Introduction
When we read early Christian narratives such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, what is the relationship between the characters portrayed in the story and the “real-life” persons and groups who composed and transmitted the work? In the second-century Greek account, Thecla abandons her fiancé and family to follow Paul and his ascetic message. She endures a trial by fire in Iconium, resists sexual assault on the road to Antioch, and survives attacks by beasts in the Antiochene arena, all the while supported by a wealthy widow as her patron, a friendly lioness as her protector, and a chorus of women in the stadium who extol her perseverance and cry out to the governor for mercy. In the end, after baptizing herself, Thecla is released, dresses herself like a man, and begins preaching the gospel as an itinerant apostle.
In light of its descriptions of dislocated families, male sexual violence, communities of women (including female patrons and clientele), and the physical alteration of bodily appearance and dress to facilitate freedom of travel, what, if anything, does the Acts of Paul and Thecla tell us about the actual concerns of second-century communities? These are questions with which scholars have been especially preoccupied over the past thirty-five years. In the case of Thecla's story, they are questions significantly complicated by factors related to the study of gender in late antiquity.
In this article, I have two main goals related to this line of inquiry. My first task is to trace a history or genealogy of the different ways that Thecla's story has been interpreted in recent scholarship. In doing so, I seek to show how scholars (myself included) have used Thecla “to think with” as they have gone about the task of historical reconstruction, and how gender studies has impacted the interpretation of her figure. My second task is to introduce a previously unpublished Arabic manuscript of the Acts of Paul and Thecla as a case study for considering the gendered reception of Thecla as a model—in this case, not for women's piety, but for male monastic devotion.
Gender Studies and the Acts of Paul and Thecla
I organize my brief history of research on the Acts of Paul and Thecla in three stages: (1) a gender pre-critical stage prior to 1980, dominated by latent assumptions about the apocryphal acts as “popular” and “romantic” literature; (2) an early gender-critical stage in the 1980’s, characterized by classical feminist methodologies; and (3) a stage spanning the last two decades in which naïve forms of feminist reconstruction have been held up to critical scrutiny and in which a diverse, new set of gender-critical approaches—from masculinity and queer studies to postcolonial criticism—have both complicated and enriched the scholarly terrain. Let me say something briefly about each of these stages, giving selective illustrative examples in each case.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholarship on the Acts of Paul and Thecla was inhibited by general neglect and by the underlying assumption that it belonged to a genre of ancient popular literature thought to be beneath the notice of serious historians. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Ernst von Dobschütz concluded that the apocryphal acts, as a corpus, were related in genre to Hellenistic romance novels.Footnote 1 Relying on a similar premise, another German scholar, Erwin Rohde, had already proposed that such tales must have targeted an audience of literate women.Footnote 2 In 1932, Rosa Söder went even further: observing the stories’ miraculous and erotic elements, she argued that they were designed for moral instruction and light entertainment among communities of female readers.Footnote 3 Apart from (and largely due to) its characterization as a form of popular “women's literature,” the Acts of Paul and Thecla remained undertreated.
After the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960’s and 1970’s, this early association of the apocryphal acts with a female readership sparked renewed interest in this corpus among scholars of early Christianity beginning in the 1980’s. The prominent role of empowered women in the Acts of Paul and Thecla and other apostolic accounts prompted hope that one could use this literature to reconstruct women's experience behind the Acts. In 1980, Stevan Davies published his book, The Revolt of the Widows, in which he posited that the Acts of Paul and Thecla was not only intended for a women's audience, but was actually authored by a woman, a female widow, as part of a social “rebellion for the sake of (sexual) continence.”Footnote 4 Three years later, another scholar, Dennis R. MacDonald, refuted Davies's arguments regarding female authorship but did not abandon the hope that the Acts of Paul and Thecla bore some relation to women's community. Using folklore studies to identify signs of orality in the Acts, MacDonald argued that this literature had its roots in practices of storytelling among communities of early Christian widows.Footnote 5 The same year, in her landmark publication, In Memory of Her, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza read Thecla's story as indicative of an early egalitarian impulse in early Christianity and as a sign of the movement's rejection of the Roman patriarchal family order.Footnote 6 Finally, in 1987, Virginia Burrus published her book, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts, in which she built upon MacDonald's folkloric analysis with an eye toward showing how the Acts of Paul and Thecla and other Hellenistic and early Christian “chastity stories” reflected and reinforced an ethos of autonomy among communities of ascetic women in late ancient society.Footnote 7 The arguments of Davies, MacDonald, and Burrus were largely based on “mirrored” readings of the text. In each case, the prominent role of women within the literature was assumed to reflect patterns of religious community outside the text.
