The Self-Baptism

The flagship file of this section, handled per METHODOLOGY §4. In the arena at Antioch, facing the beasts, Thecla throws herself into a tank of water full of man-eating seals with the words “In the name of Jesus Christ do I baptize myself on the last day” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 34). This single episode became, within a generation, a battleground in the early Church over whether women might baptize and teach — Tertullian invoking it precisely to forbid the practice. This file sets out the scene, the early-church arguments on every side, and how the Orthodox tradition has received the episode without endorsing self-baptism.

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

The Scene (Acts of Paul and Thecla 34)

The self-baptism comes at the crisis of Thecla’s second trial. Condemned to the beasts at Antioch and exposed in the arena, defended by a dying lioness but otherwise without help, Thecla sees a great pit or tank of water filled with man-eating seals (Greek phōkai) — set there as a further instrument of her death — and seizes the moment:

“Now is it time for me to wash myself. And she threw herself in, saying: In the name of Jesus Christ do I baptize myself on the last day. And when the women and the multitude saw it, they wept, saying: Cast not thyself into the water; so that even the governor wept that so great beauty should be devoured by seals. So then she cast herself into the water in the name of Jesus Christ; but the seals, seeing the light of a flash of fire, floated dead upon the surface.” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 34)

Several features of the scene are essential to its later interpretation. The baptism is self-administered: Thecla baptizes herself, with no bishop, presbyter, or deacon present and no one to baptize her. It is performed in extremis, at the apparent point of death (“on the last day” — that is, she expects this to be her end). It is at once a baptism and a deliverance: the water that should drown her becomes the water of her rebirth, and the seals meant to devour her are struck dead. The episode thus fuses Christian initiation with martyrdom and miracle — a “baptism unto death” that is also her salvation in the arena.

Why It Became a Battleground

For the second- and third-century Church, this scene was not an edifying curiosity but a problem, because it could be — and was — read as a precedent: if the holy Thecla baptized herself, might not women baptize? And the same Acts ended with Paul telling her, “Go, and teach the word of God” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 41) — might not women teach? The two questions traveled together, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla supplied an apostolic-looking warrant for answering both in the affirmative.

That this use was actually being made of the Acts is established by the earliest external witness to the text itself. Writing c. 198–203, Tertullian responds directly to people who “claim Thecla’s example as a license for women’s teaching and baptizing”:

“But if the writings which wrongly go under Paul’s name claim Thecla’s example as a license for women’s teaching and baptizing, let them know that, in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office.” (Tertullian, De baptismo 17.5; ANF 3:677)

Tertullian’s strategy is to disqualify the source rather than reinterpret the scene: the Acts cannot license women’s ministry because the Acts are a forgery, composed by a presbyter who was deposed for composing them. The whole of his argument here presupposes that the Thecla narrative was being deployed by his opponents as a serious precedent — which is itself important evidence for how the early Church read the episode. (For the full source-critical weight of the Tertullian notice and the cautions about taking his “trial and deposition” report at face value, see The Source Problem.)

The Early-Church Arguments, Set Out Even-Handedly

Per METHODOLOGY §4, the positions are set out without polemical framing.

The case made from Thecla (the position Tertullian opposes). Christians in second-century Asia and after appealed to the Acts as showing that a woman — and a layperson — had baptized (herself) and had been commissioned by Paul to teach, with the narrative’s miracles read as divine ratification. On this reading the figure of Thecla licensed an active ministry for women, including baptizing and teaching. This is not a position reconstructed by modern scholars alone; Tertullian’s own words attest that it was being argued in his day.

Tertullian’s counter-case (De baptismo 17). Tertullian’s broader argument in De baptismo lays down the principle that the right to baptize belongs to the bishop, and under him to presbyters and deacons, “not without the bishop’s authority” (De baptismo 17.1); the laity may baptize only in necessity, and “how much more is the discipline of modesty and reserve incumbent on women” (De baptismo 17.4). Against the Thecla precedent specifically, he deploys the forgery argument above. His conclusion is unambiguous: a woman has no permission to teach in church or to baptize. It is critical to note that Tertullian’s polemic is itself the chief evidence that the contrary practice (or at least the contrary argument) existed; one does not forbid what no one proposes.

The wider patristic and canonical settlement. The mainstream of the early Church did not follow the Thecla precedent into a sacramental ministry of women. The teaching office and the administration of baptism were reserved to the bishop and the ordained presbyterate and diaconate, with the order of deaconesses assisting at the baptism of women (anointing, instruction, the care of the female catechumens) but not themselves performing the baptismal mystery. This is the settled order the canonical tradition reflects, and it is the order within which Thecla was, in fact, venerated — at her own shrine the resident community was led by a deaconess, Marthana, whom Egeria met (Itinerarium Egeriae 23; see The Shrine at Seleucia). The Church kept the saint and declined the precedent.

How the Orthodox Tradition Receives the Episode

The Orthodox tradition’s reception of the self-baptism is a model of the distinction this whole collection turns on: between venerating a saint and endorsing every element of an apocryphal narrative about her. Three points hold the reception together.

First, self-baptism is not the practice of the Church and never has been. Orthodox baptism is administered by a bishop or priest (and, in extreme necessity of death, by any Orthodox Christian — but never upon oneself); the minister and the recipient are distinct. The episode in Acts 34 is not, and has never been, read as authorizing self-baptism. It is read as an extraordinary act in an extraordinary narrative, belonging to the world of the apocryphal romance, not to the Church’s sacramental order.

Second, the episode is pinned to its source, not asserted as event (METHODOLOGY §3.5). That Thecla baptized herself in a tank of seals is what the second-century Acts relate; it is not an independently attested fact, and the collection reports it as the former. The veneration of Thecla does not rest on the historicity of this scene.

Third, what the tradition receives from the scene is its martyrological and baptismal symbolism, not its canonical content. The fusion of baptism and martyrdom — the water of death become the water of rebirth, the willingness to die “in the name of Jesus Christ” — is the theology of the “baptism of blood,” the ancient conviction that the martyr’s death is itself a baptism (a theology Tertullian himself articulates elsewhere). Read this way, Thecla’s plunge dramatizes the catechumen’s death-and-rising in Christ at the very threshold of martyrdom. This symbolic reception is consistent with the Church’s veneration of Thecla as Protomartyr and with its refusal to draw from the scene any license for irregular baptism.

[Disputed: the meaning and proper reception of Thecla’s self-baptism (Acts 34). It was used in the early Church (Tertullian’s opponents, De baptismo 17) as a precedent for women baptizing; Tertullian opposed this by impugning the source. Modern scholarship reads the scene variously — as evidence of contested women’s roles (MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle, 1983; Davies), or within a shared culture of modesty that does not imply a women’s sacramental ministry (Hylen, A Modest Apostle, 2015). The Orthodox tradition venerates Thecla without endorsing self-baptism, reading the episode symbolically (the baptism-martyrdom fusion) and pinning it to its apocryphal source per §3.5. The positions are reported, not adjudicated.]

References

Acts of Paul and Thecla 34, 41. In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 370, 372.
Tertullian, De baptismo (On Baptism) 17. Latin: CCSL 1. English: S. Thelwall, ANF vol. 3 (newadvent.org/fathers/0321.htm). (The reservation of baptism to the bishop, presbyters, and deacons; the prohibition of women baptizing; the forgery argument against the Thecla precedent.)
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.
Itinerarium Egeriae (Pilgrimage of Egeria) 23 (the deaconess Marthana at the Seleucia shrine). Trans. J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999).