Thecla.

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Thecla was an old time follower of the apostle Paul. She listened to Paul's advocacy of chastity then she decides marriage isn't for her and rejects her wealthy fiance. She, of course, was persecuted for making a stand since her fiance was not prepared to let her go so easily. They attempted to burn her but a miraculous thunderstorm appeared in the sky and put out the fire. Read more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thecla

It is one of the earliest examples of a woman making a stand against the cultural norm of fiance, marriage, children and she happens to be a follower of Saint Paul associated with the early days of the Christian Church. It appears in the early Christian church, it was very much a religion that catered to women in many ways.

What was the message these early Christians wanted to send? Why are there so many lady martyrs in the early church? Did Christianity start out as a woman's movement/religion only to have this fact obscured for fear it would alienate men?

Yes, there are many misogynistic passages in the New Testament that just don't quite belong within it. Many (admittedly secular) scholars believe that many of the later epistles of Paul that appear (ex. Titus) were not actually written by him, but much later, after the church had consolidated its power and position within society. I don't know if that is actually true, but it seems to make sense when one impartially examines the textual evidence we now have.

As it stands, the Bible of today seems to give at least silent approval to the subjugation of women, slavery, and conquest by genocide.

The text cited in the OP - the Acts of Paul and Thecla - are considered by the Church to be apocryphal.

Apocrypha are written works that are of unknown authorship, of doubtful authenticity, spurious, or not considered to be within a particular canon. The word is properly treated as a plural, but in common usage is often singular. In the context of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, where most texts are of unknown authorship, Apocrypha usually refers to a set of texts included in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible.

Considering that the authorship of most (if not all) texts in the current Bible is dubious at best, calling the Acts of Paul and Thecla 'apocryphal' seems somewhat hypocritical.

One thing that has always tripped me up when I heard or read the Christian Gospels is the story of Mary, Jesus's mother. I really question that in particular because it starts out almost as if it's the story of a single mother since, at the time, a never-been-married woman was considered to be a virgin so a virgin birth is just a way of saying, "single mother" since it was so taboo to think of a woman having sex before marriage.

So it seems like Mary started out as a single mother, probably like many lower caste or servile women at the time, so they could relate to her image. Later on, someone challenged this idea since it was not acceptable to have a child out of wedlock, so someone came up with Joseph as her husband but it seems that maybe, originally, he was her father and she was a single mother. Something about the story in The Gospels just doesn't add up and it's not just the idea of immaculate conception which is thought of as impossible in human beings.

The story of Mary being a single mother giving birth to the Christos does work in favor of the religion being about women at first and later was altered to gain more converts.

It's not surprising the story was excluded at Nicaea when the religion could have been somewhat revised to give men a more authoritarian role and to encourage people to marry and have children.

Very possible.


And its been pointed out by folks on past threads on PPR that Hebrew has a word for "young unmarried girl" which doesnt necessarily mean "virgin", and that that word might have been translated to "Virgin" - making his conception more miraculous than it was.

By the way (this is off the subject, and its a mistake everyone makes) the phrase "the Immaculate Conception" doesn't mean what you think it means.

The phrase does not refer to the miracle of Christ being conceived by one parent.

The "Immaculate Conception" is the Catholic doctrine that when Mary herself was concieved in HER mother's womb ( which happened the normal biological way) that her soul was "immaculate"- that she was concieved free of the stain of the "original sin".

The rest of us get blamed for Adam and Eve eating that fruit back in the day, but Jesus's future Mom got a get-out-of-jail-free card when SHE was conceived.

As both Fulton Sheen, and C.K. Chesterton, observed "if you don't believe in Original Sin then we all had 'immaculate conceptions' just like Mary".

Mary was a young woman who got married and had a child in the normal manner. Later, the Church fathers decided that they wanted to relate the story of Jesus's birth to a prophesy from the Old Testament which said that a young woman would conceive and bear a child. But the OT was written in Hebrew and the Church fathers were reading a translation into Greek. The Greek translators mis-translated the Hebrew word for a young woman to the Greek word for a virgin, and, voila! the Church fathers had their miracle prophesy.

Before Constantine institutionalized the Christian faith (and purged the last remnants of the teachings of Jesus from it) it was a poor-people's religion, a refuge from the political reality of Rome. Many women found freedom from a male-dominated world in it, and women were disproportionately drawn to it. Poor women, mostly, though a few upper-class women also. While the story of Thecla's salvation from the fire is obviously fictional, there is an allegory there which was very real: Christianity as a refuge for poor women who did not want to spend their lives as the property of husbands and as baby factories. Even after Christianity was institutionalized, this refuge remained in the form of the convent: Women who did not want to marry, for whatever reason, could go into the convent. It was a socially-acceptable way to avoid marriage. Women still had no power and were officially regarded as inferior to men. But the Church at least did provide this refuge for them.

Today, of course, the Catholic Church and many fundamentalist churches still bar women from leadership roles, which is not all that surprising: All-male clubs often fight tooth and nail to remain all-male and to justify by any flawed logic they can find their exclusion of half of humanity. I spit on any "faith" that bases its dogma or leadership on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or anything other than the character of the individual in question.

The text is considered apocryphal, but the church does acknowledge the woman of Thekla and the overall story. I was raised eastern orthodox and she was a canonized saint in the church. I believe we celebrated her name day on Sept 24th.

There were early sects that had women in positions of authority. For instance, the so-called montanists. That is until the other Christians disagreed with them, persecuted them, martyred them and wiped them out. You know, all those things that 'good Christians' do to the other christians they disagree with.