other · 48 · Iconium
Everything known about Thecla comes from one text and it is not history. She listens at a window for three days, breaks off her engagement, is condemned to burn and is saved by rain, is thrown to the beasts at Antioch and defended by a lioness, baptises herself in a tank of seals, dresses as a man to follow Paul, and ends her life at Seleucia. This dataset marks the row legendary and keeps it, because what grew out of the text is documented in a way the text is not: Egeria travels to her shrine near Seleucia in the 380s and describes it, Gregory of Nazianzus retreats there, and the site became one of the great pilgrimage centres of the East. Tertullian adds the sharpest detail. Writing around 200 he says the Acts were composed by a presbyter in Asia 'out of love for Paul', that the man was deposed for it — and that he is bringing it up because women were citing Thecla as licence to teach and to baptise. That is a second-century argument about women's authority conducted through a story, which is a more interesting fact than whether the lioness was real.
To hear Paul out, at the cost of a marriage and twice of a life.
A cult large enough to be visible in the fourth-century record, resting entirely on a second-century novel.