When a Girl Becomes Her Own
Let’s start with this–a teenage girl is sitting at her bedroom window listening intently to a man share stories to a crowd nearby. She’s riveted to every word he says. And even though her mom and her fiancé plead with her to stop listening, she refuses to move. This man, a stranger to her village, is talking about a world that’s entirely foreign to her; a world of freedom, and love–a love that liberates. And what’s so radical about this world she hears him talking about is that it’s open to everyone, including her.
Her door is not locked, and there are no bars on the window she looks through. But she’s far from free. At 17, she’s expected to marry her fiancé, the powerful man her parents have chosen for her. She’s expected to fulfill the duties of an obedient daughter, and subsequently, the obligations of a faithful wife, and then finally a mother. A mother who would one day expect her daughter to fulfill the same obligations that her own mother right now expects of her.
Her name is Thecla, and her story takes place in the mid-1st century in an area of the Roman Empire that is present day Turkey. The man she is listening to outside her window is the Apostle Paul, one of the earliest known followers of Christ. And the scripture where her story is found dates back to 70 A.D. titled The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Scholars consider it to be one of the earliest known Christian scriptures.
So why is Thecla’s story so unheard of, even among Christians?
There’s a form of Christianity that existed before the 4th century–a form of Christianity that is almost unrecognizable to the various sects of Christianity practiced today.
Some biblical scholars refer to this earliest form of Christianity as the Christ movement, since they practiced and taught kenosis–which is Greek for “self-emptying love.” It’s a form of “living remembrance”– anamnesis–meaning, it’s the arduous spiritual practice of releasing the individual will, the “tiny mad ideas” of the ego, and remembering a power that exists within, a power that renders all of humanity equal.
The Christ movement was so threatening to the Roman Empire that Christ was crucified, and everyone associated with him was persecuted. And for hundreds of years, up until the 4th century, to call yourself a Christian meant being sentenced to death.
Why?
Women, like Thecla, within the Roman Empire in the 1st century had about as much power and rights as slaves. It was a revolutionary act then for the women within the Christ movement to consider themselves equal to men. And also, it was radical that these 1st century women considered themselves sisters whether they were slaves or women with only a proximity to power through marriage.
When Christianity began to be institutionalized under Emperor Constantine with a series of councils starting with the Council of Nicaea in 325 A. D., the women of this pre-4th century Christianity were excluded and erased from its foundation.
For example, Thecla’s story was lost to all the girls and women, like me, who would have been inspired by her.
Because here’s what happens next after Thecla refuses to stop listening to Paul. She refuses to marry the man her family wants her to, and she later refuses the unwanted advances of the President of Syria; she refuses to belong to, or to be controlled by, anyone.
Thecla cuts her hair short, wears the clothing more often worn by men in the 1st century, and after Paul tells her to be patient, she goes ahead and baptizes herself. Thecla lives out the rest of her life as a minister of the Christ movement. The scripture reads in the final passages that she’s buried close to Paul the Apostle.
This is what was lost when the scripture that contains Thecla’s story was excluded in the formation of what would become by the 5th century the formal Christian canon of The New Testament. What was lost was the power of what happens when a girl becomes her own.
From the 4th century onward, the radical, highly persecuted form of Christianity that began in the 1st century was tamed and transformed under Emperor Constantine to look far more like the systems of power already in place within the Roman Empire. The systems of power that rank humanity according to a hierarchy of existence with Caesar way at the tippy top and slaves with no power down at the bottom.
This is what happened in the 4th century; women were edited, erased, and taken out of the Christian story. Mary of Nazareth, Christ’s mother, would become immaculate, removing the “sin” of sex from Christ’s mother and placing her in such an impossibly exalted state of virginity that no human woman could identify with her or draw strength from the fact that Mary gave birth to Christ. Mary Magdalene’s image would undergo the opposite transformation. She would be declared and remembered by the faithful from the 6th century onward as the penitent prostitute. And this fictitious narrative about Mary, about both Marys, would serve to justify why women are innately unfit for positions of spiritual authority.
I was never baptized. First because Unitarians don’t do that. But mostly because I couldn’t reconcile my feminism with the root-deep sexism that exists within the church. And by church, I don’t just mean a single denomination, but really in the foundation of the story itself. The story that was institutionalized in the 4th century, what Harvard scholar Dr. Karen L. King refers to as, “the master story.” Where God is the Father and the father only. This is the story that perpetuates the misunderstanding that salvation can only come through Christ, God’s son, a man, and therefore females, trans, and non-binary are sidelined from the divine equation.
I would have had to become someone else in order to get baptized, and later ordained, or faked it until I made it and found a way to believe the parts of the story that I didn’t believe. And, gratefully, I was never willing to do that. My problem was, I did feel called.
What I found after years of theological study at Harvard Divinity School and years of theological training at Union Theological Seminary is that what really compelled me and repelled me in equal measure about Christianity is that there’s actually another story about Christ.
When I pieced back together the scripture that was deemed too heretical to include in the New Testament, Christ morphs from a blue-eyed, blond haired, bearded man holding a staff and telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies to a radical, Middle Eastern man freeing women from the illusion that their worth could ever be dictated by someone outside of them. The Christ that Paul spoke so passionately about, that Thecla couldn’t be moved from hearing; the Christ that reminds us of a love that liberates us because it exists within each of us equally, so it frees us from the illusion that any one of us could be greater or less than the other.