The late 1990’s marked a turning point in the study of the Acts of Paul and Thecla as historians became by-and-large more skeptical about the potential for reconstructing women's “experience” from such works along traditional feminist lines. The main reason for this change of attitude was the so-called “linguistic turn,” a shift in philosophy that debunked earlier positivist assumptions about language as a transparent means of access to some kind of extra-linguistic “reality.” Instead, proponents of this turn—from Hayden White to Judith Butler—emphasized the ways that language itself inevitably shapes and constructs “reality” as we humans perceive it.Footnote 8
This epistemological shift unsettled traditional historians’ attempts to use narrative accounts as direct evidence for “what really happened.” At the same time, it posed serious challenges to classical feminist criticism with its static assumptions about “women” as a unified class or category of analysis. The result was a loss of confidence in the possibility of using early Christian narratives as reliable sources for the reconstruction of women's communities behind the text. In the face of this shift, as Elizabeth Clark so famously put it, “the lady vanishes.”Footnote 9 The experience of real, historical women was no longer visible in such texts. Instead, all that historians were left with were traces—a complex web of representations oriented toward the regulation of power within specific social life settings (Sitze im Leben). Thus, the “linguistic turn” helped bring about the application of discourse theory and gender studies within the field of late ancient history. In this context, poststructuralist historians began exploring the complex ways that language and linguistic performances shaped the gendered subjectivities (and gendered bodies) of early Christians living in the Roman world.Footnote 10
How all this came to influence the study of the Acts of Paul and Thecla may first be glimpsed in Kate Cooper's 1996 publication, The Virgin and the Bride, which carried the subtitle, Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity.Footnote 11 To Cooper, the female characters depicted in such stories were a thoroughgoing literary construct—one that gave expression not to ancient women's egalitarian aspirations but rather to ancient men's preoccupations with the Roman civic order. In other words (and here I borrow language from Lévi Strauss), the characterizations of Thecla and other women in the apocryphal acts are understood as cases of male authors using women “to think with.”Footnote 12 In this reading, what was being thought about was the maintenance of communal loyalty and male authority within early Christian hierarchical social structures.
