The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

Thecla’s Challenge to Both Rome and the Early Christian World

An Interview with Dr. Perry Kea

Dr. Perry Kea

When the young teen, Thecla, heard Paul’s preaching about a new kind of life following Christ, she became infatuated with both the message and the messenger. Abandoning her fiancé and her Roman aristocratic life style, she faced two death threats, discovered her own strength and worth, and matured in her appreciation for both Paul and his teachings. She bought into the ascetic way of life and insisted on her rights as a woman with authority.

Dr. Perry Kea has been an active Scholar of the Westar Institute since 1987. He served as the Chair of its Board of Directors from 2014 – 2019. He co-Chaired Westar’s Mini-seminar on the Bible and Human Sexuality and has participated in several other seminars, notably the Jesus Seminar, the Acts Seminar, and the two Christianity Seminars. He also contributes to Westar publications and Westar programming. Perry is Associate Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught for 35 years.

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Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson:

Today, our guest scholar, Dr. Perry Kea, is going to talk about one of my favorite Christian books, The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Whether you’re very familiar with Thecla’s story or it’s new to you, I think you’ll agree when we get into this that it’s quite interesting to think about from many different angles.

So let me introduce to you Perry Kea. He’s a longtime member and leading scholar of the Westar Institute and was its board chair for about five years. Also, he was an active member of Westar’s Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles. So he knows his stuff. He taught 35 years at the University of Indianapolis. And I’m really glad to have you with us today, Perry, to talk about Thecla, this amazing ancient character.

Perry Kea:

Thank you, Shirley. I’ve enjoyed being with you and your audiences before on the Bible and Beyond, and it’s a pleasure to be with you again. Thank you. Just a little peek of the book. Out of the Shadows: The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Yes, with my co-author, Brandon Scott, whom I know you’ve had on your program before as well.

Shirley:

Yes, that’s right. Yes. So this book that we’re talking about that has not only the story itself, but you do a lot of wonderful explaining about where it came from, what it’s about, why it happened, and all those things are interesting as well as the story itself.

My guess is that some of our listeners may know the story of Thecla quite well, but others may not. So I thought to get us all on the same page, it might be helpful for you to give us a brief account of the story itself. And I know that the plot has lots of twists and turns, but to give us a basic outline of the story so we can understand what we’re talking about. Why don’t you give us that?

Perry:

Okay, I’ll try to hit just enough highlights to fill people in who don’t know it. This is a very fast-paced little story. It’s only two chapters long, but Paul is traveling in Asia Minor, southern Asia Minor. He arrives in the city of Iconium and begins preaching, and the message is heavy on sexual continence. A young aristocratic woman named Thecla is listening from her room through an open window, and she is just captivated by this message. So much so, she won’t leave. She won’t eat, and worse, she won’t communicate with her mother or her fiancé or any of the household slaves. So they become very worried about this, and the fiancé goes looking for information about Paul. He finds out some dirt on Paul and has him arrested.

Thecla learns that Paul’s been thrown into prison. She slips out at night, bribes her way into Paul’s cell, and listens to him preach. At the same time, there’s more going on. She’s really filled not just with joy at this message, but there’s a strong sexual undertone here. Paul—we’ll say more about this later—but Paul is a desirable object for her.

So, of course, this being the kind of story it is, they are discovered and hauled in before the governor. The governor seems fairly well disposed to hear Paul out, but when he turns to Thecla, he asks her, “Why won’t you marry your fiancé?” And she won’t answer him. And so then her own mother calls for her to be executed by being burned at the stake, because they want to send a signal to the whole city that this is not permissible.

So Paul is scourged and thrown out of the city. They prepare a funeral pyre for her. She climbs onto it, but God miraculously intervenes and rescues her. And that chapter ends with her just kind of wandering off. It doesn’t say where she goes or anything like that.

The second chapter begins with Paul hiding in a cave outside of the city with a Christian family. Thecla finds them, and there’s a wonderful reunion scene. Thecla announces to Paul, “I’m going with you when you start traveling. I’ll cut my hair to go with you.” He seems rather, shall we say, reluctant to do this. He says, “The times are evil, and you’re very beautiful and something worse may happen to you.” But she insists and asks him to baptize her, to give her the bath, literally. Curiously, he puts her off and that’ll play out later in the story.

So they start off and come to another town where immediately this very powerful man, powerful socially, economically, and apparently physically, just recognizes her as this gorgeous woman and tries to purchase her from Paul. Paul does not behave very well. He denies even knowing her, and that’s the last we hear of Paul until the end of the story.

