The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  At just the opposite end of the motivational spectrum, documents were occasionally forged in someone else's name out of admiration and humility. We know of this best from a school of philosophers from the second century ce who were self-conscious devotees of the classical Greek philosopher Pythagoras. These neo-Pythagoreans, highly educated and skilled themselves, produced significant philosophical treatises, but wrote them in the name of Pythagoras. Why? Because, they claimed, their own ideas were simply elaborations of the system devised by the greatest mind the world had ever seen. To sign their own names would have been an act of hubris and, in a somewhat ironic sense, a false attribution.

  Probably the most common reason for forging a document in someone else's name in the ancient world, however, was in order to receive a hearing for one's views. Suppose you were a completely unknown but aspiring young philosopher, who believed that you had something to say to the world and that the world ought to hear it. It would do little good to publish your ideas under your own name, a name no one knew or cared about. If you wanted the work to be read, it would be much better to sign the treatise "Plato." Or to transpose the matter onto Christian territory: If there were problems in your church that you needed to address, problems of church organization or of false teaching, you could produce a letter but circulate it not in your own name but in the name of someone who would be taken seriously, such as the apostle Paul.

  And so we have a letter called Corinthians, allegedly written by Paul, but from the second century, opposing a docetic view. We have three other letters allegedly written by Paul, but evidently from the late first century, dealing largely with problems of church organization, called Timothy and Titus. And there are other letters allegedly from Paul, several to the Roman philosopher Seneca, in which Paul is shown to be one of the greatest philosophical minds of his age, and one to the church of Laodicea—all from later times.Other letters that were forged in Paul's name no longer exist, including one to the Christians of Alexandria, Egypt. Some of these "Pauline" letters were thought by one Christian group or another to belong to sacred Scripture.

  The Forging of the Acts of Paul

  We also have the Acts of Paul, which includes the tales of Thecla. In this particular case we know that the book was forged because, in one of the rare instances of the kind to come down to us from antiquity, the forger was caught in the act.

  The story is told by the proto-orthodox church father Tertullian, who, on this score at least, is probably to be trusted as providing reliable information.Among the many surviving works of Tertullian is a treatise that discusses in detail the practice of baptism, explicating its biblical and theological rationale and meaning. At one point in the treatise ("On Baptism," chap. 17), Tertullian deals with the issue of who is allowed to administer baptism, in a passage that has helped sully Tertullian's reputation over the years as one of Christian history's worst misogynists. For among other things, Tertullian strictly forbids the practice of allowing women, who are seen as inferior to men, to baptize. He points out that some Christians have appealed to the example of Thecla as a woman who was authorized both to teach (men) and to baptize, but he undercuts the example by indicating that the tales of Thecla had been forged by a presbyter (i.e., a church elder) in Asia (meaning Asia Minor, modern Turkey). Moreover, Tertullian indicates that this Christian forger had been convicted by a church tribunal and that during his trial he had confessed to doing it "for the love of Paul." That is to say, in his own eyes, the forger's motives were pure as the driven snow. He had evidently wanted to celebrate the apostle Paul's life, and he did so by fabricating miraculous tales that transpired during the course of his missionary journeys, including the tales of Thecla, his famous female convert. The church court that tried the case did not find the defense compelling; they reprimanded the presbyter and removed him from office.

  We can assume that the story of Thecla known to us today is the same story fabricated by this presbyter of Asia Minor. We should not think, however, that he made the story up out of whole cloth. Indeed, there are reasons for thinking that he compiled stories he had heard, oral traditions that had been in circulation for years, and used them to compose a literary account. The full text of the Acts of Paul included not only stories of Paul's adventures as a miracle-working apostle and the narrative of Thecla, but also the letter of Corinthians mentioned above, actually composed in Paul's name as if he had written it. A clear deceit was in play here.

