Born: 30 CE, Turkey
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Turkey
Also known as: Θέκλα, Thékla, Θέκλα, Tekla

Thecla, the beast fighter: The saint who faced down lions and killer seals is one of many ‘leading ladies’ in early Christian texts

The Bible is filled with brave and courageous women.

Deborah, the judge who fought a war to protect her people. The widow Ruth, who wittingly convinces a man to marry her in order to continue the lineage of her mother-in-law, Naomi. Esther, who boldly stands up to an evil politician, Haman, in order to save the Jewish people from death. Judith, who beheads an opposing general in order to save her community.

The stories of these confident women are found in the Hebrew Bible, the sacred text of Judaism, which also forms half of the Christian Bible. But when it comes to the New Testament, where are the “leading ladies” of Christianity?

While a few important women are mentioned – such as Mary, the mother of Jesus; and Mary Magdalene, who discovers his empty tomb – no women are the stars of their own books in this half of the Bible. Instead, one must look to the Christian apocrypha: texts that are not found in the New Testament but were written by early Christians. One example of a prominent woman in these writings is Thecla, venerated for her persistence, courage and influence.

Thecla makes frequent appearances in my research and teaching, which focus on gender and early Christian literature. Her story is memorable not only for its dramatic miracles but Thecla’s persistence as a woman who felt called to preach, teach and baptize.

Facing down fires and seals

Thecla’s story is told in a second-century text titled the Acts of Thecla, or the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The story begins when the apostle Paul, who spread Jesus’ gospel more than any other follower in early Christianity, visits the city of Iconium, in modern-day Turkey. Paul’s teachings there highlight celibacy, and he blesses the bodies of virgins, which he says are pleasing to God.

Thecla listens intently while sitting in her home by the window. She is so drawn to Paul’s voice that she refuses to move, eat or drink for three days and nights. Even though she is engaged to be married, she longs to be pure like the virgins Paul celebrates. Thecla’s mother and fiancé are troubled by this, and they convince the leaders of the city to arrest Paul.

Thecla gains entry to the prison by trading her bracelets and sits with Paul and kisses his chains. During his trial, Thecla is questioned and refuses to answer. Her own mother calls for her to be burned because of her refusal to marry. Thecla is stripped naked and placed on a pyre, but no flames touch her. A miraculous storm erupts, the fire is extinguished, and Thecla survives.

Afterward, she cuts off her hair and dresses as a man in order to follow Paul in disguise. Thecla also asks that he baptize her. Paul asks instead that she have patience and takes her to the city of Antioch.

Thecla’s beauty attracts unwanted attention there, and a man named Alexander immediately falls in love with her. Rather than come to Thecla’s aid, Paul denies knowing her, and Alexander attempts to rape her. Thecla humiliates him by ripping his robe and tearing the wreath off his head. Alexander brings her to the governor of Antioch, who condemns her to face the beasts in the arena.

The scene is terrifying and vivid. Thecla is stripped naked and thrown into the arena, where lions and bears are waiting to attack her. But a lioness walks over to Thecla, lies at her feet and protects her from the other animals.

In the midst of this danger, Thecla stands, reaches out her hands and prays to God. When she opens her eyes, she sees a pool of water filled with killer seals, yet throws herself in to baptize herself. Immediately after, lightning strikes and the seals are killed.

The governor finally releases Thecla and provides her with clothes. She goes immediately to Paul, who finally blesses her and commissions her to teach the gospel.

Women preaching

Many Christians in the ancient world viewed Thecla as an inspiration and an example for leadership. Yet not everyone approved of women teaching and preaching, including a second-century church father named Tertullian. He discouraged Christians from reading the Acts of Thecla and claimed that it was a forgery, since he did not think Paul – who wrote that women should be silent in church – would affirm a woman’s right to teach and baptize.

Tertullian’s warnings reflect controversies surrounding women’s leadership and imply that some women claimed Thecla’s example as justification for preaching.

Later Christians remembered Thecla through artwork as well as texts. For example, a fresco of Thecla – along with her mother and Paul – is depicted in a fifth- or sixth-century grotto just outside of Ephesus, an important city both in the Roman Empire and in early Christianity. The painter imagined Thecla looking out her window, just as the beginning of the Acts of Thecla describes.