Yeah, this aristocrat named Alexander then really tries to force himself. It’s basically a sexual assault. She fights him off and is able to humiliate him. And because of that, he has her arrested by the governor who, after a short hearing, condemns her to the wild beasts.

Fast forward: after a few days in the custody of a wealthy aristocratic woman who’s taking care of her until the death sentence is carried out, she’s led into the arena, and wild beasts are released upon her. But this is where the action gets fast and furious. Every time it looks like the end is there for her, something happens to help her out.

There’s a really interesting point in the story where it looks like she’s finally going to meet her death, and she spots a pool of water. And she says, now’s the time for me to bathe. I bathe or baptize myself on my last day. She jumps in. And because there are man-eating seals in the water, God miraculously strikes the water and the seals float up dead, but she is saved.

Then what’s really interesting is the women in the arena start howling with disgust at what’s happening to her. They’ve clearly taken her side and they start tossing in all of these aromatic spices and stuff to try and confuse the scent of the animals. God has also sent in a kind of cloud cover to protect her.

And after further adventures, everything has failed. Alexander and everyone is stopped in their tracks when the aristocratic woman who was safeguarding Thecla thinks she’s died. Here’s the little trump card. This woman turns out to be a distant relative of the emperor. So they think, uh-oh, we’ve killed the emperor’s relative. Let’s bring this to a halt now.

So the governor calls Thecla forward and asks her, “Who are you?” And that gives her a chance to bear witness, to give her testimony. And it’s short but eloquent. And then the women in the city just roar their approval. The governor releases her. It turns out that the aristocratic matron who’s been sheltering her had merely fainted. She takes her home, signs over all of her property to Thecla, and the whole household is converted by Thecla.

The story ends with her going in search of Paul and finding him in a nearby city. He’s flabbergasted that she’s still alive. But once he hears her story and how she baptized herself, he tells her directly, go and teach the word of God. She then goes back to her hometown of Iconium. Conveniently, her fiancé has died. She makes a little speech to her mother, offering her the chance to become a follower of the Anointed. And then she departs and goes to another city, Seleucia, where it ends abruptly. She slept a beautiful dream. That’s the end.

Shirley:

What a story. I mean, like that’s not only imagined, but to make up something like that! Wow. So there’s a lot going on with it. As you said, “It’s a fast paced story!” But there’s a lot of layers of things to think about also. Maybe you could help us to think about where was it written? Why was it written? And give us a little context for where this came from.

Perry:

Okay. Right around the year 200, a North African Christian writer named Tertullian makes the first known reference to this story. He’s not fond of it, let’s say. So we know that it was in existence by then. Based on some other things that we can get into if you want, it probably had to have been written after about 130. So somewhere in the middle of the second century, in the broadest terms, 140 to 180 is probably when it was written. As for where it was most likely written, all of the place names in the Acts of Paul and Thecla are in south central Asia Minor. And Tertullian himself thought it had been written by an Asia Minor elder. So there’s very broad consensus that the story was composed in Asia Minor.

Shirley:

Okay. All right. Well, that maybe tells us things or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t really know. But let’s sort of get into a little bit more of them. I think we should talk about the shadows. Your book is talking about coming out of the shadows. Was this book ever popular among Christians? Or why do you think it fell into shadows?

Perry:

Yeah. And that’s why we wanted to bring that out in our title. The story of Thecla was very popular for centuries. We know that it was originally written in Greek, but it was quickly translated into other languages like Coptic, Latin, Syriac, and even Armenian. If you count up all of the manuscript fragments and nearly complete manuscripts of the Acts of Paul and Thecla, there are over 40 manuscripts. Think about that, you know, the big interest, deservedly goes for things like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary. We don’t have anything like that kind of attestation. This is an extremely strong manuscript tradition.

Interestingly, the Acts of Paul and Thecla circulated independently, but also as part of a larger collection known a little confusingly as the Acts of Paul. The Acts of Paul is 14 chapters long. The Thecla story occupies chapters 3 and 4 in that. Very interestingly, when you look at the manuscript tradition, Thecla is much better preserved. We have complete copies in Greek and in Coptic of the Thecla story. Most of the Acts of Paul outside of that is pretty fragmentary with a couple of important exceptions. With the exception of Tertullian, other surviving references to Thecla in the patristic literature is positive. She’s a well-known figure. She’s usually cited as an example of piety or kind of the model virgin. So Tertullian is the only one to have a bad thing to say about her.

