The Acts of Paul — Thecla, the Baptized Lion, and the Forger Who Loved Paul

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

What is the Acts of Paul?

Sometime in the last quarter of the second century, most likely between 185 and 195, a Christian in Roman Asia sat down to write the adventures the New Testament had left untold.⁠¹ The canonical Acts of the Apostles follows Paul as far as a rented house in Rome and then simply stops. This author picked up the thread and ran with it—through Iconium and Antioch, Myra and Sidon, Tyre and Ephesus and Philippi and Corinth, and at last to Rome and the executioner’s sword, where, when the blade fell, milk rather than blood is said to have splashed the soldier who struck him.⁠² The result was the Acts of Paul, a long, episodic, thoroughly legendary sequel to a book of the Bible.

Three of its episodes became famous in their own right and circulated on their own for centuries: the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the story of a young noblewoman of Iconium who breaks her engagement to follow Paul and preach; 3 Corinthians, an exchange of letters in which Paul refutes two Gnostic teachers; and the Martyrdom of Paul, the account of his death under Nero.⁠³ For most of the book’s history these pieces were all that survived, scattered across Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, and Slavonic manuscripts. Only in 1904, when Carl Schmidt published a battered Coptic papyrus at Heidelberg, did it become clear that Thecla, the Corinthian letters, and the martyrdom had once been chapters of a single continuous narrative.⁠⁴

The Acts of Paul belongs to the same shelf as the other near-misses of the canon—the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of the Hebrews—books read and loved in the early centuries that were finally judged not to be Scripture. But it holds a distinction none of the others can claim. We know who wrote it. We know why. And we know because he confessed.

The forger who loved Paul

The oldest external witness to the book is also the most damning. Writing around the year 200, Tertullian is arguing that women may not baptize, and he pauses to swat down a text his opponents were citing against him:

But if the writings which wrongly go under Paul’s name claim Thecla’s example as a licence for women’s teaching and baptizing, let them know that, in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office.⁠⁵

Read that slowly, because almost every claim the modern study of the Acts of Paul rests on is packed into a single sentence. The author was a presbyter—a clergyman, not a heretic on the fringes. He worked in the Roman province of Asia, in western Asia Minor. His motive was not deception for gain but devotion: he wrote, Tertullian says, amore Pauli—out of love for Paul—to augment the apostle’s fame “from his own store.” He was caught. He confessed. And he was stripped of his office.⁠⁶

This is an extraordinary thing to possess. The other contested books of the early Church are anonymous or pseudonymous, and their authorship is a matter of scholarly inference. The Shepherd of Hermas names a “Hermas” we cannot identify; the Apocalypse of Peter speaks in Peter’s voice, but no one has ever known whose hand held the pen. The Acts of Paul is the exception: a book whose forger was named, tried, and convicted within living memory of its composition, and who admitted, when pressed, exactly what he had done and why.⁠⁷

It matters that his crime was love. The Acts of Paul is not a Gnostic subversion of the apostle in the manner of the Nag Hammadi texts, nor a heretical counterfeit like the letters the Marcionites forged in Paul’s name.⁠⁸ It is a work of piety by a man who admired Paul so much that he could not resist writing more of him. That is precisely what makes it useful to the historian and impossible to canonize. The book tells us a great deal about how ordinary Christians two generations after the apostles imagined Paul, prayed, and thought about the body, marriage, and martyrdom. It tells us nothing that an apostle certified. Its author saw to that himself.

A portrait of Paul, bald and bandy-legged

Before the presbyter’s hero says a word, we are given his face. As Paul approaches the house of Onesiphorus at Iconium, a companion looks down the road and sees him coming:

a man little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, with eyebrows joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace: for sometimes he appeared like a man, and sometimes he had the face of an angel.⁠⁹

This is the earliest physical description of the apostle Paul in all of Christian literature, and it is not flattering in any obvious way. He is short, balding, bow-legged, and his eyebrows meet in the middle over a hooked nose.⁠¹⁰ Modern readers have sometimes taken the portrait for caricature, or even for a covert insult. The scholarship points the other way. Abraham Malherbe showed that every one of these features carried a positive charge in the physiognomic conventions of Greco-Roman literature, where meeting eyebrows and a compact frame signaled a vigorous, trustworthy, philosophic man.⁠¹¹ The presbyter was not mocking Paul. He was drawing him as a hero in the visual grammar his readers understood, and then adding the one detail no physiognomist could supply: that this ordinary-looking man sometimes wore the face of an angel.

