Iconium and the Tradition

The setting the Acts of Paul and Thecla presuppose — Iconium in the Roman province of Galatia/Lycaonia, where the canonical Acts places a Pauline mission — and how the Thecla legend relates to the canonical record of Paul. This file maps the points of contact and the silences between the apocryphal narrative and the New Testament, and traces the shape in which the legend entered the Church’s memory.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Early Church / Equal-to-the-Apostles)

Iconium in the Pauline World

The Acts of Paul and Thecla opens with Paul arriving at Iconium after fleeing Antioch, received into the house of one Onesiphorus (Acts of Paul and Thecla 1–3). Iconium (modern Konya, in central Turkey) was a real and significant city of the Anatolian interior, in antiquity reckoned to Lycaonia or, administratively, to the province of Galatia. It is one of the cities the canonical Acts of the Apostles names as a stop on Paul’s first missionary journey: “they came to Iconium… a great number both of the Jews and also of the Greeks believed,” and after a hostile assault Paul and Barnabas “fled unto Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia” (Acts 13:51–14:7). The Pastoral Epistles add a corroborating geographical detail: Paul reminds Timothy of “what persecutions I endured: at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra” (2 Timothy 3:11).

The apocryphal narrative thus locates itself within a region and a mission the canonical record knows. This is characteristic of the apocryphal Acts: they attach themselves to the recognized framework of the apostolic mission and fill it with new, edifying episodes. The Acts of Paul even borrows a named figure — Onesiphorus, Paul’s host at Iconium, who in 2 Timothy 1:16–18 and 4:19 is commended for refreshing Paul and is associated (in the same letter that mentions Iconium) with that region. The author of the Acts has drawn the host’s name from the Pauline letters and built a household and a story around him. The famous physical description of Paul that the Acts supplies at this point — “a man little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, with eyebrows joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 3) — is the earliest portrait of the Apostle’s appearance in any source, and is itself a product of this second-century narrative, not of contemporary memory.

Points of Contact and Points of Silence

The relation between the Thecla legend and the canonical Paul is, on inspection, a relation of framework without content. The Acts borrow the cities (Iconium, Antioch, Myra), the host (Onesiphorus), the fact of persecution, and the figure of Paul the celibacy-preaching missionary; but the central figure, Thecla, and the central events — the broken betrothal, the pyre, the beasts, the self-baptism — are entirely absent from the canonical record. The canonical Acts narrates the Iconium mission (Acts 14) with no woman named Thecla, no betrothed Thamyris, no governor’s pyre. The Pauline epistles, which name many women co-workers — Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, Mary, Tryphaena and Tryphosa (Romans 16) — never name Thecla. (The Acts themselves seem to draw the name of Thecla’s royal protectress, Tryphaena, from Romans 16:12, where “Tryphaena and Tryphosa” are greeted; the apocryphal author has lifted a Pauline name and made it a queen.)

This pattern — canonical names redeployed into a new narrative — is the source-critical signature of the Acts of Paul and Thecla. It explains both why the story feels embedded in the apostolic age and why it cannot be read as a record of it. The author writes within the Pauline world as it was remembered and revered c. 150–190, drawing freely on the letters and on Acts for color and anchorage, and composing the rest “from his own store,” in Tertullian’s phrase (De baptismo 17.5; see The Source Problem).

The Relation to the Pastoral Epistles

One further canonical relation has occupied scholarship and deserves a clear statement, because it bears directly on the women’s-ministry debate (treated in Women Apostles and the Debate). The Pastoral Epistles — 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus — share with the Acts of Paul a common world (Ephesus, Iconium, named co-workers) but stand in apparent tension with it on the question of women. 1 Timothy 2:11–12 enjoins that a woman “learn in silence with all subjection” and “suffer not a woman to teach”; the Acts of Paul and Thecla ends with Paul commissioning Thecla, “Go, and teach the word of God” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 41).

The classic scholarly proposal, associated above all with Dennis MacDonald, reads these two bodies of text as opposing voices in a second-century “battle for Paul”: the Acts preserving (in MacDonald’s reconstruction) oral storytelling traditions cherished among Christian women, the Pastorals representing an authorial counter-effort to discipline precisely such traditions and such women (Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983). More recent work, notably Susan Hylen, has questioned the “two opposing camps” framing, arguing that the Acts and the Pastorals share a single cultural framework of female modesty and that the opposition has been overdrawn (Susan E. Hylen, A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Both readings are set out, with the disagreement named rather than resolved, in Women Apostles and the Debate. What belongs here is only the foundational point: the canonical and apocryphal Pauls are in conversation, and the Thecla narrative is one second-century party to that conversation, not a neutral record standing outside it.

How the Legend Entered the Church’s Memory

Whatever its origin, the Thecla narrative was received — and received early, and warmly — into the devotional life of the Church, in a way that sharply distinguishes it from most apocryphal Acts. By the late second century it was known and contested (Tertullian); by the early fourth it furnished Methodius the chief speaker of his Symposium; by the later fourth it was read aloud to pilgrims at a great shrine in Isauria (Egeria) and held up by Ambrose, beside the Virgin Mary, as the pattern of consecrated virginity (see Thecla in the Fathers). The Church did not receive the Acts as Scripture — it was firmly excluded from the canon — but it received Thecla: the figure was lifted out of the apocryphal text and into the liturgy, the calendar, the iconography, and the cult.

This is the characteristic Orthodox relation to the figure, and it should be stated precisely so that nothing in the later chapters is misread. The Church venerates St. Thecla; it does not canonize the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The narrative is the vehicle by which her memory traveled, and the cult is the form in which the Church received her. The discipline of this collection — to report the Acts as the Acts, pinned to their second-century source, while reporting the cult as the well-attested historical phenomenon it is — follows directly from the way the tradition itself separated the venerated saint from the apocryphal book that carried her.

References

Acts of Paul and Thecla 1–3, 41. In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 364–365, 372.
The Acts of the Apostles 13:51–14:7; 2 Timothy 1:16–18; 3:11; 4:19; Romans 16:12; 1 Timothy 2:11–12 (the canonical framework and named figures).
Tertullian, De baptismo 17.5. ANF vol. 3.
MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.
Hylen, Susan E. A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Barrier, Jeremy W. The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary. WUNT II/270. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. (On the physical description of Paul, Acts 3, and the borrowed names.)