  But how did the presbyter pass his work off as genuine, an authentic account of Paul and a faithful reproduction of at least one of his writings, Corinthians? We can never know for certain. One common ploy used by ancient forgers was to claim that they had "found" an older writing which they were reproducing for the world to see for the first time. Such claims were almost impossible to substantiate, and so were quite reasonable as a way to present one's own work as someone else's. If this is how the infamous presbyter of Asia Minor proceeded, then he not only forged an account; he also forged a discovery. For that matter, even if he used some other means of presenting his work to the world, he forged a discovery. With the appearance of this work, the world could see for the first time new episodes from the life of Paul and, of yet more importance to our discussion here, episodes from the life of his most famous female convert, Thecla.

  The Story of Thecla

  The tale of Thecla is full of intrigue. One can see how, even after its exposure as a forgery, it continued to grip the imagination and inspire the awe of readers down to the Middle Ages. Here Paul is not portrayed as he is in the New Testament, as a Christian missionary who preaches to the Gentiles a message of the death and resurrection of Jesus for the salvation'of the world; here he proclaims a message of sexual renunciation, in which those who choose the life of chastity will be saved. Thecla is his main convert, who commits herself to Paul's gospel of abstinence, much to the chagrin of her fiance and at least one other man in her life.

  The narrative proceeds through four major scenes of action. The first takes place in the Asia Minor city of Iconium, where Paul arrives to preach his message from the home of a Christian, Onesiphorus. Day by day he proclaims:

  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they will become a temple of God. Blessed are those who are self-controlled, for God will speak to them. Blessed are those who have wives as if they did not have them, for they will be the heirs of God.... Blessed are the bodies of the virgins, for these will be pleasing to God and will not lose the reward for their chastity. (Acts of Thecla 5-6)

  The message attracts a large number of fascinated listeners, including Thecla, Onesiphorus's next-door neighbor. For three days and nights she sits in a window listening to Paul, enraptured by his words, not stirring an inch. Her mother becomes distressed at her behavior and calls for help from Thecla's fiance, Thamyris. They both, of course, have something to lose if Paul's message sinks home: the man a wife and the mother, one might suppose, social and financial security through a marital connection. But Thamyris's attempts to make Thecla see reason are to no avail. Now she has eyes only for Paul and his message of sexual renunciation.

  The next scene involves the prosecution of Paul and Thecla. Thamyris is incensed at his loss and drags Paul off to the governor of Iconium to stand trial for creating a disturbance. The other married men in town, as might be expected, lend their wholehearted support. Thecla, however, manages to bribe her way into Paul's jail cell and spends the night sitting at his feet, listening to his eloquent words, and "kissing his bonds" (Acts of Thecla 18). The story, as interpreters have long noted, is as much about the displacement of sexual desire as its renunciation.

  When Thamyris learns where his beloved is, he comes and finds her with Paul "bound together with him in affection" (Acts of Thecla 19). They take Paul off to trial, while Thecla stays behind, rolling around in the place where Paul had been sitting. She is also then brought, and both stand trial. Because he is an outsider, Paul is fl
ogged and exiled from the city as a troublemaker. But the evil not from outside but resident within requires more drastic expulsion: Thecla's own mother pleads for her execution. The governor orders Thecla burned at the stake. But as the execution begins, as one would expect for such a saint devoted to God, a divine intervention occurs. The blaze around Thecla does not touch her body, and God sends a preternatural thunderstorm that douses the fire, allowing Thecla to escape.

  Portrayal of Paul preaching his gospel, seated by a tower, from which his soon-to-be disciple Thecla listens with rapt attention, from an ivory panel of the fifth century.

  She tracks down Paul and begs him to allow her to join him on his journeys, offering to cut off her hair (to look like a male traveling companion?) and "follow you wherever you go." But Paul refuses to baptize Thecla, for fear she might change her mind and prove herself unworthy.