The description outlived the book that contained it. The bald head, the short stature, the long nose, the joined brows—this became the fixed iconographic type of Saint Paul in Byzantine and later Western art, the reason the apostle is instantly recognizable on ten thousand icons and altarpieces.⁠¹² A forger’s sketch became the Church’s memory of a face.

Thecla: the woman who baptized herself

The woman who hears Paul through that window becomes the real protagonist of the book’s most beloved section. Thecla, a wellborn virgin of Iconium engaged to a man named Thamyris, sits at her window “night and day” listening to Paul preach continence next door, and will not move.⁠¹³ Paul’s sermon is a string of beatitudes recast around chastity—“Blessed are they that keep the flesh chaste, for they shall become the temple of God”—and Thecla is captivated past the point of return.⁠¹⁴ She breaks her engagement. Her own mother demands she be burned. Condemned to the fire, she is saved when God sends a sudden storm of rain and hail that quenches the flames.⁠¹⁵

She follows Paul to Antioch, where a leading citizen named Alexander accosts her in the street; she fights him off and tears his cloak, and for this humiliation of a great man she is condemned to the beasts.⁠¹⁶ The arena scenes are the narrative’s climax, and they turn on a startling act. Facing death and still unbaptized, Thecla sees a pit of water set among the beasts—a tank full of man-eating seals—and baptizes herself:

she turned and saw a great tank full of water, and said: Now is it time that I should wash myself. And she cast herself in, saying: In the name of Jesus Christ do I baptize myself on the last day … and the seals, seeing the light of a flash of fire, floated dead on the top of the water.⁠¹⁷

She survives beast after beast—a lioness dies defending her—and is finally released.⁠¹⁸ When she finds Paul again, she tells him she is going home to Iconium, and he sends her out with a commission stated in seven plain words: “Go, and teach the word of God.”⁠¹⁹ She goes on to Seleucia, the text says, and there, after enlightening many, she falls asleep.⁠²⁰ A self-administered baptism and an apostolic commission to a woman: it is not hard to see why this story made some readers uneasy and others delighted—or why Tertullian, decades later, was still trying to put it down.

Thecla and the question of women’s ministry

Tertullian’s complaint is worth reading a second time, because it proves something the story itself only implies. By the year 200, Christians were already invoking Thecla’s example “as a licence for women’s teaching and baptizing.”⁠²¹ Tertullian is not warning against a hypothetical misuse. He is arguing against a live one, and his rebuttal is twofold: the writing is a forgery whose author was deposed, and Paul himself commanded that women “be silent … and at home consult their own husbands.”⁠²² The text was contested from the beginning precisely because of what Thecla does in it.

Modern scholarship has made the contest louder. Beginning with Stevan Davies and Dennis MacDonald in the early 1980s, a body of work argued that the apocryphal Acts preserve storytelling that circulated among communities of celibate Christian women—that Thecla is, in effect, a woman’s hero from a woman’s oral tradition.⁠²³ MacDonald pressed the argument furthest, proposing that the Pastoral Epistles, with their instruction that women learn in silence and their warning against “old wives’ tales,” were written to suppress exactly the kind of tradition the Acts of Paul later wrote down.⁠²⁴ On this reading the canon itself preserves a quarrel: the Pastorals on one side, Thecla on the other.

The thesis is influential, and it is contested. Kate Cooper argued that the continent heroine of these Acts is a rhetorical device rather than a documentary record—that the real subject of a story about a woman rejecting her suitor is a contest of authority between men, the ascetic apostle against the civic householder, with the woman as the ground they fight over.⁠²⁵ Lynne Boughton pressed the more basic point that hagiographical license is not apostolic practice: a legendary scene of self-baptism written by a convicted forger cannot establish what the early Church actually did.⁠²⁶ Thecla is invoked to this day in arguments for women’s ordination, and the Catholic magisterium’s answer on that question—stated in Inter Insigniores in 1976 and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994—rests on the constant practice of the Church and the example of Christ, not on any reading of Thecla one way or the other.⁠²⁷ The deeper point is the canonical one. A book whose own author confessed he had invented it, and which the Church never received as Scripture, cannot norm the faith or the sacraments however it is read. That is not a verdict against Thecla. It is the reason her story is evidence about the second century rather than a rule for any century.

