Acts of Paul

Introduction

There is a version of early Christianity that most people have never encountered. It does not live in the canonical letters of Paul, nor in the carefully curated narratives of the Acts of the Apostles as preserved in the New Testament. It exists, instead, in a body of texts that were read aloud in house churches across the ancient Mediterranean world, texts that were copied by devoted hands, carried across deserts, translated into half a dozen languages, and treasured by communities of believers who found in them something urgent, something alive, something that the more official documents did not quite capture. These texts were eventually pushed to the margins of Christian tradition, labeled apocryphal, and in some cases actively suppressed. But they never entirely disappeared. And what they contain is extraordinary.

The document at the heart of this book — known to scholars as the Acts of Paul — is one of the most fascinating, most controversial, and most underappreciated pieces of early Christian literature ever produced. Written in the second century, probably sometime around 160 to 190 CE, it presents a portrait of the apostle Paul that is simultaneously more dramatic, more mystical, more egalitarian, and in many ways more human than anything preserved in the New Testament canon. It tells stories of miraculous escapes and divine interventions. It features a remarkable young woman named Thecla who becomes one of the most celebrated heroines in all of early Christian memory. It includes letters, visions, a lion who receives baptism, and a martyrdom scene of breathtaking power. And it was, for several centuries, read and revered by enormous numbers of Christians across the known world.

Yet for most modern readers — even those with a serious interest in early Christianity, in biblical history, or in the life of Paul himself — this text remains almost entirely unknown. It does not appear in Sunday sermons. It is not discussed in most popular books about the apostolic age. When Paul is mentioned in contemporary culture, the conversation almost always centers on his canonical letters: Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, the great theological edifices that have shaped Western thought for two millennia. The other Paul — the Paul of legend, of miracle, of dramatic confrontation with lions and emperors, of deep friendship with a young woman who cuts her hair, dresses as a man, and preaches the gospel with an authority that rivals his own — this Paul has been waiting in the shadows for a very long time.

This book is an invitation to step into those shadows and let your eyes adjust to a different kind of light.

To understand why these stories matter, it helps to think carefully about what we mean when we use the word 'apocryphal.' In common usage, the word has come to mean something like 'probably not true' or 'of doubtful authenticity.' We say that a story is apocryphal the way we might say it is a rumor — entertaining perhaps, but not to be taken seriously. But this is a modern misunderstanding of a much more complex historical reality. In the ancient world, the line between canonical and apocryphal was not drawn cleanly or quickly. It was contested, debated, and drawn differently in different communities. Texts that we now regard as apocryphal were, in their time, read alongside what would become canonical scripture, sometimes with equal or greater enthusiasm. The Acts of Paul was cited by Origen, discussed by Tertullian, and known to Eusebius. These are not fringe figures. These are the intellectual giants of early Christianity. The fact that a text like this eventually fell outside the boundaries of the official canon tells us a great deal about the politics of early Christian identity formation — but it tells us relatively little about the text's importance, its influence, or its historical and spiritual value.

What the apocryphal acts — and this one in particular — actually represent is something precious and irreplaceable: a window into the diversity of early Christian experience. The Christianity that eventually became dominant, the Christianity that produced the creeds and the councils and the great cathedrals, was not the only Christianity that existed in the first and second centuries. There were communities that emphasized different virtues, told different stories, organized themselves in different ways, and understood the message of Jesus and his apostles through very different lenses. The Acts of Paul emerged from one such community — or perhaps from several overlapping communities — and it preserves their voice with remarkable vividness. To read it is not merely to encounter an interesting historical artifact. It is to sit down with people who lived and breathed and argued and prayed and wept, people for whom these stories were not ancient history but living faith.

The narrative itself is structured as a series of episodes tracing Paul's journeys through the cities of the ancient Mediterranean world — Antioch, Iconium, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome — encountering believers and opponents, performing miracles, preaching a gospel that places remarkable emphasis on sexual renunciation, bodily resurrection, and the radical equality of souls before God. The episodes are loosely connected, and scholars believe that the text as we have it is actually a compilation of originally separate documents that circulated independently before being woven together. The most famous of these is the story of Thecla, which was so popular that it eventually circulated on its own as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and which generated a cult of veneration around Thecla herself that lasted for centuries and spread from Asia Minor to Egypt to the far reaches of the Byzantine world.

But there are other episodes of equal fascination. There is the correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians — a set of letters not found in the New Testament — which addresses theological controversies about the nature of the resurrection and the reality of Christ's human body. There is the dramatic confrontation in Ephesus, where Paul is thrown to the beasts in the arena and encounters a lion he had previously baptized — a scene that is at once theologically rich and almost comically vivid in its storytelling. And there is the martyrdom of Paul in Rome, a scene of such dignity and power that it has moved readers across the centuries, a scene in which the apostle faces death not with resignation but with a kind of luminous confidence that transforms everyone who witnesses it.