Over the past decade and a half, in the wake of Cooper's book, there has been a proliferation of scholarship about the figure of Thecla. Some scholars have returned to the feminist-inspired project of historical reconstruction while taking account of the difficulties raised by the “linguistic turn.” Thus, Shelly Matthews, in her 2001 article, “Thinking of Thecla,” posited that it is necessary to pay “close attention to representation in texts while still attempting to reconstruct a history of women.”Footnote 13 And more recently, Ross Shepard Kraemer—in a book published in 2011 in which she sharply critiqued Cooper's assumptions about (male) authorial intention—reaffirmed her earlier conviction that the Acts of Paul and Thecla “does still point. . . to actual ancient Christian women baptizing, teaching, and exercising authority in various other forms.”Footnote 14 She asserted this despite the fact that she found herself somewhat “less confident” in the possibility of using the text to reconstruct the actual “demographics” of early Christian ascetic women.Footnote 15
However, other scholars have decisively moved away from this “recovery mode” to focus on representational strategies in the literature, bringing gender-critical discourse analysis into fruitful interdisciplinary conversation with other forms of ideological criticism, most notably postcolonial theory. Two examples will suffice here. The first comes from Virginia Burrus, who in her 2005 article, “Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and the Ancient Romance,” read the conflict between disruptive desire and patriarchal marriage (eros and gamos) in the Acts of Paul and Thecla in terms of “a relation of complex mimicry.”Footnote 16 According to Burrus, Thecla is a hybrid cultural production—presented both as an ideal of female virginity and as a subversive “mimic-man.”Footnote 17 More recently, Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Penner similarly drew on postcolonial theory in their 2009 book Contextualizing Gender in Early Christian Discourse: Thinking Beyond Thecla.Footnote 18 The “beyond” part of their subtitle was meant to signal their reading of Thecla as a “boundary-crosser.” In her various “passings”—spatially from the seclusion of the home to the public tribunal, socially from bride to ascetic follower of Paul, bodily from modestly clothed woman to an apostle empowered to travel and preach in male dress—Thecla becomes one who disrupts and reconfigures binary concepts of gender identity in late antiquity.Footnote 19
Given the (necessarily abbreviated) history of scholarship that I have narrated here, what does the future hold for Thecla studies? Along with many others, I find myself today slightly more skeptical than I once was about the project of reconstructing communities of women behind the text. What I have become increasingly fascinated with, however, ever since my 2001 book, The Cult of St. Thecla, is the textual and cultural reception of Thecla's figure, whether it be in the examination of Egyptian material evidence for women's devotion to Thecla or the reading of legends about so-called “transvestite saints” that drew on Thecla's image.Footnote 20 And I have not been alone in this interest. In 2002 and 2003, Catherine Burris and Lucas van Rompay published articles on Thecla in Syriac Christianity, and more recently Burris completed a University of North Carolina dissertation on this topic.Footnote 21 In 2004, Elizabeth Castelli investigated late ancient practices of martyrological commemoration associated with Thecla in her book Martyrdom and Memory.Footnote 22 In 2006, Scott Johnson produced a detailed literary study of The Life and Miracles of Thekla, a fifth-century hagiographical work connected with her pilgrimage shrine in Seleucia, Asia Minor (south-central Turkey).Footnote 23 In his 2009 commentary on the Acts of Paul and Thecla,Footnote 24 Jeremy W. Barrier called attention to new artistic evidence related to the female saint.Footnote 25 One example is a fifth- or sixth-century ivory tablet in the British Museum showing Thecla standing behind the walls of a home listening to Paul as he reads from a scroll.Footnote 26 Another is a late antique fresco discovered at the so-called “Grotto of Paul” in Ephesus, where Thecla is shown sitting within a house listening to the competing messages of Paul and her mother Theocleia.Footnote 27 Finally, in a 2007 article and in her 2011 book, The Gendered Palimpsest, Kim Haines-Eitzen has explored Christian scribes’ censorship and domestication of controversial female characters like Thecla in the process of manuscript copying and transmission.Footnote 28
Despite all this important work in the field, the reception history related to the Acts of Paul and Thecla remains fertile ground, with great potential for posing questions about the complex intersection of gendered discourses and religious practice. Susan Hylen's 2015 book, A Modest Apostle, provides the most recent example. Arguing against the idea that the figure of Thecla underwent a simple, unidirectional process of domestication in later centuries, Hylen instead notes certain continuities in the way late ancient Christian authors acknowledged and celebrated Thecla's empowerment, albeit in and through the female saint's embodiment of modesty as a virtue.Footnote 29
The case study with which I conclude this article is meant to add to this diverse scholarly chorus. Like Catherine Burris and Kim Haines-Eitzen, I too am interested in training my eye on the scribal reception of the Acts of Paul and Thecla. In my case, however, I will focus on an Arabic text copied by an eighteenth-century scribe at the Egyptian Monastery of St. Paul at the Red Sea. In studying this manuscript as evidence for Thecla devotion, I will be asking questions about what that scribe's work tells us about the construction of male monastic identity in the context of ritual practices of worship.