The cult of Saint Thecla

Here the Acts of Paul produces its strangest result. The Church rejected the book and embraced the saint. By the fourth century Thecla had a great shrine at Seleucia in Isauria, on a hill called Meriamlik above the plain of Cilicia, where the emperor Zeno would later raise a monumental basilica in her honor.⁠²⁸ The pilgrim Egeria, traveling from Spain or Gaul around the year 384, made a point of going there; she records that she read “the whole of the acts of Saint Thecla” at the shrine and gave thanks to God, and that she met a holy deaconess named Marthana whom she had known in Jerusalem.⁠²⁹ Gregory of Nyssa tells us that his sister, Macrina the Younger, carried “Thecla” as a hidden name, given her mother in a vision at her birth as a sign of the life of virginity she would lead.⁠³⁰ A fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thecla, written at Seleucia itself, gathered the wonders worked at her tomb.⁠³¹

The devotion never depended on the book’s canonicity, and it survived the book’s exclusion intact. The Christian East honors Thecla to this day as “protomartyr among women and equal to the apostles,” keeping her feast on the twenty-fourth of September; the traditional Roman Martyrology kept it on the twenty-third, though her name was dropped from the general calendar of the Latin rite in the 1969 reform because the historical foundation of her cult is so thin.⁠³² The pattern is instructive. The Church could venerate a saint whose story it could not verify, and could refuse Scripture to a book whose heroine it kept in its prayers. Canonicity and devotion are not the same measure, and Thecla is where the difference is clearest.

The baptized lion

If Thecla is the book’s heart, its most charming episode belongs to a lion. In the section set at Ephesus, the Acts of Paul tells how the apostle, condemned to the beasts, meets in the arena a lion he had himself baptized—a lion who now lies down at his feet and will not touch him:

A lion, then, of huge size and unmatched strength was let loose upon him, and it ran to him in the stadium and lay down at his feet.⁠³³

A sudden, violent hailstorm scatters the crowd, and man and lion escape together, the lion bounding off “to the mountains.”⁠³⁴ The tale is exactly the kind of thing the presbyter’s admirers loved and his critics distrusted, and it is also, by a lucky accident, the book’s earliest datable footprint. Around the year 204, Hippolytus of Rome, commenting on Daniel in the lions’ den, reaches for the story as an illustration his readers will already know:

For if we believe that when Paul was condemned to the beasts the lion that was set upon him lay down at his feet and licked him, how shall we not believe that which happened in the case of Daniel?⁠³⁵

Hippolytus treats the episode not as Scripture but as edifying illustration, a familiar wonder he can lean on to make a point.⁠³⁶ That is the register in which much of the early Church received the Acts of Paul: a good story, useful for preaching, well short of a rule of faith. M.R. James, who translated the fragments, noticed that the baptized lion is “quite in the manner of our author”—of a piece with the book’s tender, extravagant devotion, in which even the beasts turn continent and Christian.⁠³⁷

3 Corinthians: the letter that stayed in the Armenian Bible

The third of the book’s famous units is the most surprising, because for a long time and in real churches it was simply Scripture. Embedded in the Acts of Paul is an exchange of letters between the church of Corinth and the imprisoned apostle. The Corinthians write in alarm: two teachers, Simon and Cleobius, have come to the city denying that there is a resurrection of the flesh, denying that the world and man were made by God, denying the prophets, and denying that Christ “came … in the flesh, neither was born of Mary.”⁠³⁸ The signature of the heresy is in the claim “that the world is not of God, but of the angels”—the teaching of the Syrian Gnostic Saturninus, who held that a lower order of angels, not God, had made the cosmos.⁠³⁹

Paul’s reply, which the manuscripts label a third letter to the Corinthians, is a compact catechism against that error. He insists that “our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary which is of the seed of David according to the flesh”; that God, not the angels, made the world; and that the flesh will rise.⁠⁴⁰ To prove the resurrection he reaches for three images the canonical Paul never used in quite this way—the grain of wheat that is buried bare and rises clothed, the prophet Jonah swallowed and disgorged whole, and the corpse that revives when it touches the bones of the prophet Elisha.⁠⁴¹ The theology is orthodox; that is the point. 3 Corinthians was written to defend the incarnation and the resurrection of the body against Gnostic denial, and it reads like a second-century creed in Pauline dress.

