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The Virgin-Martyr and the Emergence of the Early Christian Heroine: a Study of the Female Protagonist in the Acts of Paul and Thecla

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The Virgin-Martyr and the Emergence of the Early Christian Heroine: a Study of the Female Protagonist in the Acts of Paul and Thecla The Virgin-Martyr and the Emergence of the Early Christian Heroine: A study of the female protagonist in the Acts of Paul and Thecla Violina Yankova-Ingvarsson MA Religious Roots of Europe 120 credits UiO Faculty of Theology 06.08.2020 1 ABSTRACT The broader interest of this study is linked to the manifestations and perceptions of the ‘roles’ of women in the socio-cultural landscape of the Greco-Roman late antiquity. In particular, it attempts to understand how they can be situated in relation to the emergence of the identity constructing rhetoric of early Christian discourse in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. With the development of poststructuralist and feminist perspectives in the last decades of the 20th century, the scholarly interest and interpretative efforts - in the field of cultural studies in general and religious studies in particular - have been increasingly focusing on the ‘non-canonical’, ‘peripheral’, and the ‘grass-root level’ phenomena, and respectively, engaging with the study of the ‘history’ and ‘roles’ of women. These ongoing research efforts - while deconstructing the grand-narratives of the scholarly positivism of the previous centuries - had significantly widened the body of texts included in the scope of scholarly investigation, amongst which, the various texts usually gathered under the complex term of early Christian apocrypha. In the current study I concentrate on one of the probably most popular in antiquity - and in depth researched by today’s scholarship - examples of this ‘genre’: The Acts of Paul and Thecla. Reading through the captivating narrative of Thecla’s struggles I will try to detect the textual features of the female protagonist that can be meaningful in the larger perspective of the early Christian discourse and its paradigmatic notions of renunciation and soteriological suffering. 2 Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................ 7 1. Outline and referred scholarship ....................................................................... 11 2. Novum martyria genus. Setting the stage: female protagonists and metaphors .......................................................................................................................................... 21 Table 1. ‘Gendered performativity’ and ethos ...................................................... 29 3. Thecla and the metaphor of the ever-enduring virgin body. This “male woman” of God ............................................................................................................................... 30 4. The virgin and ‘protomartyr’ Thecla: Virgo or Virago? Building up a metaphor: appropriation, subversion or liberation? ......................................................................... 39 Table 2. Rhetorical strategies ............................................................................... 41 Table 3. Narrative layers ...................................................................................... 42 5.Conclusion. Salvation for Every-Body: The Virgin - Martyr trope and the emergence of the early Christian heroine ....................................................................... 101 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 106 3 Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. Luke 10:38 - 42 4 Fig.1. Ivory Casket; one of three panels. Lower panel carved in relief: Paul bringing his apostolic message and Thecla (left) listening to him from her window; divided by a half-rounded arch is the second scene with the Stoning of St Paul (right). Period: Late Roman (ca. 430 AD). Image courtesy of the British Museum Online Collection, http://www.britishmuseum.org 5 The Christian stories were stories with meanings - Let us call them myths. They were mostly evangelistic. But they were also just stories. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire1 Wherever it appeared, it seems, the saintly body was a poetic body. Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination2 1 Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 89-90. 2 Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 163. 6 Introduction My research interest in the cultural significance of the phenomena related to early Christian martyrdom, and respectively, the various aspects of the ideas of renunciation and suffering - seen as an integral pattern of early Christianity - has evolved in a somehow ‘time-line-reversed’ manner. The departure point was at first the cultural problematic surrounding today’s revival of extremist ideologies and acts of terror disguised under various ‘rhetorics of martyrdom’. Then from the field of synchronic studies on the subject my perspective shifted towards the diachronic trajectory: back to the Christian female mystics and the expansive textual and visual imagery3 of medieval Christianity surrounding the notions of bodily suffering and renunciation as ways of achieving spiritual purification; a sort of elaborate ‘purgatory of the incarnated spirit’, as most strikingly captured in the imagenarium of Hieronymus Bosh paintings. Then further back to the cult of the martyrs and the late antique cult of the saints4 and their relics, signified by overwhelmingly multifaceted devotional practices densely growing throughout the emerging imperial landscape of the 4th century Christianity. This ‘landscape of holiness’ that was unfolding along the pilgrimage routes also provides an abundant research material related to the ‘renunciation and suffering’ imagery, especially when it comes to its manifestations related to the notion of imitatio Christi. As Patricia Cox Miller succinctly puts it in her inspiring study of the dynamic between matter (i.e., corporeality) and ‘religious representations’ of meaning (i.e., both artefacts and ‘written images’): “The fact that the Word had a body made embodiment itself a site of religious meaning, “filled with divine energy and grace”5. Indeed, the main focus of the current study came to be aimed at viewing the phenomena of renunciation and suffering as ‘paradigmatic’ within the perspective of rhetoric and imagery (in both narrative and art) of early Christianity. That naturally lead me further into the world 3As we can see in, e.g., the depiction of The Worship of the Five Wounds (in the Prayer book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg) by the Flemish artist Simon Benning (1483-1561); courtesy of the interactive feature for the exhibition Imagining Christ of The J. Paul Getty Museum, http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/imaginingchrist/. 4As vividly interpreted in Peter Brown's seminal work The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 5 Cox Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 157. 7 of the 2nd and 3rd century martyr acts and apocryphal acts of the apostles as the very spring of formation of that paradigm and its rhetoric. It is also there that I have encountered the heroine of the current study: the figure of the Virgin-Martyr. That fascinating dramatis persona6 which even today captures the imagination of the reader will be presented in one of its most popular and charismatic impersonations: the virgin-martyr Thecla. Her character and textual functions in the narrative of the 2nd century narrative of the Acts of Paul and Thecla - interpreted within the context of early Christian rhetoric of identity formation - will form a major part of my thesis. Not least, a sufficient attention will be paid to the inherent ‘performativity’ of expression7 of the renunciation and suffering paradigm of late antique Christianity8. I attempt to offer a textual analysis of Thecla’s narrative which is in line with the understanding of the important function of the ‘ideologies’ and ‘practices’ of martyrdom for the construction of early Christian identity. The analysis also seeks to bring forth the hypothesis that the main ‘tools’ of the early Christian identity construction were based on rhetorical themes centred around the ideas of renunciation and suffering, and respectively, textual-images and recurring tropes9, such as the one of the Virgin-Martyr, the prototypical early Christian heroine. Further, I set to explore one of her earliest literary manifestations known to us: the virgin and 6 Lat., dramatis persona is a rarely used singular form of dramatis personae (characters of a play) and in the current study the term is appearing as a reference to the figure of the Virgin-Martyr in order to underline the ‘novelistic’ features of the heroine of Thecla in the Acts of Paul and Thecla as interpreted further in this paper. 7 That rationale is brilliantly formulated in Kate Cooper’s study on the heroine in the apocryphal acts: “Rhetorical analysis adds a new dimension to the theory of ascetic behaviour as “performances designed
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