Thecla was born, tradition says, of a noble family of Iconium in Lycaonia, in the first Christian generation, when the name of Jesus was still new upon the roads of Asia Minor. Her mother was Theoclia, and she was betrothed to a young man of standing named Thamyris. Her earliest and most famous story is told in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a text already circulating about the year 180 and read everywhere in East and West; the Church has never received it as Scripture, and Tertullian and Saint Jerome record that the presbyter in Asia who composed it was deposed from his office for it, while Pope Gelasius listed the book among those not to be used. Yet as Johann Peter Kirsch observed, "notwithstanding the purely legendary character of the entire story, it is not impossible that it is connected with an historical person"; and the sheer breadth of her cult, from Seleucia to Milan and Rome, has persuaded many that behind the legend stands a real virgin of Iconium who gave everything to Christ.
According to that tradition, Paul came to Iconium and preached in the house of Onesiphorus. Thecla sat three days at her window, never moving, drinking in his words about the living God and the blessedness of a chaste heart given wholly to Christ. Her mother and her betrothed grew alarmed at the change in her: she would not eat, would not speak of the wedding, would not turn her face from the voice of the preacher. They denounced Paul to the magistrates as one who "makes virgins averse to marriage," and he was thrown into prison. Thecla stole out by night, bribing the doorkeepers, entered his cell, kissed his chains and sat at his feet, and refused to return to her family. Paul was scourged and driven from the city; Thecla was condemned to be burned alive.
They led her to the pyre, and she went up upon the wood, tradition says, tracing on herself the sign of the cross. The fire was kindled, but a sudden storm broke over the city, rain and hail quenched the flames, and the virgin walked out unharmed. She sought Paul outside Iconium and found him fasting and praying for her, and she said to him, "I will cut my hair off and I shall follow you wherever you go."
With Paul she came to Antioch of Pisidia. There a nobleman named Alexander, taken with her beauty, laid hands on her in the open street; Thecla resisted, tore his cloak and struck the coronet from his head, and for this was dragged before the governor and sentenced to the beasts. The tradition tells of wonders in the arena: a lioness set against her lay down at her feet and defended her from the other beasts even to its own death, and the women of Antioch cried out against the injustice of the sentence. Seeing a pit of water in the arena and believing her hour had come, Thecla threw herself into it, saying that in the name of Jesus Christ she baptized herself on the last day; the fierce sea-creatures in the water were struck dead by lightning, and she came out alive. Bulls, fire and poison could not touch her, and at last the governor released her.
Freed, she clothed herself in a mantle cut to the fashion of a man's cloak and went to Paul at Myra, and he blessed her mission. She returned once to Iconium, where her mother would not receive her, and then went on to Seleucia in Isauria. There, tradition says, she lived seventy-two years in a cave on the mountain, in prayer, austerity and continual preaching, teaching the word of God, drawing many to Christ, and urging women to imitate her in chastity and courage. Another tradition, treasured at Maaloula in Syria, tells that she ended her days in that mountain village as a healer and worker of miracles, still hunted by her persecutors; when they closed in upon her she cried out to God, the rock split open before her and closed again behind her, and the cleft in the mountain is shown to this day. It is said also that before her death she was able to go to Rome and lay herself down beside the tomb of Paul, her father in the faith.
The Fathers held her in extraordinary honor. Gregory of Nyssa wrote that she gave death to the flesh and quenched in herself every earthly affection, so that nothing seemed to live in her but reason and spirit, the world being dead to her as she was to the world. Methodius of Olympus made her the crowned speaker of his Symposium, learned in philosophy and eloquent yet modest, and said she had received her instruction in divine and evangelical knowledge from Paul himself. Macarius Magnes saw in her the sword of the Gospel that cut Thecla from Theoclia. Martyrs in prison invoked her: Eugenius of Trebizond named her with David and Daniel in his prayers, the Acts of Polyeuctes couple her with Perpetua, and Eugenia of Rome is said to have taken Thecla for her model. Whole generations of virgins in Asia Minor and Egypt lived by her example, keeping her name, her image on their lamps and their tombs, and her fearless liberty of soul.
Her cave-tomb at Seleucia became one of the most celebrated shrines of the Christian world. Gregory of Nazianzus withdrew there for three years; the pilgrim Egeria described the sanctuary in the 380s; the Emperor Zeno restored it in the fifth century, and its ruins are still called Aya Tekla. A fifth-century book, The Life and Miracles of Thekla, gathered the graces obtained there. At Maaloula a Greek Orthodox convent with a holy well rose beside her cave, still a place of pilgrimage. Relics were venerated at the monastery of Saint Tecla at Mosfiloti near Larnaca in Cyprus, said to have been founded by the Empress Helena; pilgrim flasks from Cyprus bear the face of Menas on one side and Thecla on the other. In Rome the Catacomb of Saint Thecla near the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls carries her name, and in 2010 the oldest known portrait of Saint Paul was uncovered on its wall. The first cathedral of Milan was dedicated to her, and the duomo of Este in the Veneto; Lebanon counts forty-two churches under her name, and there are churches and towns called for her in Syria, Wales, Spain, France, Portugal, Canada, El Salvador and the United States.
In the East she is commemorated on 24 September, and on 7 October by the old calendar; in the West Bede's martyrology set her feast on 23 September, kept still with joy at Tarragona and Sitges in Catalonia, where she is patroness and her day is the great festival of the town. Her feast was removed from the universal Roman calendar in 1969 for want of historical documentation, but her honor among Christians is older than nearly every other virgin's, and the Church has never ceased to hold up what her legend proclaims: that a young woman, hearing the Gospel once, may leave everything, fear nothing, and belong to Christ alone.
May Saint Thecla obtain for us the courage she showed at the pyre and in the arena, and may we, like her, sit still today long enough to hear the word of God and then act on it without looking back.
