Tertullian says her story, as given in the Apocryphal New Testament, was forged by a writer of Asia. Yet Eusebius, Gregory and a dozen others before the fourth century refer to Thecla as having been a genuine character, whom legend had obscured and magnified as mist hides and exaggerates real figures in real life. Basil of Seleucia wrote her life in verse. Another Scholastic reports how an emperor had visions of her. The original version of her life on which this story is written is now in a Greek manuscript in the Bodleian Library and was regarded by Middle Age biblical students as largely legendary, but a picture of the status of woman in the first century in Greek Asia. The references to the names of Paul’s associates and the apostates from the faith are the same as in the Acts, but whether Thecla is to be regarded as “the half wit,” who followed Paul, or one of “the honorable women” won to the faith, it is impossible to tell. It is disappointing here to have to record that while the Catholic, Armenian and secular writers acknowledge Thecla as a fact, the great Presbyterian divines nearly all ignore her, though they quote in full the descriptions of Paul, from the life of Thecla. This strikes me as not exactly according to the rules of good sport. If the Thecla account of Paul is true, why isn’t the account of Thecla true? It is interesting to add there is a biblical manuscript in the British Museum, presented to Charles I, 1628, said to have been copied by Thecla, the Martyr. It includes the Epistles of St. Clement. The Vatican “Aid to Bible Students” wisely rejects the fables of Thecla’s Life; but all scholars accept the fact there was a Thecla, Martyr.
Iconium itself, or Konieh of to-day, was a city of 30,000 people, noted for its wool and leather, carpet and tent industries. It was a sort of halfway house for the Greeks from the Isles of the Sea and the desert travelers of Persia and Babylonia. The church where Paul preached at Iconium has been found by modern archæologists.
What do modern scholars such as Ramsay and Turner say of Thecla?
I quote from Turner’s review of Ramsay’s Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170: “The Acts of Paul and Thecla do not . . . come to us . . . in the best of company . . . and contain all the marks which characterize this whole class of forgeries.” He then refers to mistakes in the place names of the Bodleian copy and the belittling of marriage which betrays the author of this manuscript as a Gnostic or Essene; “and yet . . . the details have probability . . . and it is doubtful . . . how far it is possible to disentangle the original matter from . . . recasts.” It was on Paul’s first missionary journey (Acts XIII, 51). He was following the Roman Road of Augustus and branched to Iconium. He is described as “small, bald and bow-legged, with close-meeting eyebrows and long nose, but graceful, gracious and radiant.” Ramsay accepts this description of Paul in the Thecla legends. At Iconium, his host was the Onesiphorus, mentioned in his letters, and he was pestered by the frantic jealousy of the Demas and Hermogenes, also mentioned in his letters. Paul was accused of causing friction between man and woman; and he was scourged and expelled from the city. There follows the story much as I have given it here, with long details and repetitions and embellishments left out. When Nero used the bodies of Christians as torches for his pleasure gardens and a Herod daughter had to flee from an old satyr, whom her dowry had bought—it is a pretty sound inference without any legendary exaggeration that a young girl, who joined the despised Christians and refused to marry her lover, would be treated without mercy in an age so sensual that sex had become an untellable part of religious worship.
And now we come to one of the proofs that Thecla was more than legend. The grande dame who adopted her is variously named Trifina, Trefina, Tryphæna of the house of Polemon (date of reign 37 B.C. to 63 A.D.). It was to one of the Kings of the house that Bernice was the second time married and from whom she fled to Jerusalem. He was a converted pagan to the Jewish faith, probably to get Bernice’s dowry. The Herod daughters were half Arab, but they were also half of the Jewish high-priest blood; and union with what one historian calls “these half-breed brutes” proved too strong for even Herod blood. Trefina was daughter of a Polemon from 44 A.D. to 63 A.D. This Polemon’s wife had been a first cousin to the Emperor Claudius and ruled over Pontus jointly with her son till about 40 A.D., when she retired. Her daughter had died, and the query is—was her son the man who married Bernice; or had Trefina’s husband discarded her and married Bernice? Her son was reigning at the time she passed through Iconium. Her dead daughter’s name is given as Falconilla, the same as in the legend of Thecla. To know the type of the vice of this house one must read Apollonius’ Life.
Practically the verdict of Ramsay and Turner on Thecla is, “the Acts of Thecla . . . expand the hints of St. Luke and throw a welcome light on the social conditions.” Luke refers to “many women” attending Paul’s services in the house of Onesiphorus. In other words, Thecla was a personality, but her real history is lost in legend.
Of the legend, how closely have the facts been followed in this story? Modern decency would not permit all the details of the insults to Thecla, so these are shortened in the story here. She was exposed not only in the arena of Iconium but in the arena of Antioch for repulsing the lewd advances of the city magistrate, who in one of the fêtes represented the god Roma and proceeded to claim her as a vestal virgin. All these details have been omitted or shortened in the story, and her experiences have been centered at Iconium.
For the rest, the story conforms to the facts of the age. The Greeks were the rich trader class despised by the soldierly Romans. Men were addicted to effeminacy, jealousy, self-adornment; and the Greek matrons chased their daughters into early marriages to avoid having evidence of age in their family. Paul was called a “Jewish babbler” here as he was in Greece. Girls who would neither marry nor become temple vestals were thrust in the streets as courtesans. The red cord of the courtesan marked the difference between the temple virgins consecrated to the god and the temple girl kept as a bait for lust and revenue, of which one Aphrodite Temple had a colossal revenue. Gnostics will deny that the names of “the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost” were used in baptism before the fourth century. I refuse to discuss the controversy—it is nonessential to the true picture of conditions set forth in the story.
There is one interesting minor point for the argumentative to worry over. Paul refers again and again to the man with shaved hair, the woman with unshaved and covered head, both references really advising the Christian away from the temple vices which becurled men and women with short red-corded hair symbolized. There is a reference to Paul taking a vow, himself, that carried him to Jerusalem. (Acts xviii, 18). He had his head shaved. Now, the Thecla legend describes Paul as “bald,” like a man who, Roman fashion, had always worn his hair short. Yet the most of the pictures of Paul and the other early saints represent them with hair like a thatch, beards like Druids, and expressions about as cheerful as an inverted tablespoon, though their evangel was called “the Glad News,” and the keynote of Paul’s life was—“Rejoice.”