Its popularity does begin to wane in the Middle Ages after roughly 900 or 1000. That may have had something to do with the… She was known and revered in the West, but especially so in the East. And as the Eastern churches’ territory shrank in the coming of the expansion of the Muslim movement, some of the places where her memory had really been revered were reduced or just over time shriveled up. But this took a long time. So for most Christians in what we’ll call the modern period, the post-Reformation period, Thecla’s story was poorly known. In the late 19th century, an English translation appeared of it in the volume known as the Ante-Nicene Fathers, that is, before Nicene Fathers, under the heading of ‘Apocrypha.’ There were a couple of other translations in the early 20th century. And then when the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi documents were found in the mid and late 1940s, there was this sudden renewed interest in other Christian literature outside of the New Testament, the so-called extra-canonical materials. And people began to realize, my goodness, we’ve got the story, Thecla, it’s been around a long time, let’s take a fresh look at it. And I think we’ve got to give a lot of credit to feminist scholars for bringing it back to our attention and putting it center stage for our rethinking about what this tells us about the Jesus movements in the second century.

Shirley:

That’s so interesting. Wow, I’d love to know more about Paul’s relationship to it and all that, but I think we need to kind of move on to some other maybe bigger questions even. What would you say would be the point of the story? Besides being an amazing adventure story, why was this so important for this author to convey? What was the deal?

Perry:

Yeah, let me first mention that whatever theological emphases it has—and we’ll get to that—it is packaged in a highly entertaining story. The story draws on the conventions of the ancient romance novel. And as the name implies, a romance novel in the ancient world was about lovers separated by cruel or unfortunate circumstances who strive throughout the story to be reunited, and they go through many trials and tribulations like Thecla—often in danger of death or beatings and imprisonments and so forth. But sooner or later, the couples reunite and they live happily ever after. Thecla’s story draws on that, and the commentary that my co-author Brandon Scott mostly produced really points that out well.

What’s interesting is that the story of Thecla uses the conventions of that romance novel, but then undermines them, subverts them. Thecla’s desire for Paul, her “lover,” results in her sexual continence and rejection of household domesticity. She’s not going to end up like the women who get to marry their lovers, their betrothed in the romance novels. She’s going to remain celibate and follow Jesus. And one of the things that the story does, we argue strongly, is that it challenges the traditional social structures of the Roman Empire, which were highly patriarchal, and there’s a very specific place for women in that. Thecla’s story is really pushing against that and suggests that it was enjoyed by people, perhaps men and women, who appreciated that anti-empire, anti-establishment emphasis.

Shirley:

Okay, so now let’s talk a little bit more about the story itself. How did Thecla get involved with Paul? You’ve alluded to a kind of a surprising relationship with Paul. What’s that about? I mean, that just seems a little odd. We don’t think of Paul falling in love with anybody.

Perry:

The one filled with desire is Thecla. Okay, Paul is warm towards her, except when he’s not. Like when he denies even knowing her to Alexander. Commentators have danced around each other trying to figure out what that’s about.

Yeah, okay. But when Paul gets to Iconium, Thecla’s hometown, he is invited into the home of a Jesus follower named Onesiphorus, whose name is mentioned in the New Testament. And it is from his house that Paul preaches. And the way it’s presented in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, it’s a list of beatitudes. It sounds similar to Matthew’s beatitudes. In fact, the very first one is pretty much a quote from one of the beatitudes in Matthew. But the emphasis in Paul’s beatitudes in the Acts of Paul and Thecla are on sexual purity. And let me just share with you a couple of these:

• Congratulations to those who keep the flesh chaste, for they will be God’s temple.
• Congratulations to those who, having wives, do not possess them, for they will be heirs of God.
• Congratulations to virgins whose bodies are very pleasing to God and will not lose the reward for their purity.

So you can quickly see that that’s a primary emphasis of Paul’s preaching as this story wants to present it. And Thecla, we are told, is captivated by this message. But then when she actually meets Paul, she is filled with an overwhelming desire. And her mother, even before Thecla has met Paul, describes Thecla as consumed with a strange desire for this stranger.

Shirley:

Wow, yeah. So go ahead. This is so odd that the story is about continence, and yet she’s filled with this sexual desire at the same time. I mean, that just seems like an odd thing. Is that trying to tell people who have this desire that they should channel their desires somewhere else?

Perry:

Why, I think you can read it that way. At the point where Thecla is in the jail cell with Paul before the two of them are discovered, she’s kissing his chains. She’s like a little lovesick puppy. And when they haul him away, she’s just so lovesick that she rolls around on the ground until they take her away. And then she’s happy to be going apparently with Paul.