  The next scene takes Paul and Thecla to Antioch, where another test awaits. Walking along the streets, they encounter an influential citizen of the city, Alexander, who is immediately inflamed with passion for Thecla and decides to have her then and there. He tries to bribe Paul for her, but Paul—not putting himself in the best light—replies, "I do not know the woman you are speaking of, nor is she mine." Alexander then takes matters, and Thecla, into his own hands and tries to force himself on her. She publicly humiliates him, however, repulsing his advance, tearing his cloak, and pulling off his crown. The crowd that has gathered finds it all amusing (Acts of Thecla 26).

  Alexander, however, does not. He takes her to the local magistrate, who condemns her to be thrown to the wild beasts for assaulting one of the city's leading citizens. What follows is a series of adventures in the arena, in which Thecla is repeatedly protected from all harm and female onlookers show their true character as proponents of truth and enemies of injustice. One woman in particular, an aristocrat named Tryphaena, houses Thecla before the exhibition with the wild beasts, taking her under her wing as a "second daughter" in place of one she had earlier lost to illness. Other women in the city gather at the spectacle and cry out against the outrageous death sentence. A lioness loosed upon Thecla comes up to her and, rather than mauling her, licks her feet. The exhibition closes with Thecla still alive and well.

  And so more festivities are planned for the following day. When it arrives, Thecla is set down in the arena and wild beasts are loosed upon her. For a while she is protected by a fierce lioness, who kills a bear in her defense but then is killed in a fight with a lion. More beasts are sent in. Recognizing that she may have no other chance for redemption, Thecla notices a large vat filled with water and human-eating seals. To the dismay of the crowds, she throws herself into the vat, crying out, "In the name of Jesus Christ, on this final day I am baptized" (Acts of Thecla 34).

  It is an act of desperation, but it works. God once again intervenes, sending a lightning bolt down into the vat to kill all the seals and allowing Thecla to emerge unscathed, covered with a cloud to conceal her nakedness from curious bystanders. More miraculous interventions occur in the arena, until finally the governor gives up and releases her.

  The final scene comes as a bit of an anticlimax. Now that her trials are over and she has been baptized, Thecla "longs for Paul" and begins to search for him. She dresses as a man" and finally tracks Paul down in another town. Informing him of her adventures, including her baptism, she announces that she is returning to Iconium. Paul not only lets her go but commissions her: "Go and teach the word of God" (Acts of Thecla 41).

  At home, Thecla finds (somewhat conveniently for the plot) that her ex-fiance, Thamyris, has died. She comforts her mother and then leaves for Seleucia, near the south coast of Asia Minor, where she spends a long life preaching the Christian gospel so as to "enlighten many."

  Apocryphal Acts and Christian Ideology

  As I have indicated, even though the story of Thecla is not widely known today outside of circles of early Christian scholars and their students, at one time it was extremely popular, with Thecla becoming a cult hero in widespread and often remote regions of Christendom from the third century down to the Middle Ages. Already at the beginning of the third century, soon after it was written, the text was having a large impact, enough for Tertullian to show real concern that it was being used to authorize women to teach and baptize in the Christian churches—activities restricted to men throughout proto-orthodox Christianity. Somewhat later, the Thecla narrative was expanded to include tales of the many miracles she wrought once she arrived in Seleucia; tales of her "death," in which she never actually died but sank, living, into the ground; tales of her reappearing, out of the ground, in other places that had sacred cultic sites devoted to her; and yet other tales of her life of renunciation and her miraculous deeds. In the mid-fifth century, the Roman emperor Zeno, who had been temporarily removed from office, had a dream of Thecla indicating that he would soon be restored to office. Out of gratitude to her for her supernatural assistance, he built a large church in her honor in Seleucia. Other buildings followed, so that by the sixth century there were two other churches on the site, along with a public bath and a number of cisterns. It became a major place of international pilgrimage. Nor was it alone: Devotion to Thecla was widespread in Egypt, Syria, and even Rome.But to return where we began: Why did the presbyter of Asia Minor forge the text in the first place? Why claim to discover a series of adventures of Paul's companion Thecla? Given the quality of the tales, one might suspect that he wrote his narrative for the purpose of entertainment, as a kind of early Christian novel. Scholars have long noted that the various Apocryphal Acts, that is, the surviving accounts of the activities of individual apostles, such as Paul, Peter, Thomas, John, and Andrew (all of which we have), appear to be modeled on the ancient pagan "romances," or novels, that have come down to us from Greek and Roman late antiquity. Five Greek (pagan) novels, and two Roman, have survived, which, like the Apocryphal Acts, deal with individuals in relation to civic life and portray their travels, catastrophes, near-death experiences, miraculous escapes, encounters with ruthless tyrants, painful separations, and joyful reunions.

