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 post-structuralist 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 suffering.