But then in the second chapter, where after she is arrested and Paul is no longer on the scene, her own, shall we say strength and maybe even maturity, begin to come through. Paul’s not there. She displays all kinds of what the ancients would consider manly virtues. She’s bold in her speech. She takes decisive action. She is brave in the face of death. These are manly virtues. And here they are in this young girl. Her age isn’t given, but she’s a young virgin. We’ve got to imagine someone between 14 and 18.

So here she is in the arena and standing up to everything that the governor and the empire can throw at her. So I think you can say that there is a progression in the way her character develops. She grows into, you might say, her commitment to sexual purity in a way that at the end of the story, she still cares for Paul deeply. And that’s why she goes looking for him. But when they meet, she emphasizes that the God who called Paul was also at work in her—in her self-baptism, kind of making herself an equal to Paul. She’s been his disciple, but now she’s an equal. And as confirmation of that, he says, “Go teach the Word of God.” So I think she’s graduated, you might say.

Shirley:

Yeah, that’s so interesting. It’s a second century story. We just have to keep that in mind. But I’m trying to understand also, it just seems like in her maturity, she’s gaining this shift in thought about how to handle her own sexual feelings and thoughts and so forth.

Why do you think that there was such an emphasis on sex going on in the second century? Why was that so intertwined in the Christian discussion? Or was that just a story about Thecla trying to overcome her sexual drive?

Perry:

Well, two things to be said about that. One of the things about the story of Thecla that everyone recognizes is that, particularly in one of those Beatitudes that I read: “Those with wives should live without possessing them,” is a near quote from one of Paul’s lines in 1 Corinthians. The attitude towards marriage and sexual purity in the story of Thecla is much closer to Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 than what we find in some other places. You might recall Paul had not opposed marriage in 1 Corinthians 7. He even encouraged married couples who were both believers to continue to have sexual relations with each other. But to those who were single or widowed, he encouraged them to remain that way if they could. He always quickly added, if you desire to get married, that’s okay. You aren’t doing anything wrong.

Thecla picks up on that, and she’s single. She’s not married. She wants to stay that way. And so we also know now that in the 2nd century, there were various—what we might call—social experiments in the communities of the Anointed. And various forms of asceticism were being tried out. We know that there were some more, shall we say, more radically ascetic than Thecla, based on criticisms of some of these groups and some of the heresy-hunters like Tertullian or Irenaeus and others.

Thecla shows us that these conversations, debates, were a real thing. Even Tertullian, who doesn’t like the story of Thecla, is not because of her emphasis on purity. He wrote a treatise on virginity, although he was married. He wanted his wife and his daughters to be chaste within the faith. What he was opposed to with Thecla was that she baptized herself! And if she can baptize herself, other women might think they can baptize. And that she’s teaching males. That’s what upsets him.

So there were conversations going on about the exact degree to which conformity to the world or submitting to the kingdom of God was better. What degree of involvement in the world was acceptable to being a citizen of the kingdom of God? So Thecla is on that side of sexual purity. And in that sense, her story is a harbinger of the big emphasis on the ascetic life in the 4th century, where you’ve got men and women moving into monastic communities and forming these communities of ascetics.

Shirley:

That’s really very helpful to understand that context to get into Thecla’s story. I want to go back, if you don’t mind, to your point about the baptism, and I want to make this kind of quick because I want to just end up here a little bit, but the baptism question: You said that Tertullian didn’t like that. How could she baptize herself? What does that mean to baptize yourself? How did she do that?

Perry:

Since Paul had not bathed her, and we’re careful to say in the book that this act of bathing was not quite as ritualized in Thecla’s story as it would later come to be. But bathing was an important thing in the ancient world for both Jews and Gentiles. The archaeology just shows how important that was. And becoming a member of a Jesus community, bathing and cleansing are signs of one’s preparation for a new way of living, a new commitment.

In the story of Thecla, she describes, when she first asked for Paul to bathe her, she asked for the seal. And apparently reflecting a view that if you have been bathed and incorporated into the community of the anointed, you somehow are more protected than if you aren’t. And so when she hasn’t been bathed and she sees she’s likely about to die, she takes bold action and jumps into the water and declares, “I bathed myself on my last day.”

Shirley:

Wow. I’m glad that you explained bathing because it sounds like we’re so used to thinking that well, you just take a bath and get clean. But I appreciate your explaining that that has to do with the cleanliness and preparation to be in the community of purified thinkers and people. So that’s very helpful to understand that context.

