Thecla: The Apostle Who Defied Women’s Destiny

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Who was Thecla? Little known today, especially in Protestant churches, Thecla of Iconium enjoyed fame perhaps second only to Mary, mother of Jesus, in the early Christian era. Thecla’s anonymity is all the more remarkable because women were so prominent in the formation of the church. The Gospels mention women who accompanied Jesus and the 12 apostles from town to town and supported them financially—Joanna, Mary Magdala, Susanna “and many others” (Luke 8:3). We know that Jesus considered himself “at home” in the home of Mary and her sister Martha (Luke 10:38–41; John 11:1–3, 12:2). After Jesus’ death, women […]

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Footnotes

See Jane Schaberg, “How Mary Magdalene Became a Whore,” BR, October 1992.

See the following articles in Biblical Archaeology Review: Gary Vikan, “Don’t Leave Home Without Them: Pilgrim Eulogiai Ensure a Safe Trip,” July/August 1997; and Hershel Shanks, “Solomon’s Blessings,” September/October 2001.

Endnotes

The Acts of Paul is available in several English translations, including J. Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 350ff (this is a total reworking of M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963]); and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 213ff.

For more on this, see Dennis R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983); Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

Davis, Cult of St. Thecla, pp. 31–32.

MacDonald, Legend and the Apostle, chapters 3, 4.

Davis, Cult of St. Thecla, pp. 48–80.

Renate Pillinger, “Neue Entdeckungen in der sogennanten Paulusgrotte von Ephesus,” Mitteilungen zur christlichen Archaeologie 6 (2000), pp. 16–29.

Davis, Cult of St. Thecla, pp. 87–112.

Annewies van den Hoek and John J. Herrmann, Jr., “Thecla the Beast Fighter: A Female Emblem of Deliverance in Early Christian Popular Art,” The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, 13 (2001), pp. 212–249; see also Herrmann and van den Hoek, Light from the Age of Augustine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 2002), pl. 49.

10.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1937.37.165.2. The museum’s identification of the figure in the lower left has wandered back and forth between St. Thecla and St. Martina. To this viewer, the former is more likely.

11.

Widener Collection, 1942.9.26.

12.

A searchable database of art of the early church up through the 11th century reveals close to 200 images of Thecla; new entries are added to the database regularly. See www.maryvillecollege.edu/cartlidge/homepage.htm. See also David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 148–162.