Thecla and the History of Women

St. Thecla’s significance for the history of women in the Church. As the most celebrated woman of early Christianity — venerated as Protomartyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles, model of the consecrated woman, patron of the ascetic movement — she has become, in modern times, a focal point for the recovery of women’s history in early Christianity. This file sets out that significance and frames it within the Orthodox understanding, keeping the source-critical discipline of the whole collection.

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

The Most Celebrated Woman of Early Christianity

Whatever the historical questions surrounding her, Thecla is, by reception, the most celebrated woman of early Christianity outside the New Testament itself. No other woman of the apostolic or sub-apostolic age generated so vast a cult, so wide a literary diffusion, so insistent a patristic presence, or so enduring a place in the calendar and the iconography. She is the woman after whom the consecrated life was named (Macrina’s secret name; see The Patristic Thecla), the model held up beside the Virgin Mary as the pattern of virginal self-offering (Ambrose), the chief speaker on virginity in the earliest Christian treatise on the subject (Methodius), the patroness of a great pilgrimage shrine, and the figure whose image multiplied on pilgrim flasks across the Mediterranean. For the first centuries of the Church, Thecla was the exemplary Christian woman — the type to which the holy women of the age were assimilated and after which they shaped their lives.

This is the primary historical significance, and it is well-attested: not what Thecla did, but what Thecla meant — the immense role the figure played in the spiritual imagination and the lived devotion of early Christian women (see Thecla and the Ascetic Movement). The history of women in the early Church cannot be written without her, because she was the form in which so much of early Christian women’s piety understood and expressed itself.

A Window onto Women’s Lives

Beyond her function as exemplar, the Thecla tradition has been read as a window — however refracted — onto the actual lives and aspirations of women in the early Church. The narrative shows a woman choosing for herself, against family, suitor, and city, a life consecrated to Christ; renouncing marriage and the social role of wife and mother; traveling, teaching, and leading. Modern scholarship has asked what such a story reflects: an actual world in which the gospel offered women — especially through the renunciation of marriage — a measure of autonomy and a public role otherwise closed to them, and in which that possibility was contested within the Church itself (the “battle for Paul”; see Women Apostles and the Debate). On this reading, Thecla’s story preserves the memory, or at least the aspiration, of a women’s Christianity more active and more public than the later settled order — and the tension with the Pastoral Epistles becomes a trace of that contest.

This reading must be held with the cautions the source-criticism imposes (see What Can Be Known and Legend, Cult, and History). The Acts are a literary romance, possibly by a male author, and what they reveal of historical women’s lives is genuinely debated — some scholars now arguing that the older “liberation” reading projected modern categories onto an ancient text that in fact shares the period’s framework of female modesty (Hylen; see Modern Scholarship). The narrative is evidence of something about women in early Christianity — at minimum, that a story of a woman’s wholehearted, marriage-renouncing consecration could be told, treasured, and venerated — but exactly what it is evidence of remains contested. What is certain is the cult: that women in their thousands took Thecla as patron and model is documented fact (Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

The Orthodox Frame

The Orthodox tradition’s reception of Thecla holds together two things that modern discussion sometimes pulls apart: a high honor for the woman, and a settled order regarding the ministry. The Church gave Thecla its loftiest honorifics — Protomartyr among women, Equal-to-the-Apostles — and made her the founding pattern of the consecrated life; it honored her apostolic teaching, her courage, her consecration, and her witness unto death. At the same time it did not derive from her example a precedent for women’s ordination to the priesthood or for women administering the mysteries; the self-baptism was never read as licensing self- or women’s baptism, and the teaching commission was honored as missionary and confessional, not sacerdotal (see The Self-Baptism and Women Apostles and the Debate).

This is the characteristic Orthodox pattern, and Thecla is its great early instance: the Church venerates women who evangelized, taught, suffered, led, and were consecrated to Christ — Thecla, the Myrrh-bearers, Nina the Enlightener of Georgia, the deaconesses, the great abbesses and ascetics — within an order that reserves the sacramental priesthood to men. The honor and the order are not felt as contradictory; the title Equal-to-the-Apostles names a real and high achievement of evangelism and witness, not an office. The broader 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 observation that Thecla, the most celebrated woman of the early Church, stands at the head of the Orthodox honoring of holy women — a saint whose significance for the history of women is immense, and whose veneration the Church has always held within its own understanding of the Church’s order.

The Long Reach of the Figure

Thecla’s significance for the history of women did not end with late antiquity. Through the Middle Ages she remained, in both East and West, a fixed exemplar of the holy woman: invoked in the Western commendation of the dying among the saints from whose perils God delivered the faithful, named patroness of cities and cathedrals (Milan, Tarragona), depicted in church programs and menologia, and remembered in the East under September 24 as the head of the company of women saints. The name “Thecla” was borne by consecrated women across the centuries as a sign of vocation, as it had been given in secret to Macrina. In the modern period the figure acquired a second life in scholarship: the rise of women’s history and of feminist study of early Christianity from the 1970s onward made Thecla a central case precisely because she sits at the junction of so many questions — women’s ministry, asceticism, the apocryphal Acts, the cult of saints — and because her single slender source and vast reception make her an ideal site for asking how the memory of early Christian women was formed, transmitted, and contested (see Modern Scholarship).

The continuity across these very different periods is itself instructive. In every age Thecla has functioned less as a documented predecessor than as a figure to think with — about consecration, courage, women’s place in the Church, the relation of holiness to history. That is the deepest sense in which she belongs to the history of women in the Church: not (or not only) as a woman who lived, but as the woman through whom, for nearly two millennia, the Church and its scholars have thought about what a holy woman is. The Orthodox tradition adds to this the conviction that the thinking is not idle: in venerating Thecla the Church confesses that through this figure, received and ratified in the cult, the grace of God has been and is at work — which is, in the end, the warrant for honoring her at all (see Legend, Cult, and History).

See Also

References

  • Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Hylen, Susan E. A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.
  • Cooper, Kate. The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Acts of Paul and Thecla 41, 43 (the commission and the apostolic ministry). In J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).