Its orthodoxy earned it a long afterlife as Scripture in the East. The Syrian church received it—a commentary handed down in Ephrem the Syrian’s name treated it as a genuine letter of Paul, alongside the fourteen—and the Armenian church treated it as canonical for centuries, so that 3 Corinthians appears in Armenian biblical manuscripts and was still being printed in Armenian Bibles as late as the seventeenth century.⁠⁴² A letter forged into a legendary romance about Paul became, for a while and in a real communion, part of the word of God. The wider Church did not follow, and for the reason it excluded the whole book: whatever its doctrine, it was not the apostle’s.

The book the fathers used but would not canonize

The reception of the Acts of Paul traces a clean line between reverence and Scripture. Individual Fathers used it, and used it warmly. Origen, the greatest biblical scholar of the third century, quotes it approvingly on the nature of the Word, judging its language “rightly used,” and refers to it again in his commentary on John.⁠⁴³ Hippolytus retold its lion. But using a book for edification and receiving it as Scripture were two different acts, and on the second the verdict hardened.

Eusebius, taking stock of the whole tradition around 320, placed the Acts of Paul among the notha—the “spurious” or rejected writings—in the same breath as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Didache.⁠⁴⁴ Elsewhere he states flatly that he could not find the Acts of Paul “among the undisputed writings.”⁠⁴⁵ The Latin lists that followed were firmer still. The sixth-century catalogue bound into the Codex Claromontanus records the Acts of Paul at 3,650 lines and marks it with the obelus reserved for disputed books; the Stichometry of Nicephorus files “the Circuit of Paul,” 3,600 lines, among the New Testament apocrypha; and the Decretum Gelasianum lists the “Acts of Thecla and of Paul” among the works the Roman church rejected.⁠⁴⁶ One point deserves emphasis, because popular accounts get it wrong: the Acts of Paul is not named in the Muratorian Fragment. That early canon list rejects two forged letters under Paul’s name, to the Laodiceans and the Alexandrians, and says nothing of the Acts.⁠⁴⁷

Why the Church was right

The criteria by which the early Church discerned Scripture are usually reduced to three: apostolic origin, orthodoxy of content, and catholicity of use—whether a book came from the apostles, agreed with the rule of faith, and was received across the churches.⁠⁴⁸ The Acts of Paul is an instructive case because it does not fail on every count. Its content is largely orthodox; Origen could quote it with approval, and 3 Corinthians defends the creed. It was widely read and, in the East, widely loved. What it lacked, and lacked beyond dispute, was the first thing: apostolic origin. It was the work of a known, named, post-apostolic man, and unlike every other borderline book, its non-apostolic origin was not merely probable but confessed.

This is where the Catholic understanding of the canon does its quiet work. The Church, the Catechism says, “discerned” which writings belonged in the list of sacred books; it did not manufacture them.⁠⁴⁹ The Second Vatican Council put the reason plainly: the canonical books are holy because, “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author.”⁠⁵⁰ A book has God as its author or it does not, and no amount of piety in the human writer can supply what is missing. The presbyter of Asia loved Paul; he did not speak for God, and he knew it, which is why he confessed rather than defend the fiction. The Church’s judgment simply ratified his own. The discernment was not a suppression of a rival gospel. It was the recognition of a plain fact that the author had already admitted under examination.

The afterlife of the Acts of Paul

To be left out of the canon was not, in this case, to be forgotten. Thecla outlived her book by more than a millennium, venerated from Seleucia to Spain, her shrine a pilgrimage and her name a sign of consecrated virginity.⁠⁵¹ The portrait sketched in a forger’s opening lines became the face by which the Church has remembered Paul ever since. 3 Corinthians held its place in the Bibles of the East for centuries. Even the baptized lion padded on into the medieval imagination, one more wonder in a Church that never quite stopped loving a good story about its apostles.

