| Part of a series on |
| New Testament apocrypha |
|---|
 |
 Christianityportal |
The Acts of Paul and Thecla (Latin : Acta Pauli et Theclae) is an apocryphal text describing Paul the Apostle's influence on a young virgin named Thecla. It is one of the writings of the New Testament apocrypha. Edgar J. Goodspeed called it a "religious romance" [1]
It is attested no earlier than Tertullian, De baptismo 17:5 (c. 190), who says that a presbyter from Asia wrote the History of Paul and Thecla, and was deposed after confessing that he wrote it. [2] Eugenia of Rome in the reign of Commodus (180–192) is reported in the Acts of her martyrdom to have taken Thecla as her model after reading the text, prior to its disapproval by Tertullian. [3] Jerome recounts the information from Tertullian, [4] and on account of his exactitude in reporting on chronology, some scholars regard the text a 1st-century creation. [5]
Many surviving versions of the Acts of Paul and Thecla in Greek, and some in Coptic, as well as references to the work among Church fathers show that it was widely disseminated. In the Eastern Church, the wide circulation of the Acts of Paul and Thecla in Greek, Syriac, and Armenian is evidence of the veneration of Thecla of Iconium. There are also Latin, Coptic, and Ethiopic versions, sometimes differing widely from the Greek. "In the Ethiopic, with the omission of Thecla's admitted claim to preach and to baptize, half the point of the story is lost." [6]
A Coptic text of the Acts of Paul contains the Thecla narrative. [7]
The author sets this story during Paul the Apostle's First Missionary Journey, but this text is ideologically different from the New Testament portrayal of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles.
In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Paul travels to Iconium (Acts 13:51), proclaiming "the word of God about abstinence and the resurrection." Paul is given a full physical description that may reflect oral tradition. In the Syriac text, "he was a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large eyes [8] and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long, and he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time he seemed like an angel." While in Iconium, Paul gave his sermons in the house of Onesiphorus (cp. 2Tim 1:16) in a series of beatitudes, which Thecla, a young noble virgin, heard from her window in an adjacent house. She listened, enraptured, without moving for days. Thecla's mother, Theocleia, and her fiancé, Thamyris, became concerned that Thecla would follow Paul's demand "that one must fear only one God and live in chastity," and they formed a mob to drag Paul to the governor, who imprisoned the apostle.
Thecla bribed a guard to gain entrance to the prison, and sat at Paul's feet all night listening to his teaching and "kissing his bonds." When her family found her, both she and Paul were again brought before the governor. At her mother's request, Paul was sentenced to scourging and expulsion (cp. Acts 14:19, 2 Tim 3:11 refers to Paul, but not specifically Thecla), and Thecla to be killed by being burned at the stake, so that "all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid." Stripped naked, Thecla was put on the fire, but she was saved when God sent a miraculous storm to put out the flames.
According to apocryphal sources, Thecla and Paul reunited outside of Iconium, where she told him, "I will cut my hair off, and I shall follow you wherever you go." [9] The two then traveled to Pisidian Antioch (cp. Acts 14:21), where a nobleman named Alexander desired Thecla and offered Paul money for her. Paul claimed not to know her, and Alexander then attempted to take Thecla by force. Thecla fought him off, assaulting him in the process, to the amusement of the townspeople. Alexander dragged her before the governor for assaulting a nobleman, and, despite the protests of the city's women, Thecla was sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts. To ensure that her virtue would still be intact at her death, Queen Antonia Tryphaena took her into protective custody overnight.
The next day, Thecla was tied to a fierce lioness and paraded through the city. Though some condemned her for being sacrilegious, other women in the city protested the injustice of her sentence. Still, Thecla was stripped naked and thrown into an arena, where the lioness protected her from a bear and died while killing a lion that belonged to Alexander. Believing that the day in the arena would be her last chance to baptize herself, Thecla jumped into a vat of water that contained ravenous seals (or sea-calves, in some versions of the story). A miracle killed all the seals by lightning, before they could eat her. [10] Further miracles occurred during Thecla's trial when the perfumes of the women in the arena hypnotized the wild beasts so they wouldn't hurt Thecla, and when fire spared her from raging bulls. Thecla was freed when Queen Tryphaena fainted and Alexander begged the governor for mercy, believing that the queen was dead. The governor heard Thecla speak about the Christian God, ordered her clothed, and released her to the rejoicing women of the city. [11]
In Myra, Thecla returned to Paul unharmed and "wearing a mantle that she had altered so as to make a man's cloak." [12] She later returned to Iconium to convert her mother. [13] She went to live in Seleucia Cilicia. According to some versions of the Acts, she lived in a cave there for 72 years, becoming a healer. The Hellenistic physicians in the city lost their livelihood and solicited young men to rape Thecla at the age of 90. As they were about to take her, a new passage opened in the cave and the stones closed behind her. She was also able to go to Rome and lay beside Paul's tomb. [14]
The full text of The Acts of Paul at Wikisource, translation by M. R. James in the 1924 book The Apocryphal New Testament; section II of the full Acts are the Acts of Paul and Thecla{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)| Authority control databases: National |
|---|
The Epistle to the Laodiceans is a purported lost letter of Paul the Apostle, the original existence of which is inferred from an instruction in the Epistle to the Colossians that the congregation should send their letter to the believing community in Laodicea, and likewise obtain a copy of the letter "from Laodicea".
