Between orality and writing: the two-stage composition of the acts of Paul and Thecla and its implications for social and gender history

The Acts of Paul and Thecla is a second-century Christian text that tells the story of a young woman from the Iconium (in present-day Turkey) who overcomes, through miracles, severe persecution from family and city authorities to become an itinerant preacher and baptizer.

With themes such as conversion, conflicts between the birth family and spiritual family, opposition to the Roman Empire, and gender relations, it has been a popular text among Christians since Antiquity. Modern scholars, however, have been cautious in considering it, with other apocryphal acts of the apostles, as a suitable source for the historical reconstruction of Christian communities and women’s lives around the ancient Mediterranean.

They ponder if the APTh is an entirely fictitious product of a male writer—and therefore could tell only how the writer felt about women and other Christians in confrontation with Pagans. Or if it has roots in folk stories told by and to women—and therefore it could reveal the concerns of real, actual women and how they lived, even if Thecla was a legend they created.

This study reconciles some points of these two apparent opposite hypotheses. It proposes that early versions of Thecla’s story had at least two stages of composition. First, it circulated orally, among storytellers of uncertain gender(s), and then it was penned down by a male scribe, circulating in a community known as Cainites. This conclusion is drawn from new, revised translation of Tertullian’s commentary about the author of Thecla. This reading is informed by the larger context of his treatise, and by the literary culture of second-century writers. The study also argues for the rehabilitation of Thecla as a source for historical readings.