What the Church discerned was not that the Acts of Paul was worthless but that it was human—a devout second-century Christian’s tribute to the apostle he loved, valuable exactly as that and no more. It is a witness to the faith of the Church in an age we know too little about: how those Christians imagined Paul’s face and voice, how they prized chastity and feared the arena, how they answered the Gnostics and hoped for the resurrection of the body. It is a window into the faith. It is not a rule of it. And the man who wrote it, in the end, said as much.⁠⁵²

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was the Acts of Paul not included in the Bible?

Because it failed the test of apostolic origin, and failed it by admission rather than by inference. According to Tertullian, the book was written around 185–195 by a presbyter in the Roman province of Asia who confessed, when convicted, that he had composed it “from love of Paul”—and was removed from his office for it. A book with an identified, post-apostolic, confessed author could not be received as Scripture, however edifying. Eusebius accordingly classed it among the “rejected” writings, and the later Latin canon lists confirmed the judgment.

Who wrote the Acts of Paul?

An anonymous presbyter of Asia Minor, writing in the late second century. His name is lost, but Tertullian preserves the essential facts: he was a clergyman, he wrote out of admiration for Paul, he was convicted of the forgery, and he was deposed from his clerical office. This makes the Acts of Paul the only near-canonical book whose author was tried and confessed within living memory of its composition.

Is Thecla a real saint, and does the Catholic Church recognize her?

Thecla has been venerated as a saint since at least the fourth century, especially in the Christian East, which calls her “protomartyr among women and equal to the apostles.” Her shrine at Seleucia was a major pilgrimage site; the pilgrim Egeria visited it around 384, and Gregory of Nyssa records that his sister Macrina bore “Thecla” as a secret name. The Latin Church long kept her feast on 23 September, but her name was removed from the general Roman calendar in 1969 because the historical foundation of her cult—the legendary Acts of Paul and Thecla—is so slender. She is honored, in other words, even though her story cannot be verified.

What is 3 Corinthians, and is it in any Bible?

3 Corinthians is a short exchange of letters embedded in the Acts of Paul, in which the Corinthian church reports two Gnostic teachers and Paul replies by defending the incarnation, the goodness of creation, and the resurrection of the flesh. It was never part of the Western or Byzantine canon, but it was read as genuine and canonical in the Syriac and Armenian churches for centuries—a commentary handed down in Ephrem the Syrian’s name treated it as Paul’s, and it appears in Armenian biblical manuscripts and printed Bibles into the seventeenth century. It is not in any Bible in use today.

Did the Acts of Paul support women priests?

The Acts of Paul and Thecla shows Thecla baptizing herself and being told by Paul to “teach the word of God,” and by the year 200 some Christians were already citing her example to justify women teaching and baptizing—which is exactly what Tertullian was writing to refute. Modern scholars debate whether the story reflects real women’s ministry or is a legendary and largely rhetorical construction. The Catholic Church’s teaching on the priesthood, set out in Inter Insigniores (1976) and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), rests on the example of Christ and the constant practice of the Church, not on Thecla; and a text its own author confessed to inventing cannot establish sacramental practice in any event.

What is the baptized lion story?

In the Ephesus section of the Acts of Paul, the apostle baptizes a talking lion, and later, condemned to the beasts in the arena, meets that same lion, which lies down at his feet and refuses to harm him; a hailstorm then lets both escape. The story is the book’s earliest datable trace: around 204, Hippolytus of Rome referred to it as a wonder his readers already knew. Like much of the Acts of Paul, it was received as a charming and edifying tale, never as Scripture.

Footnotes

1. 1. On the date, the standard estimate is Wilhelm Schneemelcher’s: “the period between 185–195 may be regarded as a possible estimate” (Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects, rev. ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992; repr. 2003], 235). The outer limits run from the death of Paul under Nero (c. 64) to Tertullian’s De baptismo (c. 200); Dennis R. MacDonald prefers c. 160–190 (The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983], 85).

2. 2. On the episodic itinerary (Damascus, Jerusalem, Antioch, Iconium, Myra, Sidon, Tyre, Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, Italy, Rome) see the overview in Cambry G. Pardee, “Acts of Paul,” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha (NASSCAL). The milk in place of blood at Paul’s beheading is in the Martyrdom of Paul (trans. in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1993], 385–88).

3. 3. The three embedded units correspond to episodes at Iconium/Antioch (Thecla), Philippi (3 Corinthians), and Rome (the Martyrdom). See Richard I. Pervo, The Acts of Paul: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014); and Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, 350–89.