Taken together, these episodes constitute not just a biography of Paul but a theology — a way of understanding what it means to follow Christ, to resist the powers of the world, to embrace a life that is radically oriented toward something beyond the ordinary calculations of survival and social acceptance. The Paul of these stories is not primarily a theologian constructing doctrinal systems. He is a wanderer, a wonder-worker, a man of extraordinary personal magnetism who leaves behind him a trail of transformed lives and outraged authorities. He is, in the deepest sense of the word, an apostle — one who is sent, who goes, who does not stop going even when the road leads directly toward death.

Reading these stories today, one is struck above all by their energy. There is something almost cinematic about the way they move — the rapid shifts of scene, the vivid characterizations, the moments of sudden danger and equally sudden deliverance. Ancient readers clearly loved them for this quality, and modern readers, I think, will find it equally compelling. But beneath the surface excitement there is also genuine theological depth. The questions these stories wrestle with — about the body and the soul, about gender and authority, about the relationship between divine power and human vulnerability, about what it costs to live by conviction in a world that does not share your values — are not questions that have become less urgent with the passage of time. If anything, they feel more urgent now than ever.

A Text Recovered From Silence

The story of how these texts came to be known to modern scholarship is itself a remarkable tale, one that involves crumbling papyri, dedicated philologists, and the slow, painstaking work of reconstruction that has occupied generations of specialists. For most of Christian history, the Acts of Paul was known primarily through references in other ancient sources — the complaints of Tertullian, who objected to the authority it seemed to grant to women; the cautious acknowledgments of Eusebius, who placed it among the disputed texts; the citations of later writers who found in it material useful for various theological arguments. The text itself, in its complete form, had been lost.

What changed everything was the discovery, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of papyrus manuscripts in Egypt — manuscripts that had survived the centuries buried in the dry desert soil, preserved by conditions that would have destroyed them anywhere else in the ancient world. Among these discoveries were fragments of the Acts of Paul, including a substantial portion now known as the Hamburg Papyrus and another significant portion known as the Coptic Papyrus. These finds allowed scholars to begin the work of reconstructing the text, piecing together the original narrative from fragments that had been separated by centuries and thousands of miles. It was painstaking, sometimes frustrating work, and the reconstruction remains incomplete. There are gaps in the narrative, passages that have not survived, episodes that we know existed because they are mentioned in other sources but of which we have no direct textual evidence.

This incompleteness is itself historically significant. It reminds us that what we have is not a pristine, perfectly preserved document but a survivor — something that made it through centuries of neglect, active suppression, and the simple ravages of time by the slimmest of margins. Every fragment that has been recovered represents an act of historical rescue, a small victory against the entropy that has claimed so much of the ancient world's literary production. And the fragments we have are rich enough — vivid enough, theologically substantial enough, narratively compelling enough — to give us a genuine sense of what the whole must have been.

The scholarly conversation around this text has been lively and sometimes contentious. Questions about its date, its authorship, its geographical origin, its theological orientation, and its relationship to other early Christian documents have generated an enormous secondary literature, and the debates are far from settled. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the text was composed in Greek, probably in Asia Minor, probably in the second half of the second century, and that it drew on earlier traditions about Paul — some of which may be historically reliable, others of which are clearly legendary elaborations. The author — or authors, since many scholars believe the text is composite — was someone with genuine literary skill, a strong theological agenda, and a deep familiarity with the Pauline tradition as it had developed in the communities of Asia Minor.

The question of authorship is particularly interesting because the text itself, in one of its most famous passages, addresses it directly. Tertullian tells us that the Acts of Paul was written by a presbyter in Asia who composed it out of love for Paul — and who, when discovered, was removed from his office. This is a remarkable piece of information, if accurate. It suggests that the text was understood from early on as a pious fiction rather than a historical record, and that even those who valued it were aware of its constructed nature. It also suggests something about the world in which it circulated — a world in which the authority of texts was contested, in which the line between legitimate tradition and unauthorized composition was being actively negotiated, and in which love for a revered figure could motivate acts of literary creation that were simultaneously sincere and transgressive.

The theological agenda of the text is one of its most discussed features. The Acts of Paul is deeply committed to a vision of Christian life centered on sexual renunciation — what scholars call encratism, from the Greek word for self-control or continence. Paul's preaching in these stories consistently emphasizes the blessedness of virginity and the spiritual dangers of sexual activity, even within marriage. This is a position that goes significantly beyond anything in the canonical Pauline letters, where Paul famously expresses a preference for celibacy but explicitly acknowledges that marriage is not sinful. In the Acts of Paul, the rhetoric is considerably more intense, and it has consequences — most dramatically in the story of Thecla, who breaks off her engagement to follow Paul's teaching and embrace a life of virginal dedication.

