Who was Thecla? Little known today, especially in Protestant churches, Thecla of Iconium enjoyed fame perhaps second only to Mary, mother of Jesus, in the early Christian era.
Thecla’s anonymity is all the more remarkable because women were so prominent in the formation of the church. The Gospels mention women who accompanied Jesus and the 12 apostles from town to town and supported them financially—Joanna, Mary Magdala, Susanna “and many others” (Luke 8:3). We know that Jesus considered himself “at home” in the home of Mary and her sister Martha (Luke 10:38–41; John 11:1–3, 12:2). After Jesus’ death, women evidently traveled as missionaries with their husbands or brothers (Romans 16:3, 7, 15); in Romans 16:7, Paul calls Junia an apostle, and he greets Euodia and Syntyche as “coworkers” (Philippians 4:2–3)—a term (in Greek, sunergos) that he usually reserved for apostles. Paul also makes it clear that women were expected to “prophesy” in the churches (1 Corinthians 11:5–10).
The voices that have come down to us from the early church are, however, those of men. Modern historians of the church study the Apostolic Fathers, the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and other materials written by men and about men. In other words, nearly everything we know about the early development of the church comes from the early church fathers. Men tend to be the heroes of these extrabiblical histories, and thus they have been assigned the roles of the major actors in the drama of early Christianity.
One outstanding exception is depicted in an apocryphal book written as early as the late second century C.E. and known as the Acts of Paul.1 She was Thecla, a woman of great renown and a follower of the apostle Paul. Thecla defied social convention of her time to follow the apostolic path herself. In the succeeding centuries, her fame extended from Asia Minor to the eastern borders of the church, to the sands of Egypt and into Europe. She was celebrated not only in oral and written legends but also at sacred sites where she was venerated and in art. Thecla’s story provides valuable insights into the role of women in early Christianity, as well as the challenges a female apostle faced in the Greco-Roman world.
Thecla’s tale is so different from the rest of the Acts of Paul that scholars conclude that it almost certainly circulated separately, probably in oral form, during the second century or perhaps even earlier, and was only later combined with the other stories about Paul.2 So there is considerable justification for referring to the Thecla cycle—sections 1–43 of the Acts of Paul—as the Acts of Thecla.
The Acts of Thecla begins in Thecla’s hometown, Iconium (modern Konya, about 150 miles south of Ankara, Turkey), when Paul arrives there from Antioch in flight from persecution. In the house of a local Christian man, Onesiphorus, the apostle preaches a message about “sexual abstinence and the resurrection”: “Blessed are those who keep the flesh pure, because they shall see God … Blessed are those who have wives as not having them for they shall be heirs to God … Blessed are the bodies of the virgins, because they shall be pleasing to God.”
Thecla, herself an unmarried virgin, sits at her window raptly listening to Paul’s preaching on her blessed state and is entranced: “When she saw many women and virgins going in to Paul, she also had an eager desire to be deemed worthy to stand in Paul’s presence and hear the word of Christ.” Her mother, Theocleia, is greatly troubled by this: Thecla is betrothed to a young man named Thamyris, yet Paul’s preaching is clearly giving her other ideas about what she wants to do with her life. Theocleia sends for her would-be son-in-law to tell him he might well lose Thecla:
I have a strange story to tell you, Thamyris. For three days and three nights Thecla does not rise from the window either to eat or to drink; but looking earnestly as if upon some pleasant sight she is devoted to a foreigner teaching deceitful and artful discourses … Thamyris, this man will overturn the city … and your Thecla too.
The “natural” destiny of a woman—dutifully to marry and bear children—is being diverted before her family’s eyes. Thecla’s whole household weeps bitterly: “Thamyris for the loss of his wife, Theocleia for that of a child, and the maidservants for that of a mistress.”
So Thamyris joins a plot against Paul and gets the apostle thrown in prison.
Thecla searches throughout the city for Paul; when she finds him, she bribes his jailers with her jewelry to let her in so she can sit at his feet and hear his words. She accompanies Paul to his tribunal, where the