Theology for the Masses

In my previous post I introduced us to the Acts of Thecla and suggested that it played a powerful role in early popular Christian thought.  Next, I wanna talk about the devotion that sprang up around this figure.  Today, we will talk a bit about the material culture that we have from the Thecla devotion and its geographical location and finally, the literary words associated with the cult.

Before we get into this, I wanna take a few minutes and talk about the terms “popular religion” and “cult.”  Given the problems we have had over other technical terms such as myth, a brief discussion here will be helpful. 

Roundel: Saint Thecla with wild beasts. From Egypt. From Women of Byzantium By Carolyn Loessel Connor. Page 9

The term “popular religion” refers to the practices, structures and beliefs that the common people have.  This is usually contrasted with the official religion of a group, which refers to the beliefs, practices and structures (hereafter: religion) that those in charge of the group hold.  To use a present day example, the official religion of a Southern Baptist church would consist of the religion that the head pastor and board of deacons and elders publicly endorse.  The popular level would refer to the religion that is actually being practiced by the laypeople.  For example, when I was a member of the Crossing in Columbia, [1] the leadership of a church were strong advocates of calvinism, but in their membership class, they admitted that the majority of the members were not calvinists.  Here is the messy part: what constitutes the official religion of a group?  Can’t we contrast the top-level endorsed religion of the Southern Baptist convention with the religion endorsed by the leadership of the/a member congregation(s)?  You absolutely can; the popular/official distinction applies to any two elements which have an authoritative/subordinate relationship.  This speaks to the need for context and subtlety when studying a religious phenomena.  Here, when we are talking about the popular Christian religion, I am contrasting the popular level of cults and their devotees with the official religion which consisted of the religion of the early church fathers.  You could contrast the official religion of the cults with the religion of the devotees, but that is not what I am looking at today.

Ampulla with Saint Thecla between beasts.  From Egypt. From Women of Byzantium By Carolyn Loessel Connor. Page 10.

Now lets turn to the term “cult.”  In popular culture, and in some religious academic contexts, the term “cult” refers to any group [2] that has a set of belies, practices, and structures that the official culture [3] rejects wholesale.  For example, take the Branch Davidians, the Peoples Temple, and (for the majority of Americans throughout history) Mormonism.  However, in the academic study of religion and antiquity, a cult is something much different.  It refers to an established organization with the duty of running the a religious site, usually a temple.  Thus, when we talk about the “Temple cult” in Jerusalem, we are not talking about those “damn dirty Jews and their false beliefs.”  I am doing nothing of the sort!  Instead, we are only referring to the structures, practices, and personnel employed at this religious site.  Therefore, when I talk about the Thecla cult, I am only referring to shrine and church, the people associated with these places, and the rituals and practices that these people employed.

She is mentioned by authors and shows up in material culture in Asia Minor, Armenia, Cyprus, North Africa, Gaul, Germany, Italy, Palestine, and Egypt. [4]   Among the material culture that references Thecla are oil lamps, combs, flasks, wall paintings, shrines, and limestone graves. [5] These materials date from the fourth to the seventh centuries CE. Due to the favorable environmental conditions, most of the material evidence comes from Egypt; however, there are remnants of this material culture from all over the Roman Empire, such as a fourth century gold flask bearing her image in Germany and wall carvings in Armenia. [6]   This abundance of material culture shows the widespread popular influence of Thecla.  People came from all over the Roman empire to visit her shrine.  The Thecla cult and the values behind it was a powerful early influence in the first few centuries of Christianity.

The cult was centered at Seleucia in Asia Minor. It is here where her great shrine, Hagia Thekla, was located. [7] Two locations of the shrine have been located, and the site has an interesting history that includes the lives of Roman emperors. Most of the manuscript traditions can be traced back to this area. Two important ones in addition to the Acts of Thecla are the Life and Miracles of St. Thecla  ((Hereafter the Life and Miracles of St. Thecla will be referred to as Life and Miracles. When referring to the first section of the work, I will use the title Life, and Miracles when referring to the second part.)) and an extended version of the Acts of Thecla-Seleucia. The Life and Miracles of St. Thecla is a two part work that contains a paraphrase of the Acts of Thecla and a listing of forty-six of her purported miracles which was written in the 450’s CE. [8] The Acts of Thecla-Seleucia is an extended version of the Acts of Thecla that details her life after arriving at Seleucia that serves to provide an aetiological explanation for the shifting location of the Hagia Thekla shrine. [9] While a great deal of space could be consumed cataloging and discussing the multitude of manifestations of the Thecla cult in the Roman Empire, we will focus on the Seleucia cult. In examining this manifestation of the Thecla cult, we will be able to get a glimpse of why the cult was so popular in Roman Empire.  We will look at this issue in the next post.

1. which is not a Southern Baptist Church, but is of the reformed tradition [↩]
2. Here I am talking about religious groups [↩]
3. or the culture of the group that is using the term [↩]
4. Ibid. see chapters 3 and 6. [↩]
5. Ibid., 150. [↩]
6. Ibid., 85. [↩]
7. Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), 91. [↩]
8. The author mentions the death of prominent priest named Serverus who died in 444 CE and presupposes a local living bishop named John who died in 448CE. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: An Introduction to Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, 41. [↩]
9. Ibid., 45. [↩]

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. [↩]

In the book of Job, written sometime between the early sixth and late fifth century BCE, God describes Job as a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.  What is such a man like?  If we were to be blameless and God fearing, what sort of things ought we do?

I don’t know about you, but growing up I often imagined good ole Job as a quiet, monkly figure who amassed wealth and other manifestations of favor from God through smart and godly business practices.  I imagined his actions as self-contained.  He surely was righteous because he did no wrong, a passive righteousness, a lack of sin.  Similarly, I conceived personal righteousness in the same terms – if I don’t actively sin, I am being righteous.  Always righteousness was framed in terms of protecting it from sin.

Job considers righteousness as something completely different. Job, in verse 14 of chapter 29, poetically links righteousness and justice, saying:

I put on righteousness and it clothed me;

     my justice was like a robe and a turban.

While it makes perfect sense in retrospect, it something that I never really considered before. Just as robes and turbans clothe a person, justice the the action of the righteous.  Lets look around this verse and see how Job was righteous.

• delivered the poor who cried and orphan who had no helper
• blessed the wretched
• caused the widow to sing for joy
• eyes to the blind
• feet to the lame
• father to the needy
• championed the cause of the stranger
• broke the fangs of the unrighteous (those acting unjustly, apparently)
• made the unrighteous drop their prey (those who were people oppressed) from their teeth

How different this is from what I used to imagine?  Job is not cloistered, separated from society, being a “perfect” individual.  Here he is actively engaged with those around him, helping those in need and opposing those who oppress.  He is righteous because he takes an active stance against sin in the world.  Thus, if we are to be righteous, we must conceive righteousness in the same terms – it is not enough to not actively sin, we must act for divine justice on earth.  It is not our righteousness that needs protecting from sin – it should be sin (or injustice in the world) than need fear our righteousness!

Addendum:  As Hank rightfully pointed out, I am not talking about how we obtain righteousness, instead I am talking about how we show our righteousness.  We are declared righteous by God through no deed nor merit on our part – but, we need to be righteous instead of trying to protect our righteousness.