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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]
The discovery[ when? ] of a Coptic text of the Acts of Paul containing the Thecla narrative [7] suggests that the abrupt opening of the Acts of Paul and Thecla is due to its being an excerpt of that larger work.[ citation needed ]
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]
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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.
Marcion of Sinope was a theologian in early Christianity. Marcion preached that God had sent Jesus Christ, who was distinct from the "vengeful" God (Demiurge) who had created the world. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ; his doctrine is called Marcionism. Marcion published the earliest record of a canon of New Testament books.
Marcionism was an early Christian dualistic belief system that originated with the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144. Marcion was an early Christian theologian, evangelist, and an important figure in early Christianity. He was the son of a bishop of Sinope in Pontus. About the middle of the 2nd century (140–155) he traveled to Rome, where he joined the Syrian Gnostic Cerdo.
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 Apostolic Fathers, also known as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, were core Christian theologians among the Church Fathers who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD who are believed to have personally known some of the Twelve Apostles or to have been significantly influenced by them. Their writings, though widely circulated in early Christianity, were not included in the canon of the New Testament. Many of the writings derive from the same time period and geographical location as other works of early Christian literature which came to be part of the New Testament.
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 Pauline epistles are the thirteen books in the New Testament traditionally attributed to Paul the Apostle.
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 forgeries.
John of Patmos is the name traditionally given to the author of the Book of Revelation. Revelation 1:9 states that John was on Patmos, a Greek island where, according to most biblical historians, he was exiled as a result of anti-Christian persecution under the Roman emperor Domitian.
Bart Denton Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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.
Christianity in the ante-Nicene period was the time in Christian history up to the First Council of Nicaea. This article covers the period following the Apostolic Age of the first century, c. 100 AD, to Nicaea in 325 AD.
Christianity in the 1st century covers the formative history of Christianity from the start of the ministry of Jesus to the death of the last of the Twelve Apostles and is thus also known as the Apostolic Age. Early Christianity developed out of the eschatological ministry of Jesus. Subsequent to Jesus' death, his earliest followers formed an apocalyptic messianic Jewish sect during the late Second Temple period of the 1st century. Initially believing that Jesus' resurrection was the start of the end time, their beliefs soon changed in the expected Second Coming of Jesus and the start of God's Kingdom at a later point in time.
Traditionally in Christianity, orthodoxy and heresy have been viewed in relation to the "orthodoxy" as an authentic lineage of tradition. Other forms of Christianity were viewed as deviant streams of thought and therefore "heterodox", or heretical. This view was challenged by the publication of Walter Bauer's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum in 1934. Bauer endeavored to rethink Early Christianity historically, independent from the views of the current church. He stated that the 2nd-century church was very diverse and included many "heretical" groups that had an equal claim to apostolic tradition. Bauer interpreted the struggle between the orthodox and heterodox to be the "mainstream" Church of Rome struggling to attain dominance. He presented Edessa and Egypt as places where the "orthodoxy" of Rome had little influence during the 2nd century. As he saw it, the theological thought of the "Orient" at the time would later be labeled "heresy". The response by modern scholars has been mixed. Some scholars clearly support Bauer's conclusions and others express concerns about his "attacking [of] orthodox sources with inquisitional zeal and exploiting to a nearly absurd extent the argument from silence." However, modern scholars have critiqued and updated Bauer's model.
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.
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.