Male Monastic Devotion and the Representation of a Female Saint: An Arabic Acts of Paul and Thecla
The Arabic manuscript in question is housed in the collection of the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Society in Los Angeles, CA. The director of the society, Hany Takla, kindly provided me with a PDF image of the text.Footnote 30 In addition to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the manuscript also includes four other works: the Wonders of St. Basil, the Miracle of the Cross at the Time of Patriarch John,Footnote 31 and the Martyrdoms of two female saints, Irene and Euphronia.
We know about the scribe and the date of the manuscript from its colophon. It was copied in 1755 by a certain Jirjis (George), who was “priest and servant of the monastery of the great saint Anba Būlus (Paul the Hermit).” The Monastery of St. Paul the Hermit is located not far from the Monastery of St. Anthony in the Eastern Desert of Egypt near the coast of the Red Sea.
The scribe's purpose in copying the Acts of Paul and Thecla may be gleaned from the framing material he added at the beginning and end of the work. In an extended preface, he describes the Acts as a record of “her virtuous deeds and the fulfillment of her martyrdom.”Footnote 32 First, he thanks God for granting his community “merits” (afḍāl), which in Arabic echo Thecla's “virtuous deeds” (faḍā’il). Second, he asks God to form him and his fellow monks as “sons of the New Testament” who are empowered to follow “the correct and most beneficial [monastic] way of life.”Footnote 33 This way of life is understood to be akin to Thecla's martyrdom insofar as it is characterized by “suffering” and has as its reward the obtaining of a “luminous crown.”Footnote 34 As a saint, Thecla has an instrumental role in facilitating these virtuous merits and this way of life. At the end of the text, after reporting her final rest at Seleucia, the scribe concludes by petitioning God to forgive the community's lapses “through the prayers of this holy martyr-confessor Thecla.”Footnote 35 In short, in the preface and postscript to this Arabic version of the Acts, male monks are prompted to regard Thecla as their model and intercessor.
I mentioned earlier how the figure of Thecla has sponsored recent scholarly interest in boundary constructions and boundary crossings. Virginia Burrus has talked about the novelistic genre of the Acts as a “hybrid” genre in which one finds “hybridized” productions of gender and ethnicity.Footnote 36 Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Penner have drawn connections between the establishment of canonical boundaries and the policing of gender boundaries in the early church.Footnote 37 Let me make a couple of observations about the ways that this particular Arabic manuscript of the Acts provides a forum for exploring the role that Thecla (and her sisters) played in such boundary maintenance at an eighteenth-century Egyptian monastery. What I shall argue is that Egyptian monks, even as they embraced Thecla as a model for male monastic piety, made efforts to reframe canonical and gender boundaries along binary lines.
First, Thecla is appropriated as an exemplar through specific acts of “canonization” on the part of the scribe. In his hands, the Acts of Paul and Thecla is not a dubious, apocryphal work penned by an anonymous Asian presbyter and used to authorize women's baptism, as the early Christian author Tertullian would have it.Footnote 38 Instead, her story is related by “the physician-evangelist,” Saint Luke himself, and is thus granted an apostolic imprimatur. In this way, Thecla is allowed to cross—if only by association—into the sanctioned authorial space of the scriptural canon.
Second, Thecla is enrolled in the canonical body of saints and martyrs—those “who bartered their lifeblood seeking after the happiness of the hereafter in the eternal abode” and “who have shed blood that pours out and who have taken up permanent residence in the high and exalted place.”Footnote 39 Her vita was meant to be read as part of the monastic liturgy on her saint's day, the twenty-fifth day of the Coptic month Abīb.Footnote 40 In and through such scribal and ritual acts, she becomes a sanctioned spiritual model for monastic “sons of the New Testament.”
Yet, part of the scribe's method of incorporating Thecla into the ranks of the apostles and saints also meant that he on the one hand downplayed (and sometimes even erased) the transgressive elements of her original story, and on the other worked to reinforce certain canonical and social boundaries. This process of erasure and boundary reinforcement applies especially to the construction of gender in this male monastic world. One observes this in the manuscript itself, as well as in the visual and ritual culture that contextualized its use.
