Who wrote the Acts of Paul and Thecla is one of the very few authorship questions in early Christian literature with a dated answer. A church father names the author’s office, his province, his motive and his punishment.
The passage is short, and it does considerably more work than its length suggests. Tertullian reports that a presbyter in Asia composed the book, that his church found him out, and that he lost his position over it.
What makes the report worth pausing on is the charge itself. Nobody removed the man for heresy, and no council ever called his story false doctrine.
Who Wrote the Acts of Paul and Thecla, According to Tertullian
The evidence is a single paragraph, written around the year 200 and never corroborated since.
In his treatise on baptism, Tertullian is arguing against women who claim the right to teach and to baptise. Some of them, he says, appeal to the example of Thecla. He answers that the book they cite carries Paul’s name falsely.
The presbyter who compiled it, he continues, was in Asia. The man admitted he had done it out of love for Paul, and his church removed him from office all the same.
That is the whole testimony, and every later account of the book’s authorship goes back to it.
What the Complaint Was Actually About
Read closely, Tertullian’s objection is not theological, and that changes what the passage proves.
He nowhere says the story contradicts scripture, and he does not accuse the presbyter of denying the resurrection. He mentions neither Gnostic teaching nor any of the charges that fill his other books.
The problem is what readers were doing with the text. Women in his own churches were citing Thecla as a precedent, and Thecla in the story teaches publicly and baptises herself in an arena.
A book becomes dangerous, on this account, not for what it says but for what readers do with it. That is a modern-sounding idea turning up in a document from around the year 200.
The Problem With Tertullian’s Testimony
Before accepting the story wholesale, its single witness deserves some examination.
Tertullian is a hostile source with a case to make. His entire chapter exists to stop women baptising, and an anonymous forger removed from office is exactly the evidence that argument requires.
He also supplies no name, no city and no date. A presbyter in Asia is not a person, and nothing else in antiquity mentions the trial or the deposition.
None of that makes the report false, and it may well be accurate. It does mean the best-attested authorship claim in the apocrypha rests on one hostile paragraph.
When It Was Written, and Out of What
Independent dating evidence exists, and it points at a source the author plainly knew.
Tertullian is writing around the year 200 and treats the book as established, so it cannot be much later than 190. Most scholars place the composition somewhere between 160 and 190, in Asia Minor.
The more interesting question is where the author found his material. The Second Letter to Timothy names Paul’s persecutions at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra, which are the exact cities of the Thecla story. It also names Onesiphorus, who shelters Paul, and Demas, who deserts him.
All of those people appear in the Acts, in those roles. Hermogenes turns up as a coppersmith, a trade the letter gives to a different man altogether.
That overlap allows two readings, and scholars defend both in print. Either the author built his narrative out of the letter, or the letter and the story both draw on local traditions that were already circulating in those towns.
Whoever wrote the Acts of Paul and Thecla was working with inherited material rather than inventing from nothing. That is worth holding on to whenever the word forgery comes up.
The Earliest Portrait of Paul
One passage in the book had a longer afterlife than the rest of it combined.
When Onesiphorus goes out to meet Paul on the road from Lystra, the text stops to describe him. He is small, balding, bandy-legged, well built, with eyebrows that meet and a nose somewhat hooked.
That is the earliest physical description of Paul in any surviving source, and it is not flattering. It also determined how painters drew him for the next fifteen centuries, since Christian art had nothing else to work from.
The detail bears directly on the authorship question. A writer manufacturing a hero from scratch does not make him short and bald, and the description reads like something the author received rather than something he chose.
The line that follows is stranger still, and it undercuts the realism immediately. Paul sometimes looked like a man, the text says, and sometimes he had the face of an angel.
What the Manuscripts Say Instead
Official disapproval and actual readership ran in opposite directions, and the manuscripts record the gap.
The Acts of Paul and Thecla survives in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic and Slavonic. Dozens of Greek copies survive, which puts it among the most widely transmitted apocryphal texts in existence.
