Saint Thecla baptised herself, and an early church writer was not amused
In a second-century tale, a young noblewoman named Thecla abandons her fiancé to follow Paul, survives a burning and wild beasts, and plunges into a pool to baptise herself. Her story made her the most famous virgin martyr of the ancient world, and it worried Tertullian enough to reject women teaching and baptising on its strength.
Her legend comes from the Acts of Paul and Thecla, written around AD 180. It tells how, in Iconium, she listened for three days from her window as Paul preached chastity. Her mother and her fiancé Thamyris had Paul arrested; Thecla visited him in prison and refused to go home, and she was condemned to the flames, only for a storm to save her. In Antioch of Pisidia she fought off a nobleman named Alexander, was sentenced to the beasts, and was protected by lionesses before throwing herself into water full of seals, which lightning struck dead. She then cut her hair, altered her cloak to look like a man's and preached.
Tertullian, writing On Baptism, reported that the presbyter in Asia who composed the text confessed he had written it out of love for Paul and was removed from office, and he insisted it gave women no licence to teach or baptise. Even so, Johann Peter Kirsch noted that behind the legend there may stand a real person.
Her cult spread widely. Methodius of Olympus, around 280, made her a learned speaker in his Symposium, and Gregory of Nyssa praised her austerity. The Eastern churches called her apostle and first martyr among women. Her cave shrine at Seleucia in Cilicia became one of the most celebrated in Christendom: Gregory of Nazianzus retreated there for three years, and the pilgrim Egeria described it in the mid-380s. Scholars suggest her example inspired later tales of women saints who lived disguised as men.
For women across Asia Minor and Egypt she became a figure of empowerment, a woman who preached to men and baptised herself; some lived as virgins in her image and named daughters after her. The West was less sure. In 1969 the Roman Catholic Church removed her feast from its calendar for lack of historical evidence, though the Orthodox still keep it. In 2010, restorers in Rome's Catacomb of Saint Thecla uncovered what they believe is the oldest known portrait of Paul.
Source: Thecla
