Rewritten Heroes: Reimagined Saints in the Early Christian World
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.
During my lifetime, the big screen has offered three Spider-Men, three Supermen, and six Batmen. Something impels us to rewrite superheroes, to create new versions of superhuman characters, stories that rethink what it means to be human. Ancient Christians had their own superheroes: the saints constantly rewritten in multiple media.
One of the most popular saints in antiquity was Thecla, a legendary companion of the apostle Paul. She gave up wealth, family, and a fiancé to become a chaste apostle, twice risking martyrdom. She first appeared in the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla (Acts below), but her image and story were frequently updated in texts, images, objects, and shrines across the Mediterranean. An anonymous mid-fifth century devotee of Thecla produced a two-part work, conventionally known as the Life and Miracles of Thecla.
I recently published the first English translation of the initial part of this work, Life of Thecla (Life, below; the second part, the Miracles, recounting Thecla’s wonders at her shrine, has been translated previously). The Life rewrites the second-century Acts, keeping its narrative structure while adding literary flourishes, notably inserting invented speeches into the mouths of established characters.
For its author, the Life was an act of devotion that fulfilled a vow. For modern readers, it is a window to how one ancient superhero was reimagined for new audiences. The fifth-century Thecla is more orthodox than her second-century counterpart: in the Life, she recites a long confession that was filled with anachronistic creedal jargon. This Thecla is also more modest. Her silence in the face of judgment at her first near-martyrdom is unexplained in the second-century Acts, but the Life explains that “feminine decency” prevented her from “exposing her virginal tongue to a vulgar audience.” One of the most famous and controversial moments in the original Acts was Thecla’s self-baptism during her second near-martyrdom, plunging herself into a pool containing man-eating seals. In the later Life, Thecla willingly dives into the pool so that by dying, she will achieve “baptism” through martyrdom. God’s intervention, killing the seals and saving Thecla’s life, transforms her self-sacrifice into a ritual of Christian initiation.
Thecla’s sexual renunciation in the Acts inspired women to give up marriage and family for a higher calling. In the Life, however, Paul concedes that married Christians who refrain from sex except for procreation have the same “dignity” as virgins. Thecla’s virginal calling is made extraordinary: like a modern superhero, she can be admired but never emulated. Thecla embodies impossible contradictions for mere mortals. She is an apostle but also a girl. She is a martyr who twice cheats death. She is a virgin who is virile enough to defeat the Devil.
The Life demonstrates a fascination with magic. When Thecla first overhears Paul preaching next door, “she was stung in her soul by his words and transfixed to the window as if by the steely nails of Paul’s speech.” This imagery evokes binding spells, a common form of ancient magic in which a curse or blessing is inscribed on a thin sheet of metal and pierced with nails. Later, when traveling with Paul to the city of Antioch, Thecla is assaulted by a local nobleman, Alexander, whom she fends off and humiliates. Alexander is emotionally torn between hate and “enchantment,” that is, philtron, a Greek word for a love spell. During Thecla’s second near-martyrdom, condemned to be delivered to lethal beasts in the arena, women in the audience hurl perfumes and oils that vaporize in a fire; thereby, they “cast a spell on the beasts” so Thecla can survive unharmed.
The governor presiding over the arena assumes Thecla survived through “some kind of sorcery or magical art.” Despite his earlier use of magical imagery, the author assures his readers that saints are not like abominable sorcerers with their polluted rituals. Saints perform miracles through simple prayer and God’s might, like Elijah, Moses, Peter, Paul, and Thecla. The Life’s flirtation with and rejection of pagan magic discloses the anxieties that creep into this rewritten saint’s life. The shrine where our anonymous author worked welcomed both Christians and non-Christians who sought supernatural healing. If some of these pilgrims were not scrupulous when distinguishing pious miracles from everyday magic, the Life indulges their desire for familiar magical imagery but sets them straight about the true source of the saint’s power.
Several copies of the Life and Miracles of Thecla survive, although it was never as popular as the second-century Acts or later versions read on her saint’s day. Not every retelling of a superhero’s story is a blockbuster. The power of rewritten superheroes lies in their ability to speak, even briefly, to a particular time and place, making way for new versions of these figures to speak.