges: the Lord himself is the shepherd of his people, while the leaders who fatten themselves and scatter the flock are condemned as shepherds who failed, and a coming ruler from David's line is promised as the one shepherd who will finally do the job. So the word arrives in the New Testament already carrying rule, rescue, and accountability, not only tenderness.
That is why the New Testament can use one word at several distances at once:
- the working herders on the hills outside Bethlehem, out with a real flock at night
- the leader Israel has been missing, so that the crowds look worn out and adrift like sheep with nobody to lead them
- the promised shepherd himself, whom the Gospels identify as Jesus: the one who knows his sheep, gathers them into one flock, is struck so that they scatter, and gives up his life for them
- the leaders given to the church, who feed and guard God's people on his behalf
Because the word stays concrete, the demands of the job travel with it wherever it goes. The matching verb (ποιμαίνω) names the work itself, and the people cared for are the flock (ποίμνη). Calling anyone a shepherd is therefore a claim about responsibility for others, and about being held to it.
Nuances
Whether the shepherds of Luke 2:8 would have been seen in their own day as despised outcasts, or simply as ordinary working people.
- majorityThe claim is overstated: the evidence for shepherds as despised outcasts comes largely from sources written centuries later, and the point of the scene is that the announcement came to ordinary rather than elite people.; David A. Croteau, Urban Legends of the New Testament (2015); Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, NICNT (1997); Darrell L. Bock, Luke, BECNT (1994)
- minorityFirst-century shepherds were a despised and religiously suspect class, which is the force of their being the first to hear the announcement.; Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (English translation 1969)
What background the shepherd discourse of John 10 draws on, and whether its shepherd is a kingly, promised deliverer.
- majorityThe discourse grows out of Israel's Scriptures and later Jewish writing about the shepherds of Israel, above all Ezekiel 34 with its promise of one shepherd from David's line, so the shepherd here is the promised royal deliverer.; Johannes Beutler and Robert T. Fortna, eds., The Shepherd Discourse of John 10 and Its Context, SNTS Monograph Series 67 (1991); Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, Anchor Bible 29 (1966); Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (2003)
- minorityThe discourse reworks an older revealer myth in which the redeemer's own recognize his voice, and although it corresponds to Israel's Scriptures at points, its shepherd is not a kingly deliverer at all.; Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (English translation 1971)
Whether "the shepherds and teachers" in Ephesians 4:11 names two overlapping groups or a single combined role.
- majorityTwo groups that overlap rather than coincide: all who shepherd also teach, but not all teachers shepherd. The shared article does not fuse two plural nouns into one group, as comparable New Testament phrases show.; Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (1996); Frank Thielman, Ephesians, BECNT (2010)
- minorityOne combined role, the shepherd who teaches, so that separating the two into distinct offices misreads the text.; Charles Hodge, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (1856)