4. 4. Carl Schmidt, Acta Pauli aus der Heidelberger koptischen Papyrushandschrift Nr. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1904; 2nd ed. 1905). The Coptic papyrus showed that the separately transmitted Thecla, Corinthian, and martyrdom pieces had been continuous parts of one work. The Greek Hamburg papyrus was later edited by Carl Schmidt and Wilhelm Schubart, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ. Acta Pauli (Hamburg: Augustin, 1936). Whether the author composed a unified whole or gathered pre-existing units is debated; for the minimalist view see Glenn E. Snyder, Acts of Paul: The Formation of a Pauline Corpus, WUNT 2/352 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

5. 5. Tertullian, On Baptism 17, trans. S. Thelwall, in Ante-Nicene Fathers [ANF], vol. 3 (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885). The critical Latin text is edited by J. G. P. Borleffs in Tertulliani Opera, vol. 1, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954); the operative phrase is that the presbyter acted amore Pauli, ‘out of love of Paul.’

6. 6. Tertullian, On Baptism 17 (ANF 3). Tertullian’s testimony is the sole ancient evidence for the book’s authorship, and every element—a presbyter, in Asia, motivated by love of Paul, convicted, and deposed—is drawn from this one sentence. See the discussion in Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:213–15.

7. 7. The contrast with the other contested books is exact: the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter are anonymous or pseudonymous with no identifiable author, whereas the Acts of Paul is uniquely furnished with an ancient report of its author’s trial and confession. On the broader phenomenon of pious forgery in the early Church see Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

8. 8. On the Marcionite forgeries in Paul’s name (the letters to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians) see the Muratorian Fragment, lines 63–67, in Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 305–7. The Acts of Paul is a work of devotion, not of sectarian propaganda; this is Tertullian’s own framing (“from love of Paul”).

9. 9. Acts of Paul and Thecla 3, trans. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 273. The ANF/Walker translation renders the same passage “a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged . . . with eyebrows meeting, rather long-nosed, full of grace” (Alexander Walker, trans., in ANF 8).

10. 10. The two standard English translations differ slightly—James has “eyebrows joining” and “full of grace,” Walker “eyebrows meeting” and “full of grace”—but agree on the substance of the portrait: short, balding, bow-legged, meeting brows, hooked nose.

11. 11. Abraham J. Malherbe, “A Physical Description of Paul,” Harvard Theological Review 79.1–3 (1986): 170–75. Malherbe reads each trait against Greco-Roman physiognomic convention and concludes the description is a positive, philosopher-hero portrait rather than caricature; he renders the closing phrase “full of friendliness.”

12. 12. On the description as the source of the fixed iconographic type of Paul—bald, short, long-nosed, meeting brows—see Malherbe, “Physical Description,” 170–75, and the discussion in Pervo, Acts of Paul, ad loc.

13. 13. Acts of Paul and Thecla 7–9 (James, 273–74). Thecla “sat at a window close by and listened night and day”; her mother Theocleia compares her to “a spider at the window” bound by Paul’s words.

14. 14. Acts of Paul and Thecla 5–6 (James, 273). The beatitudes of continence—“Blessed are they that keep the flesh chaste, for they shall become the temple of God”—are the encratite heart of Paul’s preaching in the book. On the encratism of the apocryphal Acts generally see Yves Tissot and the essays in Jan N. Bremmer, ed., The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996).

15. 15. Acts of Paul and Thecla 20–22 (James, 276). Thecla makes the sign of the cross and mounts the pyre; “a cloud full of rain and hail overshadowed the theatre,” quenching the fire.

16. 16. Acts of Paul and Thecla 26–27 (James, 277). Alexander, “a first man of the Antiochenes,” embraces her in the street; she resists, tears his cloak, and takes the wreath from his head, and is condemned to the beasts for the affront.

17. 17. Acts of Paul and Thecla 34 (James, 278). The scene is universally cited as the locus of Thecla’s self-baptism; the man-eating creatures are seals (Greek phōkai).

18. 18. Acts of Paul and Thecla 28, 33–35 (James, 277–79). A lioness dies defending Thecla against a bear and a lion; the crowd of women in the stands cries out on her behalf, and Queen Tryphaena faints, halting the games.