This encratite tendency has led some scholars to associate the text with specific sectarian movements within early Christianity — with Marcionites, or with the communities associated with figures like Tatian, who compiled the Diatessaron and was known for his rigorous asceticism. Others have argued that encratism was simply more widespread in second-century Christianity than later orthodoxy liked to acknowledge, and that the Acts of Paul represents a mainstream current of thought that was later marginalized rather than a fringe position that was always eccentric. This debate matters because it affects how we understand the text's relationship to the broader history of Christianity — whether it is a window into a suppressed minority tradition or a reflection of attitudes that were once widely shared and only gradually became controversial.

What is clear, regardless of how one resolves these scholarly debates, is that the text's theology is not merely a set of abstract propositions. It is embodied in stories, in characters, in dramatic situations that make the theological stakes viscerally real. When Thecla sits at her window, night after night, listening to Paul preach through the wall, refusing to eat or sleep, transfixed by a message that has overturned everything she thought her life was going to be — this is not just an illustration of a theological principle. It is a human experience rendered with genuine psychological insight. And when the authorities of Iconium drag her before the magistrate, when her own mother calls for her execution, when she stands naked in the arena facing wild beasts — the theological questions about the body, about purity, about the cost of conviction, are not abstract at all. They are written in flesh and fear and extraordinary courage.

This is why the text has continued to find readers across the centuries, even in periods when it was officially disapproved. It speaks to something that doctrinal formulations alone cannot reach — the experience of being a person who has staked everything on a conviction that the world around them does not share, who has walked away from safety and comfort and social belonging in pursuit of something that cannot be fully explained or defended but only lived. This experience is not limited to any particular time or culture. It is one of the permanent possibilities of human existence, and literature that renders it with honesty and power will always find an audience.

Why These Stories Still Matter

There is a question that serious readers will inevitably bring to a book like this, and it deserves to be addressed directly: why should we care? Not in the abstract, historical sense — the historical importance of early Christian apocrypha is well established in academic circles — but in the personal, existential sense. Why should a modern reader, with all the demands and distractions of contemporary life, invest time and attention in stories that are two thousand years old, that were excluded from the official canon, that deal with theological controversies that might seem remote from present concerns? What is in these pages for someone who is not a specialist in early Christianity, not a scholar of ancient texts, but simply a curious, thoughtful person who wants to understand something real and important?

The answer, I think, begins with the figure of Paul himself. Paul of Tarsus is one of the most consequential human beings who ever lived. His letters shaped the theology of Western Christianity in ways that are still working themselves out. His ideas about grace, about law, about the relationship between faith and works, about the nature of the church as the body of Christ — these ideas have been argued over, interpreted, misinterpreted, weaponized, and illuminated for two thousand years, and they are still alive in contemporary religious and cultural debates. To understand Paul is to understand something fundamental about the civilization that produced modernity, for good and for ill.

But the canonical Paul — the Paul of Romans and Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence — is in some ways a very difficult figure to know personally. He speaks at such a high level of theological abstraction, with such intensity of argument, that the human being behind the letters can be hard to see. The Paul of legend — the Paul who walks into cities and transforms them, who faces down governors and gladiators, who inspires a young woman to defy her family and her society and her own future — this Paul is easier to feel. He has a physical presence, a personal magnetism, a way of moving through the world that the letters, for all their brilliance, do not quite convey. The legendary Paul and the theological Paul are not contradictions. They are complementary portraits of the same extraordinary person, and reading them together gives us something richer than either alone can provide.

Then there is Thecla. In the history of early Christianity, Thecla occupies a unique and fascinating position. She is not an apostle in the canonical sense. She does not appear in the New Testament. And yet for several centuries she was venerated as a saint of the first rank, celebrated as 'equal to the apostles,' her shrine at Seleucia in Asia Minor one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the ancient Christian world. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote about her. Methodius of Olympus devoted a major theological work to her. Egeria, the fourth-century pilgrim whose travel diary is one of the most charming documents of late antiquity, visited her shrine with evident devotion. The cult of Thecla was not a minor curiosity. It was a major phenomenon of ancient Christianity, and it was rooted entirely in the story preserved in the Acts of Paul.

