Only three nights from Tarsus, in Isauria, is the martyr shrine of Saint Thecla. Since it was so close we were pleased to travel there… Around the holy church there is a tremendous number of cells for men and women… There are a great many cells on that hill, and in the middle a great wall around the martyrium itself, which is very beautiful… I arrived at the martyrium, and we had a prayer there and read the whole Acts of holy Thecla…

- Egeria, writing in her travel diary during the late 4th century CE [1]

By the early fifth century CE the city of Seleucia in southern Turkey had become home to an international pilgrimage site Hagia Thekla dedicated to Saint Thecla, heroine of the Acts of Thecla. [2] [3]   The Acts of Thecla was written in the middle to late second century CE and was nestled in the middle of the Acts of Paul.

The Acts of Thecla recounts a series of adventures, or trials, that the young, beautiful, and betrothed virgin Thecla, the very picture of Roman femininity, must endure in her pursuit of her goal of being a disciple of Paul. She is constantly tested throughout her journeys – she is often alone, abandoned by her fiancé, mother, and separated from her beloved Paul while facing perilous trials.  [4] In each of these instances she is miraculously saved by God’s intervention as a direct result of her unyielding devotion and virtue. [5]   This series of miraculous escapes reaches its climax when Thecla baptizes herself while being attacked by wild animals. Along her way she befriends and converts the household of Queen Tryphaena, who adopts her to replace her dead daughter Falconilla at the bequest of Falconilla! After the self-baptism she dons the cloak of a man and is finally reunited with Paul, who commissions her for a preaching ministry. The story comes full circle when, after a successful preaching career, she returns home, finds her old fiancé dead, and ministers to her still living mother.  After doing so, she travels to Seleucia and “enlightens many by the word of God” and rests in a “glorious sleep.” This tradition was likely based on oral legends which were in turn likely based on a historical person named Thecla from the area. [6] As evidenced by literary, archaeological, and material culture, the Theclan tradition was popular in Asia Minor and, to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean in during the 2nd through 6th centuries.

What were the driving socio-religious factors that lead to the rapid widespread growth and appeal of this tradition? We will answer this question by exploring the tradition back through time and narrowing our focus from the expressed cult tradition back to the written tradition and ending with the oral tradition. Firstly, we will examine the importance and makeup of the Cult of St. Thecla in Asia Minor. After exploring these social settings we will then turn to the book of the Acts of Thecla, exploring the rhetorical devices it employed and will compare it to Roman romance novels.((Several Acts and martyrdom accounts include variations on the Acts of Thecla. For example, one of the Acts of Xanthippe’s main characters, Polyxena, is a virgin who is thrown to the beasts, saved by a lioness and consequently preaches to a queen and governor.)) Lastly, we will explore the social and theological conditions that the Thecla tradition stepped into.

We will find the Thecla tradition filled an ideological hole which was created in the Greco-Roman socio-religious fabric by Early Christian Missionary movement and its radical egalitarianism. [7] This movement fostered an expectation that females should be on par with males both in terms of authority and function. The Thecla tradition spoke to those needs and expectations and lent them the authority to bolster their claims through efficacious mediums, such as oral tradition and romance novels, which were modified to transmit the desired message with maximum effect.

In my next post, we will take a look at the cult (or devotion) of Saint Thecla in the early centuries of Christianity.

1. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land (Ariel Pub. House, 1981), 120 21. This excerpt is taken from the diary of Egeria, a Christian pilgrim writing in the late 4^th century. [↩]
2. Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. [↩]
3. The Acts of Thecla will refer to the earliest version of this work that was inserted into the Acts of Paul. When I am referring to the longer and later version extended, in part, to justify the moving of the shrine by Zeno I will use the title Acts of Thecla-Seleucia. [↩]
4. The use of the term “beloved” is purposefully ambiguous. Because of the nature of the work as an adapted Roman romance novel, it is necessary to have Thecla fall in love with Paul to maintain the standard storyline. [↩]
5. She is saved from a pyre in chapter 22, from a lioness which befriends her in 28, from wild beasts by the same lioness in 33, and by the scents of the woman onlookers in 35 from more wild animals. [↩]
6. The historicity of the Thecla traditions is not being analyzed in this post series. While the legends are definitely not historical in nature, it is likely that they were based and grew up around a historical figure of the same name. [↩]
7. See Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989). chapters four through six for a description of these movements. Where pertinent, features of these movements will be discussed in detail. [↩]