19. 19. Acts of Paul and Thecla 41 (James, 280). The line reads identically in the James and Walker translations: “Go, and teach the word of God.”

20. 20. Acts of Paul and Thecla 43 (James, 281): Thecla “departed unto Seleucia, and after she had enlightened many with the word of God, she slept a good sleep.” The later manuscript tradition adds a cave, a great old age, and a rock that opens to receive her.

21. 21. Tertullian, On Baptism 17 (ANF 3). That Tertullian is rebutting a live appeal to Thecla, not a hypothetical, is clear from his framing: he writes to answer those who “claim Thecla’s example as a licence.”

22. 22. Tertullian, On Baptism 17 (ANF 3), quoting 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Tertullian couples the canonical prohibition with the charge of forgery; both arguments are aimed at the same use of the Thecla story.

23. 23. Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980); MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle. Both argue that the apocryphal Acts preserve storytelling cultivated in communities of continent Christian women.

24. 24. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle, esp. 34–77, linking the Pastorals’ warning against “old wives’ tales” (1 Timothy 4:7) and their restrictions on women to a deliberate effort to suppress the oral tradition the Acts of Paul later recorded. The majority of scholarship runs the dependence the other way; Richard Bauckham argues the Acts of Paul knew and used the Pastorals, in “The Acts of Paul as a Sequel to Acts,” in The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting, ed. Bruce W. Winter and Andrew D. Clarke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 105–52.

25. 25. Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 45–67, arguing that the contest between apostle and suitor is “the true subject” and that the heroine functions rhetorically rather than as a record of real women’s agency.

26. 26. Lynne C. Boughton, “From Pious Legend to Feminist Fantasy: Distinguishing Hagiographical License from Apostolic Practice in the Acts of Paul/Acts of Thecla,” The Journal of Religion 71.3 (1991): 362–83.

27. 27. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Inter Insigniores (1976); John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994). Both ground the reservation of priestly ordination to men in the example of Christ and the constant tradition of the Church, without appeal to the Thecla material. For the reception of Thecla in modern discussion see Anne Jensen, God’s Self-Confident Daughters: Early Christianity and the Liberation of Women, trans. O. C. Dean Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

28. 28. On the shrine at Meriamlik/Seleucia and the basilica of the emperor Zeno (r. 474–491), see Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

29. 29. Egeria, Itinerarium 23, trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, The Pilgrimage of Etheria (London: SPCK, 1919): at Seleucia in Isauria she visits the shrine, reads “the whole of the acts of Saint Thecla,” and meets “a holy deaconess named Marthana” known to her from Jerusalem. Egeria’s journey is usually dated c. 381–384.

30. 30. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 2. Macrina the Younger—sister of Gregory and of Basil the Great—was given “Thecla” as a hidden name, revealed to her mother in a vision at her birth as a token of the virginal life she would embrace.

31. 31. The Life and Miracles of Thecla (mid-fifth century, Seleucia) circulated under the name of Basil of Seleucia but is anonymous; critical edition, Gilbert Dagron, Vie et miracles de sainte Thècle, Subsidia Hagiographica 62 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1978).

32. 32. For the Eastern title “protomartyr and equal-to-the-apostles” and the feast on 24 September, see the Greek Orthodox synaxarion; for the traditional Western feast on 23 September and its removal from the general Roman calendar in 1969, see the entry “Thecla” in the Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912) and the Calendarium Romanum (1969).

33. 33. Acts of Paul, Ephesus episode, trans. James, Apocryphal New Testament, 295 (the fuller form of the episode is preserved in the Greek epitome of Nicephorus Callistus). Paul had baptized the lion in an earlier scene near Damascus; the two meet again in the arena at Ephesus.

34. 34. Acts of Paul, Ephesus episode (James, 295): a great hail falls, scattering the crowd, and “the lion escaped to the mountains.”

35. 35. Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 3.29, quoted in James, Apocryphal New Testament, 294. The allusion is generally dated c. 204 and is the earliest datable external reference to the Acts of Paul. A modern critical translation is T. C. Schmidt, Hippolytus of Rome: Commentary on Daniel (2010).

36. 36. Hippolytus cites the lion as an a fortiori illustration—if the lion spared Paul, how much more the God who shut the lions’ mouths for Daniel—treating the episode as edifying and familiar, not as canonical Scripture.

