Text and Transmission

The textual history of the Acts of Paul and Thecla: its place within the larger Acts of Paul, its survival in Greek and in an extraordinary range of versions, its wide circulation across the Christian world, and its standing as the most popular of the apocryphal Acts even as it was firmly excluded from the canon. The reception history is, paradoxically, far better documented than the events the narrative relates.

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

Part of the Acts of Paul

The Acts of Paul and Thecla is not an independent composition but a self-contained narrative unit within a larger second-century work, the Acts of Paul (Acta Pauli) — one of the five major apocryphal Acts of the apostolic age (with the Acts of John, Andrew, Peter, and Thomas). The larger Acts of Paul once narrated the Apostle’s travels, preaching, and martyrdom at Rome, and included such other pieces as the correspondence known as 3 Corinthians and the Martyrdom of Paul; but it survives only in a fragmentary and damaged state, reconstructed from scattered Greek leaves, a long Coptic papyrus (the Heidelberg Coptic codex, P. Heid.), and the versions (J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, pp. 350–357; Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992).

The Thecla portion is the great exception. Where the rest of the Acts of Paul is preserved in tatters, the Thecla narrative survives complete and in abundance — in numerous Greek manuscripts and in version after version. The reason is plain: it circulated separately, copied and translated on its own as the popular story it was, and so was preserved by the very devotion that made it travel. The standard critical Greek text remains that of R. A. Lipsius and M. Bonnet, Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1891), supplemented by the commentary and text of Jeremy W. Barrier, The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary (WUNT II/270, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

The Versions: An Extraordinary Range

Few works of early Christian literature outside the New Testament were translated as widely as the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Beyond the Greek, the text or its derivatives survive in Latin (in multiple recensions), Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Slavonic, and other languages — a spread that marks it as one of the most internationally diffused of all apocryphal narratives (Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 351–352; Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, who traces the cult’s diffusion across the Greek East, the Latin West, Egypt, and beyond). This breadth of translation is itself a historical datum of the first importance: it documents, far more securely than anything in the narrative, that Thecla’s story was read and loved from Mesopotamia to Spain.

The versions are not merely passive copies. The text grew and was reshaped in transmission — most consequentially in the fifth-century Greek Life and Miracles of Thecla, which paraphrased and amplified the narrative and supplied a new ending (the “living disappearance” at Seleucia), and which itself became the dominant form of the story in the Byzantine world (see The Life and Miracles). Manuscript variation, expansion, and local adaptation are the norm across this tradition, and they complicate any attempt to recover an “original” text behind the layers.

Wide Circulation and Reception

The reception is, paradoxically, the best-documented thing about Thecla — far better attested than the events the Acts relate. The chain of witnesses is dense and early:

• By c. 198–203, Tertullian in North Africa knows the Acts of Paul, knows it is used to license women’s teaching and baptizing, and writes to refute that use (De baptismo 17; see The Source Problem).
• By the early fourth century, Methodius of Olympus makes Thecla the chief and most eloquent speaker of his Symposium (see The Patristic Thecla).
• By c. 384, the pilgrim Egeria has the entire “Acts of Thecla” read aloud to her at the saint’s shrine near Seleucia (Itinerarium Egeriae 23; see The Shrine at Seleucia) — direct evidence that the Acts were used liturgically and devotionally at the cult center.
• Through the fourth and fifth centuries, the Fathers of East and West invoke Thecla as the model of consecrated virginity (Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa, and others; see Thecla in the Fathers).

This reception is why the figure of Thecla so far outran the apocryphal book that carried her. The Church received and venerated Thecla while declining to receive the Acts as Scripture — a distinction the tradition itself drew, and which this collection keeps (see Iconium and the Tradition).

The Place Among the Five Major Acts

To see the Acts of Paul rightly it helps to set it among its peers. The five major apocryphal Acts — of John, Andrew, Peter, Paul, and Thomas — share a family resemblance: each narrates the post-Pentecost travels, preaching, miracles, and martyrdom of an apostle, in the episodic, romance-like manner of the genre, and each promotes (with varying intensity) the ideal of sexual continence. But they differ sharply in doctrine and in fate. The Acts of John and the Acts of Andrew carry pronounced encratite and at points docetic or gnosticizing tendencies, and were correspondingly suspect; portions of them were condemned and have survived only in fragments. The Acts of Paul stands, by comparison, on the orthodox end of the spectrum: its Christology is broadly sound, its asceticism intense but not heretical, and its hero is the canonical Apostle preaching a recognizably apostolic gospel of continence and resurrection. This relative orthodoxy is part of why the Acts of Paul — and especially its Thecla portion — could be read devotionally and could give the Church a venerated saint, where the more heterodox Acts gave it chiefly problems. The Acts of Paul was excluded from the canon, but it was never anathematized as the heretical Acts were; it occupied the broad middle territory of edifying-but-non-canonical literature, and Thecla traveled on the strength of that standing.

Excluded from the Canon

For all its popularity, the Acts of Paul was never received into the New Testament canon. Tertullian’s notice already treats it as a writing falsely circulating under Paul’s name (De baptismo 17). Around 325, Eusebius of Caesarea classes the Acts of Paul among the writings that are not genuine and not to be reckoned with the recognized Scriptures — he lists it among the notha (“spurious”), distinct both from the accepted books and from the heretical forgeries to be rejected outright (Ecclesiastical History 3.25.4). Later canon lists and the so-called Gelasian Decree likewise exclude it. The Church’s settled judgment was consistent: the Acts of Paul and Thecla is edifying apocryphal literature, not Scripture, and not a historical source on a par with the canonical books.

[Disputed: the status the early Church accorded the Acts of Paul. Eusebius classes it among the notha — “spurious,” not canonical, yet distinguished from the heretical books to be wholly rejected (Hist. eccl. 3.25.4); Tertullian treats it as a pseudonymous composition (De baptismo 17). The work was read devotionally in many quarters while being excluded from the canon. This collection follows the consensus that it is non-canonical apocryphal literature, neither Scripture nor (in the Eusebian sense) a book to be simply rejected as heretical.]

That non-reception is the indispensable companion to the wide circulation. The Acts of Paul and Thecla was, at once, among the most widely read and translated of all extra-canonical Christian narratives and a book the Church declined to canonize. Both facts are true, and the collection holds them together: the story traveled the whole Christian world, and the Church venerated the saint it carried, without ever treating the narrative as Scripture or as documented history.

See Also

• The Source Problem — the date, the Tertullian notice, and the canonical exclusion
• The Narrative — the story preserved in this widely-copied text
• The Life and Miracles — the fifth-century reshaping that became the dominant Byzantine form
• The Shrine at Seleucia — Egeria’s reading of the Acts at the cult center
• Modern Scholarship — the critical editions and the scholarly study of the text

References

• Acts of Paul and Thecla, within the Acts of Paul. Greek: R. A. Lipsius and M. Bonnet, Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1891). English and introduction: J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 350–389.
• Schneemelcher, Wilhelm, ed. New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2. Rev. ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992. (The Acts of Paul: text, fragments, versions.)
• Barrier, Jeremy W. The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary. WUNT II/270. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.25.4 (the Acts of Paul among the notha). NPNF II/1.
• Tertullian, De baptismo 17. ANF vol. 3.
• Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. (Diffusion of the narrative and the cult across the Christian world.)