Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Social Reality of Early Christian Women
The rise of feminist scholarship in the 1980s and onward has resulted in an ongoing interest in the apocryphal acts in general and in the Acts of Paul and Thecla in particular. The first stage was characterized by enthusiasm: the story of Thecla appeared to offer an access to the everyday life of early Christian women.
If anywhere then here, it was said, was a writing reflecting “sensitivity to women,”[1056] communicating women’s experiences and sentiments, and originating from among female storytellers,[1057] perhaps even from a female author.[1058] One argument for this was the narrative’s disproportionate characterization along gender lines; women are portrayed in a sympathetic light showing solidarity with Thecla - her mother being a noteworthy exception - while men are constantly shown in a negative light.[1059] This female solidarity extends itself to the animal world: a lioness protects Thecla in the arena and fights other beasts until her own death. Even though the story contains many fanciful features, it shows that celibacy gave women a new kind of autonomy - rejecting marriage meant moving outside the conventional social and sexual roles - and gave selfdetermination and an escape from male control.[1060]Not everyone has been as enthusiastic.[1061] The second stage of scholarship noted that the path leading from a textual representation to social reality is a complex one. The Acts of Paul and Thecla and other apocryphal acts should not be read as evidence of real women’s lives.[1062] According to Kate Cooper, these stories describe “essentially a conflict between men. The challenge posed here by Christianity is not really about women, or even about sexual continence, but about authority and the social order.”[1063] Women in these texts serve a purely rhetorical function in a male struggle over power.
The Acts of Paul and Thecla offers no good news for women. At a closer look, the character of Thecla reveals no signs of resisting the patriarchal models of her day; especially in the first part of the story, she remains an ideal woman, silent and exaggeratingly obedient to Paul. Instead of playing the role of an autonomous subject, she remains an object - whether that of Paul’s apostolic authority, of men’s sexual desire, or of public gaze in the arena - and in order to gain an independent position, she must act and dress up as a man, become “one of the guys,” and fulfill masculine standards.[1064]Both these positions seem to contain some truth but, as such, they are both one-sided. A text is always a literary artifact, not a one-to-one reproduction of the world outside of the text. The move from the textual world to social reality, from rhetoric to social experience is not straightforward.[1065] Claiming anything else only produces “naive historical readings.”[1066] A female protagonist does not necessitate a female storyteller. Whatever “feminine sensitivities” a modern scholar reads from the text, they do not necessarily correspond to the sensitivities of ancient women. Moreover, the benevolence of women and the evilness of men in the story have often been exaggerated.[1067] Onesiphorus, for example, is a male character that is viewed in a thoroughly positive light. Most other male figures do act against Thecla, but they are rather ambiguous characters. Thecla’s fiance, Thamyris, for example, clearly loves her[1068] and only after the advice of Paul’s deceitful companions Demas and Hermogenes does he bring charges against Paul. Similarly, the two governors are hesitant to condemn Thecla (and Paul), weep when they see her in the arena and listen to Thecla’s (and Paul’s) preaching willingly. Furthermore, women are not unequivocally positive characters. Even though the anonymous women are mostly described as feeling sympathy and solidarity toward Thecla, in the arena they are divided: some weep for Thecla, others are against her.[1069] The animals are not divided along gender lines, either; the lioness protects Thecla against a she-bear (την αρκον).[1070]
However, to say that the story “is not really about women” is equally misleading.
As critics of this view have pointed out, the Acts of Paul and Thecla (and other apocryphal acts) describe circumstances that had a counterpart in the real life of early Christian women: there existed ascetic communities; mixed marriages between Christian women and nonChristian men were common; there were wealthy women who acted as patronesses of different cult associations; etc.[1071] Moreover, questions concerning power, authority, and social order were also women’s questions in the early Christian movement, which was never exclusively male, as Shelly Matthews has aptly noted.[1072] Whatever the rhetorical function of the women characters in the apocryphal acts may originally have been, there were real women who heard and read these texts and could have been inspired and encouraged by them to act beyond the cultural expectations.[1073]The Acts of Paul and Thecla is a profoundly ambiguous text that resists any simple solution. On the one hand, Thecla is characterized as “Paul’s lamb-like model disciple”[1074] who is ready to follow him blindly wherever he goes. The first part of the narrative resembles other apocryphal acts where the young and extraordinarily beautiful heroine becomes an involuntary party in a triangular drama with herself, the apostle and a leading man of the city. But as the narrative unfolds, this male power struggle breaks down: Paul disappears from the scene and leaves Thecla to act on her own. In the latter part of the story, there is no apostle and thus, no male combat; rather, Thecla has to fight the lustful Alexander alone. Now she takes initiative and acts independently, making choices without Paul’s consent - both baptism and dressing up as a man are something Paul previously refused her. This description of Thecla as an independent actor allows her to partly escape the submissive rhetoric.
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