And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea.
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events relating to first-century Christianity. The New Testament's background, the first division of the Christian Bible, is called the Old Testament, which is based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible; together they are regarded as Sacred Scripture by Christians.
The Gospel of Nicodemus, also known as the Acts of Pilate, is an apocryphal gospel claimed to have been derived from an original Hebrew work written by Nicodemus, who appears in the Gospel of John as an associate of Jesus. The title "Gospel of Nicodemus" is medieval in origin. The dates of its accreted sections are uncertain, but the work in its existing form is thought to date to around the 4th or 5th century AD.
The Gospel of the Hebrews, or Gospel according to the Hebrews, is a lost Jewish–Christian gospel. The text of the gospel is lost, with only fragments of it surviving as brief quotations by the early Church Fathers and in apocryphal writings. The fragments contain traditions of Jesus' pre-existence, incarnation, baptism, and probably of his temptation, along with some of his sayings. Distinctive features include a Christology characterized by the belief that the Holy Spirit is Jesus' Divine Mother and a first resurrection appearance to James, the brother of Jesus, showing a high regard for James as the leader of the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem. It was probably composed in Greek in the first decades of the 2nd century, and is believed to have been used by Greek-speaking Jewish Christians in Egypt during that century.
The Apocalypse of Peter, also called the Revelation of Peter, is an early Christian text of the 2nd century and a work of apocalyptic literature. It is the earliest-written extant document depicting a Christian version of heaven and hell in detail. The Apocalypse of Peter is influenced by both Jewish apocalyptic literature and Hellenistic philosophy from Greek culture. The text is extant in two diverging versions based on a lost Koine Greek original: a shorter Greek version and a longer Ethiopic version.
The New Testament apocrypha are a number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. Some of these writings were cited as scripture by early Christians, but since the fifth century a widespread consensus has emerged limiting the New Testament to the 27 books of the modern canon. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant churches generally do not view the New Testament apocrypha as part of the Bible.
The Acts of Peter is one of the earliest of the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Christianity, dating to the late 2nd century AD. The majority of the text has survived only in the Latin translation of the Codex Vercellensis, under the title Actus Petri cum Simone. It is notable for a description of a miracle contest between Saint Peter and Simon Magus, the first record of the tradition that Saint Peter was crucified head-down, and as the origin of the saying Quo vadis?
The Gospel of Mary is an early Christian text discovered in 1896 in a fifth-century papyrus codex written in Sahidic Coptic. This Berlin Codex was purchased in Cairo by German diplomat Carl Reinhardt.
Thecla was a saint of the early Christian Church, and a reported follower of Paul the Apostle. The earliest record of her life comes from the ancient apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla.
The Acts of John refers to a collection of stories about John the Apostle that began circulating in written form as early as the 2nd-century AD. Translations of the Acts of John in modern languages have been reconstructed by scholars from a number of manuscripts of later date. The Acts of John are generally classified as New Testament apocrypha.
