The image of the Good Shepherd might be one of the most enduring symbols of Jesus Christ. For me, I’ve always found it uncomfortable, suggesting an agrarian era from another time and not speaking to my modern sensibilities. So it was a bit of a surprise to be taken aback by an ancient fresco while traveling in Rome this past winter.
One cloudy February afternoon, some friends and I took the number 64 bus from central Rome into the suburbs. I’d read about the Catacomb of Domitilla in an art history travel guidebook. The bus dropped us off in a modern neighborhood. After several wrong turns, each blocked by construction detours, we found our way down through layers of Roman tufa into underground chambers where early Christians buried their dead. The ceilings were low, and the air was cool and damp, heavy with centuries. And there, painted on the curved ceiling of a burial chamber, was an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb on his shoulders and surrounded by twelve disciples, in a fresco that also depicted the Last Supper.
This painting revealed something older than the Gospel of John, older than Luke’s parables. The young man in the fresco stood in a perfect Greco-Roman contrapposto, with his weight on one leg, mimicking a pose familiar from classical sculpture. His tunic was simple and almost archaic. The way he carried that ram did not resemble Jesus comforting the lost sheep. Instead, it resembled Hermes Criophorus, the ram-bearer, the Greek deity who guides souls to the underworld.
The Christians who commissioned this third-century fresco weren’t trying to hide their pagan borrowing. They were doing something far more interesting. They were speaking a visual language their neighbors could understand, translating the radical claims of their upstart religion into the grammar of images that Romans already knew how to read.
The Borrowed Image
The Good Shepherd motif was widespread in early Christian art, especially in funerary contexts, yet it had deep roots in Greco-Roman culture. The kriophoros, a figure carrying a ram, appeared in Greek sculpture as early as 500-450 BCE, often depicting Hermes. In Greek contexts, this shepherd symbolized protection, guidance, and the promise of safe passage.
Early Christians adapted the existing image of Hermes Criophorus, transforming the ram-bearing god into Christ, who protects the dead and leads them to eternity. The theological shift was profound, yet the visual vocabulary remained strikingly similar. Same contrapposto stance. Same lamb draped over the shoulders. Same young, beardless face. Same promise of safe passage through death.
Standing in that catacomb, I grasped what art historians call “syncretism”, the deliberate adaptation and reinterpretation of images from different traditions. The pagan depictions of shepherds on sarcophagi represented humanitas or philanthropia, virtues valued by both pagan and Christian groups. Early Christians didn’t create an entirely new visual language. Instead, they repurposed existing symbols of care, guidance, and transition from Roman funerary art to reflect their own cosmology.
But the borrowing went deeper than mere aesthetics. To understand why early Christians turned to Hermes when they wanted to depict Christ, we need to understand who Hermes was in the Greek imagination.
Hermes Psychopompos
Hermes served as a psychopomp, a deity who guided the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. His role wasn’t to judge the dead, but simply to accompany them on their journey. Hermes escorted souls to the River Styx (no, not the 1970s Rock band), where Charon would ferry them across into Hades. He was the divine companion at the moment of greatest vulnerability and fear.
The word itself—psychopompos—means “soul-guide.” In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp represents a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms, often appearing in dreams as a wise figure or a helpful animal. This is where the resonance with Christian theology becomes almost uncanny. Jesus, too, claims in the Gospel of John to be a shepherd who knows his sheep, calls them by name, lays down his life for them, and leads them to eternal pastures.
Both figures occupy liminal space, the threshold between life and death, between the known world and the unknown. Hermes was understood as a god of boundaries, and his association with the underworld reflected his role as guardian of the boundary between life and death. In Christian theology, Jesus performs a similar function, becoming the one who descends into death and emerges alive, and promising his followers that where he goes, they can follow.
The structural similarities: divine son (Hermes is Zeus’s son, Jesus is God’s son), shepherd imagery, psychopomp function, and boundary-crosser between realms. It’s as if early Christians looked at the available mythological vocabulary and thought, “Yes, this Hermes figure is the closest approximation we have for what we’re trying to say about Christ.”
The Demigod Pattern
There’s another layer worth exploring, namely, the pattern of the divine demigod, the offspring of a god and a mortal. This is standard fare in Greek mythology. Examples include Heracles, Perseus, and Achilles, all born of divine fathers and mortal mothers. Their dual nature gave them access to both worlds. They could walk among mortals and also traffic with the divine.
Jesus fits this pattern as well. Son of God, born of a mortal woman. Divine nature, human flesh. The early church councils would spend centuries articulating the precise mechanics of this relationship. The Nicene creed (C.E. 325) states as ‘fully God and fully human, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,’ yet the underlying structure echoes the Greek demigod tradition.
Jung called this the archetype of the Divine Child, the miraculous birth, the one who mediates between heaven and earth. It’s a pattern that recurs across cultures, not because one tradition borrowed from another in a simple, linear way, but because it speaks to something persistent in the human soul, namely, our hunger for a bridge between the transcendent and the earthly, between what we experience and what we intuit must lie beyond it.
The early Christians weren’t naïve about this. They knew they were working within existing patterns. Paul explicitly references Greek religion in his speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17, pointing to the altar to an unknown god and declaring that what the Greeks worship in ignorance, he proclaims to them in truth. It’s a rhetorical move that acknowledges continuity even as it claims superiority. We’re talking about the same God you dimly perceive, but now we’re naming him clearly.
Why the Image Faded
It might surprise the current churchgoer that by the fifth century, the Good Shepherd image had largely disappeared from Christian art. I say this because the image is still widely used in US American Protestantism, even though most modern people don’t own sheep. Yet Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church and The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd are popular names for congregations founded in the late 20th century. Additionally, every year, in the weeks following Easter, a Sunday is dedicated to the imagery of God as Shepherd, including a reading of Psalm 23, “the Lord is my Shepherd.” But the fifth-century Church emphasized Christ’s majesty in response to various doctrinal controversies. The humble shepherd seemed inadequate to convey Christ’s divine power. Instead, Christ enthroned, Christ triumphant, and Christ as Pantokrator became the preferred images. The vulnerable, boundary-crossing shepherd gave way to the imperial ruler. Ah, the wonders of Christendom.
Something was lost in that transition. The early church’s willingness to work with ambiguous, liminal imagery that could be understood by both people within Christianity and those outside gave way to a desire for clear doctrinal content. The thinking went that it was better to show Christ as king and teacher than to risk the Good Shepherd being misread as just another Hermes.
But religion works not by inventing entirely new languages but by taking the deep grammar of human myth-making, the patterns Jung called archetypes, and inflecting them in new directions. The shepherd who guides souls and the divine child born of god and mortal are patterns because they map onto persistent human experiences of transcendence, vulnerability, and transformation.
The Christians didn’t steal Hermes’s image. They recognized that the language of the psychopomp, the soul-guide who accompanies us through the valley of the shadow of death, was already embedded in human religious imagination. They simply claimed that in Jesus, this archetypal pattern had been made flesh in a new and definitive way.
Walking out of the Catacomb of Domitilla in February, I reflected on how modern viewers often overlook how religious images borrow from and transform shared archetypes. We prefer clear distinctions: Christian versus pagan, never blending. But the Good Shepherd fresco shows sacred language in borrowed forms. Early Christians had no problem depicting Jesus in the imagery of Greek gods, recognizing that Hermes and Jesus both address our need for guidance through death and act as boundary-crossers who show the way.
In that sense, Jesus as the Good Shepherd now makes sense to me.
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Gerhard Willhalm on Wikimedia under CC License