In Egypt, a round, carved plate was discovered depicting Thecla with the lions at her feet. This fifth-century artistic depiction demonstrates how far the story of Thecla’s perseverance in the arena with the beasts had spread.

Today, Thecla is the patron saint of the city of Tarragona, Spain, where the cathedral is named after her and images of Thecla decorate the altarpiece. Each year on Sept. 23, the feast day of St. Thecla, this Spanish city celebrates her story through parades, music, dancing and human towers called “castells.” A relic of her arm is processed through the city and displayed in the cathedral so that devotees can view it and pray for blessings.

Just as Thecla listened through her open window to Paul’s message, today Thecla’s story echoes to those who desire to hear the stories of courageous early Christian women.

Christy Cobb, Associate Professor of Christianity, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This biography, written by Catherine Kennedy, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Thecla is quite a gal – part nude Xena warrior princess, part Saint Claire dispensing alms to the poor and the good word to anyone who’ll listen. To be fair, she only ever sets out to play the second role, but like any dangerous woman she attracts some unwanted attention, and in fighting it off she lands herself in the Roman arena fighting for her life. Just as well God is on her side!
Thecla appears in the ‘Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla’, an entertaining little book which was penned around the time of the Biblical pastoral epistles – the ones addressed to Timothy, and from ‘Peter’ and ‘John’. In this Apocryphal book, a character called Paul is travelling around the Empire preaching a new religion which venerates a certain Jesus. His message is slightly different from the Biblical one, involving swearing off sex as a basic condition for salvation. Young people flock from far and wide and decide to stay single. Wives leave their husbands, or refuse them their conjugal rights … this probably won’t end well.
In other books of ‘Apocryphal Acts’ women drive a husband to suicide (Agrippina), cause another woman to be murdered (Agrippina again), desert their live-in lover together (the four concubines of prefect Agrippa), flee naked by night from an amorous husband (Mygdonia), and get imprisoned in a tomb and miraculously rescued (Drusiana). The original ‘Princess Bride’ is another of these colourful stories. The ethics are often questionable, but the plot lines are as dramatic as secular novels from the time, where star-crossed lovers are abducted by pirates, threatened by cannibals, and generally have a hard time. The crucial difference is that in the secular stories true love of the heterosexual married kind conquers all, whereas in the Apocryphal plot lines marriage and sex are precisely what the women are all desperate to escape. With implacable resolve. As fanciful as these stories may be, they reflect the deadly serious threats any woman could face if she dared to question the inevitability of marriage. Threats which remain a pressing reality for many women and girls in the world today.
At the start of her tale Thecla is a privileged teenager engaged to a rich young man chosen by her mother. The absence of a father suggests that the mother, Theoclia, has remained single after being widowed in order to retain control of her fortune and her daughter. Many wealthy women in Antiquity did this rather than surrender their freedom again, although it was hardly a working class option. In a perfect world this independent-minded mother would empathise with a headstrong daughter, but the world is not perfect, and Theoclia proves to be the sort of mother who takes disobedience personally.
Thecla overhears Paul preaching his celibate Christianity in the house next door, and she is fascinated. For days she hangs on his every word through her bedroom window and refuses to come down for meals. Her fiancé is sent for to talk some sense into her, to no avail. He takes it badly, and has the preacher arrested for disturbing the peace by persuading women not to marry, and to become bad wives. So that night Thecla creeps out of the house and bribes her way into the cells. Falling at his feet, she begs Paul to preach to her in person.
Meanwhile the whole town is out looking for her, and when she is found there is uproar. Teenaged rebellion is not recommended for girls in Antiquity. Thecla is not just a class traitor, she has betrayed her sex by refusing to marry, and betrayed her mother into the bargain by publicly refusing to back down. Theoclia demands her daughter be burned at the stake as a warning to other youngsters who might get uppity after hearing this new-fangled religion. The governor passes sentence on the spot, and Thecla is only saved by divine intervention.