Rome eventually listed it among the rejected books, alongside much of the wider apocrypha, and the listing changed remarkably little. Scribes kept copying it, churches kept reading it, and translators kept carrying it into new languages for a thousand years.
Condemnation here is not evidence of obscurity, but rather the reverse. It shows that somebody in authority had noticed how popular the book had become.
Egeria Reads It at the Shrine
One pilgrim’s diary shows precisely what fourth-century readers did with the text.
Egeria travelled from the western edge of the empire to the holy places in the 380s, writing an account for the women of her community at home. In Isauria she turned aside to visit the shrine of Thecla near Seleucia.
She describes a walled compound, a great church, and a community of monks and nuns living around it. On arrival she read the whole account of Thecla aloud, and she gives thanks for it without a hint that anyone disputed the book.
Two centuries after Tertullian, a devout traveller treats the same text as ordinary devotional reading. Neither of them is lying, and both were describing something real.
The Book Inside a Bigger Book
The Thecla story was never designed to stand alone, and for most of its history it did.
Tertullian refers to Acts of Paul, not to Acts of Thecla, and a Coptic papyrus published in 1904 confirmed why. The Thecla material is one episode inside a longer work covering Paul’s travels, his correspondence and his death.
That longer work also contains a letter now called 3 Corinthians, which some eastern churches once treated as canonical. Most of the remainder survives only in scattered fragments today.
That one episode outlived its container by a very wide margin. Whoever the presbyter was, the part of his book that survived is the part about the woman.
Did a Woman Write It?
A second answer to the authorship question circulates, and it is more interesting than it is provable.
Dennis MacDonald and Stevan Davies argued in the early 1980s that stories like this one circulated orally among women before any presbyter wrote them down. On that reading the compiler is an editor rather than an author, and the material behind him is female.
Their case rests on the shape of the narrative itself. Thecla acts without male permission, the women of Antioch defend her in the arena, and the men in the story are mostly obstacles. Scholars make the same argument about women’s voices elsewhere in the apocrypha.
The objection to that reading is equally strong. Celibacy in these texts serves an ascetic programme that male writers pushed hard, and a story about a woman refusing marriage was useful to them as well.
The Price of Thecla’s Freedom
Reading the story as an early charter for women’s ministry requires ignoring what it costs.
Thecla gains her independence by refusing marriage, and the refusal is absolute. She breaks her engagement, she never marries afterwards, and the text presents her chastity as the condition of everything else she does.
That is the encratite bargain, and it runs through the apocryphal acts as a group. A woman may preach, travel and baptise, provided she surrenders sexuality entirely.
It is a real freedom and a very narrow one, and describing it accurately is more useful than claiming the text for a modern position.
How to Read It Now
The text is short, and a reader can check both sides of the argument in an afternoon.
The Acts of Paul and Thecla in English runs to a few pages, and the trials in Iconium and Antioch occupy most of it. What actually happens in the narrative gets its own account in the account of Thecla’s story.
Tertullian’s paragraph is shorter still, and chapter seventeen of his treatise on baptism contains the whole of it. Reading the two together takes less than an hour.
One thing is worth watching for as you read the two. Tertullian’s chapter is about who may baptise, and the sentence about the presbyter arrives as a supporting argument rather than as the point.
Why Who Wrote the Acts of Paul and Thecla Still Matters
People usually ask the question out of curiosity, and it deserves rather better.
Almost every apocryphal text is anonymous, and the ones that vanished vanished for their doctrine. This book is the exception on both counts, and the exception happens to be documented.
Somebody wrote it, somebody named him, and he lost his living because women were reading it and drawing conclusions, much as they would later do with the Gospel of Mary. That sequence is rare enough in the ancient evidence to be worth holding onto.
The episode also names the real fault line. The argument never turned on whether the story was true. It turned on who could act on it.
Check out the author’s book here: The Complete Apocrypha.
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