The Acts of Paul is one of the major works and earliest pseudepigraphal series from the New Testament apocrypha also known as Apocryphal Acts. This work is part of a body of literature either about or purporting to be written by Paul the Apostle, including letters, narratives, prayers, and apocalypses. An approximate date given to the Acts of Paul is 100-160 AD. The Acts of Paul were first mentioned by Tertullian, who deemed the work to be heretical. He mentioned that that the writings "wrongly go under Paul's name" and was "augmenting Paul's fame from his own store". Eusebius wrote than, unlike other writings which were classified as antilegomena in some instances, the Acts of Paul were always classified among the disputed. The Acts of Paul may have been considered orthodox by Hippolytus of Rome but were eventually regarded as heretical when the Manichaeans started using the texts. The author of the Acts of Paul is unknown, but probably came from a Christian community in Asia Minor that revered Paul. The work does not use the canonical Acts of the Apostles as a source; instead it relies on oral traditions of Paul's missionary work. The text is primarily known from Greek manuscripts. The discovery of a Coptic language version of the text demonstrated that the text was composed of:
The Correspondence ofPaul and Seneca, also known as the Letters of Paul and Seneca or Epistle to Seneca the Younger, is a collection of letters claiming to be between Paul the Apostle and Seneca the Younger. There are 8 epistles from Seneca, and 6 replies from Paul. They were purportedly authored from 58–64 CE during the reign of Roman Emperor Nero, but appear to have actually been written in the middle of the fourth century. Until the Renaissance, the epistles were seen as genuine, but scholars began to critically examine them in the 15th century, and today they are held to be inauthentic forgeries.
The Epistle of the Apostles is a work of New Testament apocrypha. Despite its name, it is more a gospel or an apocalypse than an epistle. The work takes the form of an open letter purportedly from the remaining eleven apostles describing key events of the life of Jesus, followed by a dialogue between the resurrected Jesus and the apostles where Jesus reveals apocalyptic secrets of reality and the future. It is 51 chapters long. The epistle was likely written in the 2nd century CE in Koine Greek, but was lost for many centuries. A partial Coptic language manuscript was discovered in 1895, a more complete Ethiopic language manuscript was published in 1913, and a full Coptic-Ethiopic-German edition was published in 1919.
The Acts of the Apostles is a genre of early Christian literature, recounting the lives and works of the apostles of Jesus. The Acts are important for many reasons, one of them being the concept of apostolic succession. They also provide insight into the valuation of "missionary activities among the exotic races," since some of them feature missionary work done among, for instance, the Cynocephaly.
The Epistle of Pseudo-Titus is a letter attributed to Titus, a companion of Paul of Tarsus, to an unidentified ascetic community of Christian men and women. It commends the life of chastity and condemns all sexual activity, even that within marriage, as sinful. The epistle is classified under the Apocryphal New Testament and survives only in the Codex Burchardi, an eighth-century Latin manuscript, discovered in 1896 among the homilies of Caesarius of Arles. The Latin epistle contains many solecisms which originated with an author who lacked proficiency with Latin and Greek. The origins of the epistle remain unclear, however, it contains strong features of encratism. It may have connections with the Priscillianist movement in fifth century Spain.
Infancy gospels are a genre of religious texts that arose in the 2nd century. They are part of New Testament apocrypha, and provide accounts of the birth and early life of Jesus. The texts are of various and uncertain origin, and are generally non-canonical in major modern branches of Christianity. They include the Gospel of James, which introduces the concept of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, both of which cover many miraculous incidents from the life of Mary and the childhood of Jesus that are not included in the canonical gospels. Although the Life of John the Baptist focuses on John the Baptist rather than Jesus or his immediate family, it is also included in the genre as its events would be contemporary with Jesus's early life.
Passion Gospels are early Christian texts that either mostly or exclusively relate to the last events of Jesus' life: the Passion of Jesus. They are generally classed as New Testament apocrypha. The last chapters of the four canonical gospels include Passion narratives, but later Christians hungered for more details. Just as infancy gospels expanded the stories of young Jesus, Passion Gospels expanded the story of Jesus's arrest, trial, execution, resurrection, and the aftermath. These documents usually claimed to be written by a participant mentioned in the gospels, with Nicodemus, Pontius Pilate, and Joseph of Arimathea as popular choices for author. These documents are considered more legendary than historical, however, and were not included in the eventual Canon of the New Testament.
The Acts of John in Rome is a 4th-century Christian apocryphal text that presents stories about the Apostle John. The text, written in Greek, is believed to be based on orally handed down stories about the works of John in Rome.
The Pilate cycle is a group of various pieces of early Christian literature that purport to either be written by Pontius Pilate, or else otherwise closely describe his activities and the Passion of Jesus. Unlike the four gospels, these later writings were not canonized in the New Testament, and hence relegated to a status of apocrypha. Some writings were quite obscure, with only a few ancient textual references known today; they merely survived through happenstance, and may not have been particularly widely read by early Christians in the Roman Empire and Christians in the Middle Ages. Others were more popular. The most notable example was the Gospel of Nicodemus, which proved quite popular and influential in medieval and Renaissance Christianity.
