The Passion of St. Perpetua, St. Felicitas, and their Companions, and Acts of Paul and Thecla
Thecla
The character of Thecla first appears in the late-second century text the Acts of Paul and Thecla Briefly, Paul is depicted as preaching a message of chastity in Iconium, which causes Thecla to become enamored with his words and to abandon her responsibilities to her mother and her fiancé in order to follow Paul. She overcomes two persecutions by miraculous means, eventually baptizing herself in a pool of ravenous seals that are miraculously killed by a lightning bolt before they can harm her. After this, she is released and dresses as a man to embark on a journey to find Paul. When she finds him, he gives her his blessing to go out and teach, and she is depicted as doing so until her death many years later.
The Thecla narrative “echoes the genre of the ancient romantic novel, though explicitly in the service of a religiously infused ethical project. Like its predecessor the Greek romance, this work is a written narrative. Tertullianʼs assertion that an Asian presbyter “compiled the Acts of Paul adds further credence to the argument of an oral history, suggesting that, while a presbyter in Asia Minor edited the text, his work may have been the result of oral traditions transmitted by earlier communities of women.
There are many references in antiquity to womenʼs storytelling, suggesting that this practice would have been an important means by which their social traditions were preserved and transmitted. The written version of the Thecla narrative takes the traditional formula of the ancient novel and adjusts it to fit within the Christian framework of personal piety.
This standard formula “involves the meeting of the paired lovers; their subsequent separation by circumstance, whether hardship or adventure; and their eventual restoration to each other by the end of the story, a restoration often symbolized by marriage and generally predicated upon mutual fidelity and trust in the divine. A similar framework can be seen in the Acts of Paul and
The character of Thecla first appears in the late-second century text the Acts of Paul and Thecla Briefly, Paul is depicted as preaching a message of chastity in Iconium, which causes Thecla to become enamored with his words and to abandon her responsibilities to her mother and her fiancé in order to follow Paul. She overcomes two persecutions by miraculous means, eventually baptizing herself in a pool of ravenous seals that are miraculously killed by a lightning bolt before they can harm her. After this, she is released and dresses as a man to embark on a journey to find Paul. When she finds him, he gives her his blessing to go out and teach, and she is depicted as doing so until her death many years later.
The Thecla narrative “echoes the genre of the ancient romantic novel, though explicitly in the service of a religiously infused ethical project. Like its predecessor the Greek romance, this work is a written narrative. Tertullianʼs assertion that an Asian presbyter “compiled the Acts of Paul adds further credence to the argument of an oral history, suggesting that, while a presbyter in Asia Minor edited the text, his work may have been the result of oral traditions transmitted by earlier communities of women.
There are many references in antiquity to womenʼs storytelling, suggesting that this practice would have been an important means by which their social traditions were preserved and transmitted. The written version of the Thecla narrative takes the traditional formula of the ancient novel and adjusts it to fit within the Christian framework of personal piety.
This standard formula “involves the meeting of the paired lovers; their subsequent separation by circumstance, whether hardship or adventure; and their eventual restoration to each other by the end of the story, a restoration often symbolized by marriage and generally predicated upon mutual fidelity and trust in the divine. A similar framework can be seen in the Acts of Paul and