I found that there was scripture like The Gospel of Mary Magdalene that teaches, “there is no such thing as sin,” and that the whole point of being human is in fact… to be human. We’re meant to practice emptying the horrific thoughts we’re having about ourselves and others; the guilt, the shame. And just do the bravest thing by having mercy on it all. This is what Mary’s gospel reveals Christ taught her how to practice. This is kenosis;this is self-emptying love.
And in other scripture, also not included in the New Testament, like The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Thomas, Mary is known as Christ’s companion, or in other more incendiary words, as his spiritual partner.
As a feminist theologian, I often feel like an archeologist. I have to sift through the rubble of the erasure that Christianity underwent from the 4th century onward. I have to read between the lines of the scripture that’s within the New Testament for the scripture that I know is missing. Though the scripture isn’t really missing so much as mislabeled as “Gnostic,” and deemed “apocryphal,” therefore misunderstood as separate from Christianity. When in fact, all of the ancient scripture labeled as “Gnostic” and “apocryphal” found after World War II in Nag Hammadi, Egypt are evidence of this form of Christianity that existed before the 4th century.
In the year 367, the Bishop of Athanasius of Alexandria ordered that monks destroy all of the scripture not designated as canonical. Gratefully, rebellious monks, most likely Copts, Egyptian Christians, refused to destroy scripture like The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The Gospel of Thomas, and The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Instead, they buried these scriptures in caves and urns in the Egyptian desert.
What this successfully erased over the next two millennia was evidence of the female counterparts or companions, to the central male figures in the history of Christianity. Christ lost Mary Magdalene. And Paul the Apostle lost his counterpart, Thecla. What was lost is the other half of the divine story. We lost the voice, the female version of the hero’s journey, the unique courage, and the wisdom of what it meant for a woman to reclaim her spiritual authority at a time when women had little to no power over their bodies much less their lives.
I’ve been re-watching (binge watching, that is) Buffy The Vampire Slayerduring these strange and isolating months of the pandemic. And at some point, as I was making my way through the spin-off show, Angel, one of the characters named Cordelia said, “If a male body was needed for sacrifice and holiness, the world would be atheist just like that.”
What Cordelia makes so clear is that the entire concept of holiness as it relates to the female body doesn’t actually have anything to do with purity or virginity at all. It has to do with dominance. It has to do with power.
Religious scholars and historians who have written about The Acts of Paul and Thecla have focused on Thecla’s refusal to marry as a spiritual imperative for purity. I would argue as Cordelia has inspired, her refusal to marry has everything to do with power and how she went about answering a call that came from within her at a time when she wasn’t free to do so.
Why am I so passionate about Thecla?
There’s a fresco of Paul the Apostle in a cave at a popular Christian pilgrimage site dedicated to him in Turkey that dates back to 500 A.D. Pilgrims come from all over the world to pay homage or to say a prayer in front of the fresco, in front of Paul. Because Paul is all they can see. Because Thecla’s story remains erased from Christian history, pilgrims don’t realize that the fresco is not primarily about Paul. This fresco that they are paying homage to actually depicts the moment when Thecla is sitting at her window riveted to Paul’s misadventures with Christ.
The Acts of Paul and Thecla says that she remains there at her window for three days and three nights. Her mother and fiancé beg her to obey them, and they tell her she should be ashamed for directing her attention away from them (away from the life that was expected of her). This is the moment that’s depicted in the ancient fresco at the pilgrimage site dedicated to Paul the Apostle.
It’s the moment when Thecla chooses a life of her own. And this is why her story was so dangerous to the early church fathers. This is why her story even today is still unknown.
It’s a story that electrified me when I first read it in seminary. Because, as a woman, it felt like the most personally relevant and relatable piece of scripture I had ever encountered.
Here’s what I mean. When I was Thecla’s age, at 17, there was this sexy, popular senior when I was a junior in high school. Everyone I knew thought he was IT. Just the coolest, most sought after boy to be around. So, when he told me that he liked me and wanted to date me, I felt this pressure like it was an honor. Like I’d been chosen, had won the lottery. My yes was assumed, given.
This is how I soon found myself in his basement with his tongue in my ear. My face expressed an award-winning cringe. It was dark, so he couldn’t see. And even though my face was telling the truth in the dark, I was pretending to enjoy his bizarre exploration of my inner ear with fake moans that I had learned from Dirty Dancing and Flashdance.
As I drove back home that night, I couldn’t stop crying. He had asked me to prom, so I should have been happy or felt good. Or at least, felt accepted. But I felt miserable. And at the time, I couldn’t understand why.
I had never once asked myself if I liked him. I was the one he had chosen, but I had never chosen him. And I didn’t even have the words at that time to see any of this. I was not my own.
The relationship, if it can even be called that, ended a couple of years later. And what was most upsetting about this first relationship was not that it ended, but that it ever started to begin with.
The complete inability for me to see, to know, to act on my own power, my own choices; this is what would disturb me most in the years to come. And it would disturb me the most because it was so profoundly universal. This lack of awareness among other girls and women that we get to say no to anyone and everything. That we are not commodities. That we don’t have to pin our worth on any aspect of our sexuality, as partners, as mothers. Never. None of it. Women’s worth is inherent, as is every other human being’s. It’s innate not earned, proven, or bought.
We can always refuse to be who someone else needs us to be.
And this is why Thecla’s story lit me up when I finally found it almost a decade later. And why it has been my inspiration throughout the pandemic. Because Thecla’s story is about a girl who becomes her own. Thecla refuses to meet anyone else’s expectation of her. And instead, she remembers that true power rests within. And that this power is simply, radically, love. A love we each contain. A love that liberates. From this point onward, my life blazes with that same intention to live out the miraculous of what happens when I am my own.
With only more love,
M.