  The overarching themes of these ancient novels, however, are quite different from what one finds in the Christian Apocryphal Acts. The Greek novels, such as Chareas and Callirhoe and Leucippe and Cleitophon, are almost always highly episodic accounts of two star-crossed lovers who are tragically separated before they can consummate their love and who experience heart-wrenching trials and painful tribulations (shipwrecks, attacks by pirates, imprisonments, kidnappings, and near-death experiences) before finally overcoming the capricious whims of the gods or fate to be reunited so as to enjoy the sexual embrace of their long lost partner, in socially sanctioned marriage. The stories thus celebrate heterosexual love as the glue that binds together society, that unites families, that provides social unity for the city, that keeps society healthy, prosperous, and civilized.

  The Christian Apocryphal Acts are also about sexual love and the relationship of the individual to larger society. And they employ many of the same subplots as the novels. But the Christian agenda of these books stands in stark contrast to the pagan, for here sexual love is not the goal to be achieved but the pitfall to be avoided. The ultimate good here is not the welfare of the state but the abandonment of the state. Families in these tales are not to be united in social harmony but torn apart in social disruption. It is not life in this world that matters but life in the world above. The pleasures of life are not to be achieved but forsaken. The Christians who wrote and cherished these works were not interested in making the traditional social order a happy place in which people could enjoy life to its fullest; they were interested in escaping this social world and all its trappings, to enjoy a spiritual union with God and to form their own distinctively Christian societies, rooted in a different set of values from those of the world at large. Using the form of the ancient novel, they transformed its message.

  Thus, even if the Acts of Thecla was meant to entertain, it was also
meant to instruct and encourage. But in addition to reversing the seemingly wholesome pagan agenda of the ancient novels, what other specific lessons are meant to be conveyed?

  Tertullian, of course, read the account as authorizing women to exercise leadership roles in the church, and he maintained that it was beginning to be used to that end in his day. One can certainly see how the account would function that way. To be sure, the gender relations in the text are not completely flat and stereotyped. It is not the case that all men are bad here and all women good, as is sometimes maintained. It is Thecla's mother, Theoclia, after all, who first demands her execution, and Paul is portrayed as the apostle of God. But even Paul does not come off well in places, such as when he lies about not knowing Thecla, leading to her near rape in Antioch. And most of the other men—Thamyris, Alexander, the local magistrates—are far from models of upright behavior. Women, on the other hand, take center stage and are generally worth emulating: Thecla, the inspired devotee of sexual renunciation, protected by God from all harm at every point; her protectress in Antioch, Tryphaena, who shelters and defends her before an almost implacable male force; the women of Antioch who scream for justice and finally get their way with the male administrators. Even among the wild beasts, it is the lioness who sides with God and his beloved; the male animals are like the men, fierce and hungry to take what they think is theirs, the pure virgin of God.

  One other ideological point of the narrative relates to Thecla's acts of baptizing (herself) and of teaching (others), roles that Tertullian insisted belong to men. Interestingly enough, in his treatise on baptism, Tertullian cites Paul's own writings in support of his own views. The irony is that Paul himself—the historical Paul—may have lined up on the other side of the issue.