So there’s not so much of a ritual that somebody else does to you to make you become something. That’s helpful. Besides this wonderfully engaging book with this very readable translation that you have written with Brandon, what else do you think needs to happen in order for Thecla’s story to come out from the shadows?

Perry:

Well, I think that it’s sometimes helpful to put it in conversation with texts from the New Testament. And when you do that, you can begin to see that there were some different ways of living out this idea of being a Jesus follower. This isn’t unique to our book, but lots of scholars noted that the story of Thecla bumps up against the so-called pastoral epistles in the New Testament. They have very different visions of the life of a member of the Jesus community.

So for your audience that aren’t familiar, the pastoral epistles are the letters known as 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. They gained that moniker, “the pastoral epistles,” in the Protestant Reformation. They purport to be letters from an elderly Paul, near the end of his life, to these younger associates, giving them sort of instructions on how to manage the churches in their charge. The pastorals give us a picture of a Jesus community that is very hierarchically organized. This is where we have clear references to bishops and deacons and elders. And especially 1 Timothy and Titus place real limits on the participation of women. It’s in 1 Timothy that women are expressly forbidden to speak in church or to teach males. So there’s an interesting section in 1 Timothy 5 where the author of this letter, [and I should emphasize a strong consensus for many decades that the pastorals are pseudonymous,] written…the standard explanation was late first century and increasingly second century. And Brandon and I clearly think it’s a second century document.

Shirley:

So it’s not Paul.

Perry:

Not Paul at all. Very different from Paul’s authentic letters. But in the community that the author of 1 Timothy knows, widowed women are receiving some kind of support. That’s a good thing. Right? But it runs into a problem. Apparently there’s more demand for the help of the churches than there is supply. And so he goes about this, in part, by trying to limit the number of women who can qualify as widows.

And so, it says quite explicitly, “Don’t put anyone on the list of widows—that is, people eligible to receive support from the church, unless they’re at least 60 years old, have had children, and have not remarried a divorcé. So think about that. How many women lived to be 60 years old in the ancient world? Right. And to have not married again and had children, all those things.

Shirley:

Oh, my goodness.

Perry:

Okay. And so what do you do with a younger widow? Let’s say a woman who’s 25 or 30 who’s been widowed. That would not have been uncommon at all in that time period. Well, the author of 1 Timothy has very specific advice for them. He directs them to marry, have children, and be homemakers, providing opponents with no occasions to abuse us.

Now, that advice—get married, have children, manage your household well—is exactly the social ethic expected of women in the larger Greco-Roman world. What we see here in 1 Timothy is a Christ community that is accommodating itself more to the mainstream views of the empire, probably as a survival strategy. Notice how we don’t want to give outsiders or opponents any opportunity to do harm to us.

Thecla’s taking the opposite view. Who are the bad people? Well, it’s the aristocratic men, her fiancé, Alexander, the governors. They’re all out to do her harm. And so she rebels against this expectation that women should marry and have children.

We document in the book that there was significant legislation in the Roman Empire trying to require aristocratic women to get married and to have children because there was such a worry about the birth rates on the part of the empire.

So two very different pictures. And that’s one way, when you put them side by side, and in conversation, you begin to see they’re grappling with similar kinds of situations, but taking different sides of that.

Shirley:

I wonder if Tertullian had problems. I get it. So this is so helpful to hear that this is not only an entertaining story, but deeply significant in terms of the development of Christian thought going on in the second century, when so many things were happening, and in such a robust period of time.

We need to call it quits for the moment, but boy, I hope people will pick up your book, Out of the Shadows, The Acts of Paul and Thecla. It is as fascinating as this conversation has been. I really enjoyed reading it myself. All the background information is helpful. And then the story itself is very well translated and explained.

So, Perry, I want to thank you for whetting our appetite for this amazing story. And I encourage more conversation to come. Thank you for being with us.

Perry:

Thank you, Shirley

Dr. Kea’s Suggestions for Further Reading

Barrier, Jeremy W.  The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary.  Wissenschaftlich Untersuchungun zum Neuen Testament 2/770.  Tubingen, 2009.

Pervo, Richard I.  The Acts of Paul: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary.  Cascade Books, 2014.

Kraemer, Ross Shepard.  Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

MacDonald, Dennis R. The Legend and the Apostle: the Battle for Paul in Story and Canon.  Westminster Press, 1983.

D’Angelo, Mary Rose, and Ross Shepard Kraaemer, eds.  Women and Christian Origins.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Osiek, Carolyn, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch.  A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.

Hylen, Susan.  A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.