What Thecla represents — and why her story has continued to resonate with readers across the centuries, including many modern feminist scholars who have found in her a figure of remarkable significance — is a vision of female agency and spiritual authority that the mainstream Christian tradition has often struggled to accommodate. She is not passive. She does not wait for permission. She makes her own decisions, faces her own dangers, and ultimately receives from Paul himself a commission to teach and baptize. She is, in the fullest sense, a protagonist — not a supporting character in someone else's story but the center of her own. The fact that her story was eventually marginalized, that the text containing it was pushed out of the canon, that her authority to baptize was specifically cited by Tertullian as a reason to reject the text — all of this is part of a larger story about the suppression of female religious authority in early Christianity, a story that historians and theologians are still working to understand and reckon with.

Beyond the specific figures of Paul and Thecla, the text as a whole raises questions that are genuinely urgent for contemporary readers. Questions about the relationship between institutional authority and personal conviction. Questions about the cost of living by values that put you in conflict with the dominant culture. Questions about the body — about what it means to be an embodied creature, about the relationship between physical existence and spiritual aspiration, about how we understand suffering and endurance and the limits of what human beings can bear. Questions about community — about what draws people together around a shared vision, and what happens to those communities when they are persecuted, when they disagree among themselves, when the charismatic figure who inspired them is gone.

These are not questions that belong to the second century alone. They are questions that belong to every century, including ours. And there is something about encountering them in a text like this — in a text that is ancient enough to have genuine historical distance from our own moment, but human enough to feel immediately recognizable — that can be genuinely illuminating. Reading about Thecla standing in the arena, about Paul facing execution with serenity, about communities of believers trying to live by convictions that their neighbors find incomprehensible, we are not just learning about the past. We are holding up a mirror to something permanent in human experience.

There is also, it must be said, the sheer pleasure of the stories themselves. The Acts of Paul is not a dry theological treatise. It is, at its best, gripping narrative — full of adventure, suspense, vivid characterization, and moments of genuine humor. The episode of the baptized lion is not only theologically interesting; it is also, by any reasonable standard, one of the most delightfully unexpected scenes in all of ancient literature. The correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians crackles with the energy of real theological argument. The martyrdom of Paul achieves a kind of austere beauty that is genuinely moving. These are stories that were designed to be heard aloud, in community, by people who cared deeply about what they meant — and they still carry that quality of urgency and aliveness.

What this book offers is an encounter with all of this — with the text itself, with its history, with its theology, with its extraordinary cast of characters, and with the world that produced it and was shaped by it. It is an encounter that has been made as accessible as possible, written for readers who bring curiosity and intelligence but not necessarily specialist knowledge. The goal is not to overwhelm with scholarly apparatus — though the scholarly conversation is rich and important and will be engaged where it matters — but to give readers the experience of genuinely meeting this text, perhaps for the first time, and feeling its power.

Early Christianity was not a single, unified phenomenon. It was a conversation — sometimes harmonious, sometimes fiercely contentious — among communities that shared certain core commitments but differed enormously in their practices, their emphases, their stories, and their understanding of what it meant to follow the risen Christ. The texts that eventually became the New Testament canon represent one set of voices in that conversation — important voices, authoritative voices, but not the only voices. The apocryphal acts represent other voices, voices that were marginalized and in some cases silenced but never entirely lost. To read them is to hear the conversation more fully, to understand early Christianity in its genuine diversity, and to appreciate both how much was preserved and how much was lost in the process of canon formation.

The stories you are about to encounter were treasured by real people — people who found in them courage and consolation, who read them in the face of persecution and uncertainty, who passed them on to their children and their communities because they believed they contained something true and vital and worth preserving. Those people deserve to be heard. And the stories themselves — with their energy and their beauty and their genuine theological depth — deserve to be read. Turn the page, and let them speak.

The Acts of Paul

Chapter 1

Paul went into the house where the dead boy lay. But Phila, the wife of Panchares, was furious and said to her husband in a rage: You have gone to the wild beasts — you did not father this son. Where is my child?

He had no desire for food, only to bury the boy. But Panchares stood before everyone and prayed at the ninth hour, until the people of the city came to carry the boy out. When he had finished praying, Paul came and saw, and spoke of Jesus Christ, and of the boy, and of the prayer.

A great crowd had gathered. After eight days they believed that he had raised the boy up. But when Paul had stayed on among them, they questioned him, and the men listened to what he said. They sent for Panchares and cried out: We believe you, Panchares — save the city from all these things they are saying.

Panchares said to them: Consider whether your good deeds are not possible without bearing witness to God, who has given his Son for our salvation. And I too believe, my brothers, that there is no other God but Jesus Christ, the Son of the Blessed, to whom be glory forever. Amen.

But when they saw that he would not come over to their side, they went after Paul, seized him, dragged him back into the city, abused him, pelted him with stones, and drove him out of their city and out of their country. Panchares, however, would not return evil for evil. He shut the door of his house and went inside with his wife, and they fasted. When evening came, Paul came to him and said: God has given us Jesus Christ.