The Thecla that we encounter in this Arabic version of the Acts is one whose bodily boundary-crossings are conspicuously obscured or elided. While she is notably called an apostle, the feminine form of the Arabic word used (rasūlah) underscores the way that she is gendered throughout the narrative. When she asks Paul to shave her head in preparation for baptism, the apostle Paul puts her off on account of the fact that she is a “beautiful woman” (imra'ah jamīlah).Footnote 41 In the original Greek text, the noun “woman” does not, in fact, appear: Thecla is simply described as eumorphos (“beautiful, well-formed”), an ambiguous adjectival form that, taken on its own, could be read as either masculine or feminine. As Kim Haines-Eitzen has observed, a number of later Greek copyists attempted to resolve this ambiguity by adding in the unambiguously feminine noun, “woman” (gunē).Footnote 42 Our eighteenth-century Arabic scribe follows this pattern of feminization, not only here through the addition of the word “woman” (imra'ah), but also later in the narrative through the omission of certain masculinizing details. Most notably, after Thecla emerges unscathed from the arena, there is no mention made at all of her dressing herself like a man in order to travel and preach as an apostle, as is highlighted in the Greek and Syriac manuscript traditions.Footnote 43 By contrast, this detail simply drops out of the Arabic text.
In this way, a famously transgressive figure is effectively tamed, domesticated, and regularized for male consumption.Footnote 44 Ironically, to appropriate Thecla as a model for piety, the monks in the Monastery of St. Paul must read her in no uncertain terms as a woman. Thecla is feminized so that male monastic identity can be marked off all the more clearly.
This monastic construction of gender would have been reinforced via the ritual practice of worship. In fact, we happen to have contemporary evidence for the visual program that would have been on view as monks listened to the story of Thecla read on her feast day. In the early eighteenth-century, only a few decades prior to the production of this Arabic Acts of Paul and Thecla, the main church at the Monastery of St. Paul was renovated. A new program of paintings was executed, partially superseding the earlier, medieval painted program in the church.Footnote 45 This new program, dedicated in the year 1712/13, featured an array of saints and martyrs. In the narthex, the male martyrs Victor, Theodore Stratelates, George, Ishkhīrūn, James the Persian, Menas, Julius of Aqfhas, Abadir, and Isidore. In the nave, the martyr Cyriacus, alongside familiar monks and bishops from Egypt's past—Serapion, Antony, Paul the Hermit, and Mark.
Interspersed amidst this male retinue, however, are a handful of female figures. Three of them are martyrs—Ira'i, Julitta, and Irene (whose Arabic vita is also found in the manuscript in question). By contrast, there is only one monastic woman depicted, and her figure stands out both stylistically and thematically. She is Marina, commemorated in both the Byzantine and Coptic churches as a spiritual daughter of St. Thecla, as one who disguised herself as a man, cutting her hair short and donning men's clothing in order to enter a male monastery undetected.Footnote 46 According to The Life of Marina, it was only after her death that her monastic compatriots discovered her “true” identity.
