Women Apostles and the Debate

The companion question to the self-baptism: Paul’s commission “Go, and teach the word of God” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 41), the place of women in early Christian ministry, the apparent tension between the Acts and the Pastoral Epistles, and the major scholarly debate (MacDonald, Burrus, Hylen) over what Thecla tells us about women in the early Church. Presented even-handedly per METHODOLOGY §4.

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

The Commission to Teach

If the self-baptism (see The Self-Baptism) raised the question of women baptizing, the close of the narrative raised the parallel question of women teaching. After Thecla finds Paul at Myra and recounts her deliverance, Paul sends her out with words that became the charter of every later debate about her:

“Go, and teach the word of God.” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 41)

The narrative then shows the commission fulfilled: Thecla returns to Iconium, exhorts her mother, and departs to Seleucia, where “she enlightened many with the word of God” before her death (Acts of Paul and Thecla 43). In the Acts, that is, Thecla is not only a martyr but an apostolic teacher — commissioned by Paul, enlightening many, the apostle to Iconium and Seleucia. It is this dimension, as much as her martyrdom, that earned her the later title Equal-to-the-Apostles (see The Title and the Model).

Women in Early Christian Ministry

The Thecla narrative did not arise in a vacuum on this point. The canonical record itself attests women active in the apostolic mission: Phoebe, named a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae (Romans 16:1); Prisca (Priscilla), who with Aquila instructed Apollos (Acts 18:26; Romans 16:3); Junia, “of note among the apostles” (Romans 16:7); the daughters of Philip who prophesied (Acts 21:9). Alongside these stand the texts that restrict women’s public speech and teaching — most sharply 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12. The early Church inherited both strands, and worked out an order in which women served prominently — as deaconesses, as consecrated virgins and widows, as patrons and teachers of other women and of their households — while the public teaching office in the assembly and the administration of the mysteries were reserved to the ordained male presbyterate and episcopate.

Thecla, as the Acts present her, sits at the intensifying edge of this picture: a layperson and a woman who baptizes (herself), is commissioned to teach, and enlightens many. The question the early Church faced, and that modern scholarship has revived, is what to make of such a figure — whether she reflects an actual, contested practice of women’s ministry that the wider Church later constrained, or whether she is a literary ideal whose teaching is of a different order than the public office reserved to the clergy.

The Acts and the Pastoral Epistles

The sharpest textual tension is between the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles, which share a world (Ephesus, Iconium, the figure of Paul instructing) but diverge on women. 1 Timothy 2:11–12 enjoins: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” The Acts end with Paul telling Thecla, “Go, and teach the word of God” (Acts 41). The two Pauls — the canonical author of the Pastorals and the apocryphal Paul of the Acts — appear to point in opposite directions on the very question of women teaching.

This tension is the hinge of the modern debate, and the positions must be stated carefully.

The Scholarly Debate, Presented Even-Handedly

The “battle for Paul” thesis (MacDonald, Burrus, Davies). A body of scholarship from the 1980s reads the Acts and the Pastorals as opposing voices in a second-century contest over the legacy of Paul and the roles of women. Dennis MacDonald argued that the Acts of Paul drew on oral storytelling traditions cherished among Christian women, and that the Pastoral Epistles represent an authorial effort to suppress precisely such traditions — the famous prohibition of women teaching (1 Timothy 2) being aimed, in part, at the kind of women’s piety the Thecla legends expressed (Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983). Virginia Burrus read the apocryphal Acts, including Thecla’s, as “chastity stories” reflecting women’s social aspirations and a measure of autonomy through the renunciation of marriage (Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1987). Stevan Davies similarly located the Acts in communities of continent women (Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). On this family of readings, Thecla is a window — however refracted — onto an actual and contested women’s ministry in the early Church.

The revisionist critique (Hylen, and others). More recent scholarship has questioned the “two opposing camps” framing. Susan Hylen argues that the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles share a single cultural framework of female modesty rather than representing opposed feminist and patriarchal parties; Thecla is at once “modest” and an “apostle,” and the supposed opposition has been overdrawn by reading modern categories into ancient texts. On this view, the Acts are evidence less of an organized women’s-liberation movement than of the ordinary, complex agency that modest early-Christian women already possessed (Susan E. Hylen, A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Other scholars caution further that the Acts are a literary romance whose female protagonist may tell us more about the genre and its (possibly male) author than about the lived ministry of historical women (see the discussion in Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[Disputed: what the Thecla narrative reveals about women’s ministry in the early Church. One scholarly tradition (MacDonald 1983; Burrus 1987; Davies 1980) reads the Acts as reflecting an actual, contested women’s ministry, opposed by the Pastoral Epistles in a “battle for Paul.” A revisionist line (Hylen 2015) holds that the Acts and the Pastorals share a common framework of female modesty and that the opposition is overdrawn; still others stress the Acts’ character as literary romance. The positions are genuinely unresolved; this collection reports them without adjudicating, per METHODOLOGY §4.]

The Orthodox Reception

The Orthodox tradition received Thecla as Equal-to-the-Apostles — a real and high honor, shared with St. Mary Magdalene, St. Nina of Georgia, St. Helen, and a handful of others (see St. Nina of Georgia) — precisely for her apostolic enlightening of many, while never drawing from her example a warrant for women’s ordination to the priesthood or for women administering the mysteries. The two things are held together without contradiction: the Church honors women who evangelized, taught, suffered, and led — Thecla, the Myrrh-bearers, Nina, the deaconesses, the great abbesses and ascetics — within an order that reserves the sacramental priesthood to men. The title Equal-to-the-Apostles names the missionary and confessional achievement, not a sacerdotal office.

This is the frame within which the broader Orthodox treatment of women’s roles, the diaconate, and the ministries open to women is set out in Women in Orthodoxy. What belongs here is the specific point that Thecla, the most celebrated woman of the early Church, is venerated for an apostolic ministry of teaching and witness — the commission “Go, and teach the word of God” taken seriously as the ground of her title — without that veneration being read as a precedent for the priesthood. The Church kept the apostle and the teacher; it did not derive from her a sacerdotal claim.

References

Acts of Paul and Thecla 41, 43. In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 372.
Romans 16:1–7; Acts 18:26; 21:9; 1 Corinthians 14:34–35; 1 Timothy 2:11–12 (the canonical evidence on women in ministry).
MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.
Burrus, Virginia. Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts. Studies in Women and Religion 23. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.
Davies, Stevan L. The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.
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.