At this point we can be sure we are dealing with fiction. However, while Roman courts may not have actually been in the habit of executing disobedient daughters of the aristocracy, girls were not at liberty to refuse their parents’ choice of suitor. Marriage and childbearing were legal obligations, and fathers made and unmade their offspring’s marriages as suited their business interests. The Pater Familias had theoretical power of life and death over his children as long as he lived for much of Roman History, and what went on behind closed doors was entirely the householder’s business where discipline was concerned. The ‘honour’ killing attempted against Thecla is fiction, but it was fiction with a point to make. No woman was free in such a system, and for some the best option was to opt out altogether.
On with Thecla’s adventure. Paul has been flogged and thrown out of town, so Thecla sets out after him and they travel to a different city. Here, a local chap takes a fancy to her and tries to ‘embrace’ her in the street. Thecla is having none of it. She beats off her attacker, yelling that she’s not faced death by refusing one man to end up being mistreated by another. Predictably, he takes offence, and drags her into court where it turns out that he is a big noise, and pals with the governor. She is condemned to die by wild animals as a public spectacle. There is an outcry with the ladies of the town taking her side, but they don’t make the rules. Thecla is paraded into the theatre naked, and does battle valiantly for two days with various creatures (including man-eating seals) being saved each time by some miracle. Ultimately the authorities give up, and she is freed to re-join Paul who gives her his blessing to go on her way as a fully-fledged believer and teacher of their version of Christianity. The richest of her supporters, now her adoptive mother, signs a vast fortune over to her, and Thecla sets out on a life of poor relief and preaching. She is everything the writers of the Pastoral Epistles feared – not under male control, not shut in the house, taking a role in public instruction, and attracting hostile pagan attention. Quite the ‘nasty’ woman.
So why was sex a problem, when Antiquity was so open about it? Victorian prudery was a long way off, but the idea that sex was entirely unspiritual was quite widespread across the Greco-Roman world, and committed philosophers often formed celibate communities. Philo of Alexandria describes one of these, the Therapeutae, in glowing terms, with women as full members. Whether these were all widows deemed to have ‘done their bit’ for keeping up the birth rate Philo doesn’t say, but we can be fairly sure that they were not just walking in off the street. Membership would have required independent means and the right connections. The ancients were terrible snobs, and a life of contemplation was quite beyond ordinary folk. People with breeding clung to the idea that only the well-bred could attempt life on a higher plane.
And being a woman was very much second best. The female body was deemed less human, less perfect, than the male. Women couldn’t help it: their reproductive functions just got in the way of them ever growing up and becoming rational, spiritual grown-ups. (Yes, the two went together back then) The best they could hope for was to become an honorary man by avoiding using their plumbing for making babies. These ideas of biology went back a very long way, even at the time, and although early Christianity went out of its way to stress that ladies were just as ‘saved’ as gentlemen, the combination of powerlessness that went with marriage, and the stigma attached to female biology, inspired many Christian women to go celibate and enjoy a life of independence where they could get out and about, working and doing their own thing in all-female communities. They genuinely felt this was a net gain, and theirs was one of the first belief systems to support that sort of choice. Unlike the philosophers these were ordinary women making an unorthodox choice which attracted condemnation from pagan society. It was their ordinariness, their refusal to bow to male supervision, and their firm belief that everyone and anyone could lay claim to their intellectual independence which made them dangerous. As Thecla illustrates, any woman or girl who gets wind of the fact that she is a person in her own right may just walk out on everyone’s expectations and discover that she has it in her to take on the world.
Celibate female communities were extremely controversial in an age where a stigmatised group might fall foul of a lynch-mob, or judicial discrimination. Not on the scale of Thecla’s adventures to be sure, but the pressures and dangers symbolised in the narrative were real. As the Church became ever more institutionalised female independence was often seen as problematic there as well, but the all-female groups continued to re-invent themselves and flourish as environments where women could realise their potential. They are currently very much on the wane since modern developments in medicine and in relationships have made it possible for women to have many more options, and it is easy to forget that for these very early foremothers of feminism, religion and celibacy were revolutionary and empowering. Far from being hamstrung by a quest for male approval, or seeking after their ultimate ‘soul mate’, these dangerous women were out there proving that they needed no-one but themselves and their beliefs to live to the full.