In a painting on the south wall of the northern nave at St. Paul's, Marina is depicted right next to Irene.Footnote 47 Marina wears monastic garb that is rather similar to that of the male monks depicted on the same walls, although the clothing fails to hide the very different curves of her profile. What is most striking, however, is her hair. In contrast with the female martyrs, who appear with heads covered, Marina is depicted “with a full head of hair reaching beyond her shoulders.”Footnote 48 Not only does Marina's “flowing hair” depart from the details of her vita, it also marks a stylistic departure. William Lyster has described it as a “surprising innovation” that marked her “overt femininity” for the viewer.Footnote 49
Let me conclude with this image in mind. Here, we see how eighteenth-century Egyptian monks were being habituated to particular patterns of gendered, hagiographic viewing. Whether it was listening to readings of female saints’ lives or gazing at their figures on the walls of the church, monastic worshipers were being trained in how to appropriate holy women as models for “the true and most beneficial way of life,”Footnote 50 even as the monks’ communal practice constantly impressed upon them the boundary between male and female bodies. In this way, figures like Thecla and Marina were put in their proper place, in a category of holy women that had rather more sharply defined borders than in certain early Christian hagiographical texts. At the same time, these same monks learned, in relief (and I mean that in more than one sense), what it meant to be unquestionably male “sons of the New Testament.”Footnote 51
In the end, the Arabic manuscript of the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the wall painting of Marina tell us more about the monks who commissioned and produced them than about their late ancient subjects. In both we see acts of hagiographic appropriation that reinforced the boundaries of male gender identity within the monastery. At the Monastery of St. Paul at the Red Sea, a decidedly female Thecla was thus transformed from an icon of women's piety into a figure for male devotion. Like modern scholars, the scribe Jirjis and his fellow Egyptian monks proved themselves remarkably adept at “thinking with Thecla.” My aim in this article has been to show that it is often more interesting to turn our gaze on those doing the thinking, even if that gaze inevitably turns back on ourselves as well.
Scribal Preface and Postscript: Arabic Text (151b–152a and 170b–171a)Footnote 52
[Preface]
Footnote 53Footnote 54Footnote 55Footnote 56Footnote 57
[Postscript]
Scribal Preface and Postscript: English Translation (151b–152a and 170b–171a)
[Preface]
[151b] In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, a Life (maymar) that Saint Luke the apostle, the physician-evangelist,Footnote 63 related. In it he sets forth accounts of Saint Thecla the martyr apostle, her virtuous deeds and the fulfillment of her martyrdom on the twenty-fifth day of the month Abīb. Peace from the Lord, amen.
He says: Glory to God, who made us a people for the purpose of faith in his holy name and poured forth upon us his grace, which became for us the life of our souls. And [God] removed from our souls causes of opposition and brought about for us eternal life. In this way, we have obtained luminous crowns by which the heads of kings have been crowned,Footnote 64 and which have cleansed us (if we have walked good paths) from the ailment of hearts that causes suffering and misery. We thank him for whatever beneficence [152a] and support he has granted us. And we laud him for the merits and guidance he has provided us. We continuously and abundantly glorify [him], and we ask of his generosity that he may have compassion on us through his mercy in this age and in the future, that he may help us through his mercy to be sons of the New Testament, and that he may appoint us to keep his commandments in order to follow the correct and most beneficial way of life. We seek intercession for it through the noble mistress of the women who inhabit the world, the one who is perfect in chastity and purity, the one who has wrapped herself in grace and lights and piety, along with his saints and his righteous ones who have bartered their lifeblood seeking after the happiness of the hereafter in the eternal abode, and his martyrs who have shed blood that pours out and who have taken up permanent residence in the high and exalted place. We ask [God] to inspire us to do what pleases him, amen. . .
[Postscript]
[170b] . . . We ask God through the prayers of this holy martyr-confessor Thecla, the daughter of Theocleia, to forgive us our sins, to look kindly upon our misdeeds, to pardon our lapses, to overlook our offenses, to cover our imperfections and lapses, and to make us worthy to hear his voice, full of joy and happiness, which says, Come to me, you blessed ones of my Father. Inherit the dominion prepared for you before the establishment of the world. For is it not the case that no eye has seen him, nor ear heard him, nor human heart comprehended him [1 Cor 2:9]? [171a] Through the intercession of the pure and noble lady, the Virgin Mary, the beneficent martyr, Mark the evangelist and apostle, the rest of the martyrs and saints, and whoever has pleased the Lord, pleasing him with his pious actions, glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, One God, now and at all times, for all eternity, forever and ever, amen.
Thus ends the life of the blessed saint, the virgin confessor, Thecla the apostle. Peace from the Lord, amen. Thanks to God always. From our hand, the gracious gift, amen.