37. 37. James, Apocryphal New Testament, 294–95, observing that the Ephesus episode is “quite in the manner of our author.” It is characteristic of the book’s pervasive encratism, the theme of continence that runs through the whole Acts of Paul.

38. 38. 3 Corinthians 1.10–15 (the Corinthians’ letter), trans. James, Apocryphal New Testament, 288: Simon and Cleobius teach “that we must not use the prophets, and that God is not Almighty, and that there shall be no resurrection of the flesh, and that man was not made by God, and that Christ came not down in the flesh, neither was born of Mary, and that the world is not of God, but of the angels.”

39. 39. The doctrine that the world was made by angels rather than by God is characteristic of the Syrian Gnostic Saturninus (Satornilos); see Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.1–2. 3 Corinthians is thus an anti-Gnostic tract in epistolary form.

40. 40. 3 Corinthians 3.4–6 (Paul’s reply), trans. James, Apocryphal New Testament, 289: “our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary which is of the seed of David according to the flesh . . . that he might come down into this world and redeem all flesh by his flesh, and raise us up from the dead in the flesh.”

41. 41. 3 Corinthians 3.24–32 (James, 290): the grain of wheat “cast bare into the earth” that rises clothed; Jonah in the sea-monster three days and nights; and the corpse revived by contact with the bones of Elisha (2 Kings 13:21). Each is offered as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh.

42. 42. On the reception of 3 Corinthians as canonical in the Syriac and Armenian churches—a commentary handed down in Ephrem the Syrian’s name treated it as genuine, and it stood in Armenian biblical manuscripts and printed Bibles into the seventeenth century—see Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:254–56; and the older edition of the Armenian text by Paul Vetter, Der apokryphe dritte Korintherbrief (Vienna, 1894).

43. 43. Origen, On First Principles 1.2.3, trans. Frederick Crombie (ANF 4): the language of the Acts of Paul, “where it is said that ‘here is the Word a living being,’ appears to me to be rightly used.” Origen refers to the work again in Commentary on John 20.12. Both are approving, if guarded, uses.

44. 44. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.4, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1 (New York: Christian Literature, 1890): “Among the rejected writings must be reckoned also the Acts of Paul, and the so-called Shepherd, and the Apocalypse of Peter, and in addition to these the extant epistle of Barnabas, and the so-called Teachings of the Apostles.” The category is the notha, the “spurious” books.

45. 45. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.5 (NPNF2 1): “In regard to the so-called Acts of Paul, I have not found them among the undisputed writings.”

46. 46. Codex Claromontanus catalogue (6th c.): the “Acts of Paul,” 3,650 lines, marked with the obelus that flags disputed books; Stichometry of Nicephorus (9th c.): “the Circuit of Paul,” 3,600 lines, listed among the New Testament apocrypha; Decretum Gelasianum: “the book which is called the Acts of Thecla and of Paul,” apocryphal. Texts and discussion in Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 229–38, 310–15.

47. 47. The Muratorian Fragment (lines 63–67) rejects forged Pauline letters to the Laodiceans and the Alexandrians, “forged in Paul’s name to further the heresy of Marcion,” and does not name the Acts of Paul; Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 305–7. Popular accounts that place the Acts of Paul in the Muratorian Fragment are mistaken.

48. 48. On the criteria of apostolicity, orthodoxy (the rule of faith), and catholicity as the working tests of canonicity, see Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 251–54; and, for the Catholic account, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 120.

49. 49. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 120: “It was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books.” The verb is “discerned,” not “created”; cf. Dei Verbum 8.

50. 50. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 11: the books of both Testaments “in their entirety, with all their parts . . . have God as their author.” This is the theological hinge: a book has God as its author or it does not, and the piety of a human writer cannot supply divine authorship.

51. 51. On the geographic spread of Thecla’s cult from Isauria across the Mediterranean world see Davis, Cult of Saint Thecla, esp. 3–35.

52. 52. The whole of this reading turns on Tertullian’s report that the author confessed. The Acts of Paul is not condemned as heresy—Eusebius places it among the orthodox-but-uncanonical books—but it is disqualified as Scripture by the one fact its author admitted: that it was his own composition, written in an apostle’s name, in an age after the apostles.