The Acts of Paul.

        The sequel most obviously demanded by the Book of Acts is some account of what became of Paul. Its narrative leaves him in prison, soon to go on trial for his life. Was he convicted or acquitted? The generation for which Luke wrote knew the answer perfectly well, but two generations later hardly anybody knew it. The letters to Timothy and Titus reflect the interest already felt in his subsequent movements, assuming his release from prison, and from composing such letters as might have been written on a later journey, it was a short step to describing the journey itself.

        So it must have seemed to a Christian elder in Asia-we do not know his name-perhaps in Smyrna or Ephesus, who about A.D. 160-70 had come to feel that the Pastoral Letters exaggerated Paul's views on the place of women in the church and needed to be corrected. He also wanted to counteract the strong indorsement of marriage”... train the younger women to be loving wives and mothers” (Titus 2:4, etc.) and to recall the churches to ascetic views and the renunciation of marriage. So he wrote the Acts of Paul.

        Paul had indeed said in I Corinthians that women were to keep quiet in church; they were not allowed to speak (14:34). I Timothy put this even more sharply: “I do not allow women to teach;.. they must keep quiet” (2:12). Against these Jewish views of the role of women in religion some Christians in Asia felt that women should be allowed to teach and even to baptize. Montanus had already appeared as a prophet in A.D. 156, in Mysia, in the north-central part of the Roman province of Asia, and two women, Maximilla and Priscilla, were soon exercising the same prophetic gift. Women had long been prominent in Phrygian religion, and for twenty years this movement, Montanism, was most active in Phrygia, the eastern part of the province.

        The Acts of Paul described one of Paul's women converts, Thecla, not only as teaching but as administering baptism unrebuked. Paul himself bids her go and teach the word of God. The author was clearly seeking to correct the antifeminism of I Timothy, which he flatly contradicts.

        Tertullian relates (On Baptism 17) that when a few years later, the writer of the Acts of Paul was found out and made to admit the writing of this first Christian novel, he declared that he had done it out of love for Paul and was forthwith deprived of his office. But his book, although often officially condemned, achieved great popularity, and the story of Thecla, in particular, has never been forgotten. It exists in a number of Greek manuscripts and in half-a-dozen other versions. Its abrupt beginning turns out to be due to the fact that it is simply one episode in a large narrative.

        For centuries that chapter was about all that was known of the Acts of Paul, and we did not even know that it was originally part of those Acts, so completely had they disappeared. The old lists of books of scripture, acknowledged and disputed, mentioned the book and gave its length as 3,560 lines, or more than twice that of the Gospel of Mark. Tertullian tells of its origin in Asia and of the elder who wrote it. Origen also mentions it. Hippolytus at Rome, early in the third century, shows it was highly regarded there in his day. “For if we believe,” he writes (Commentary on Daniel iii. 29), “that when Paul was condemned to death, a lion, let loose upon him, fell down and licked his feet, how shall we not believe the things that happened in the case of Daniel?” [in the den of lions]. Eusebius, in n.D. 311, speaks of it as one of the books whose place in the New Testament was denied in his day.

        But in 1896 a Coptic papyrus of the book was discovered that did much to clear up its story. It was unfortunately incomplete, but it showed that the Acts originally included not only the story of Paul and Thecla, but the two letters exchanged between Paul and the Corinthians which had once been extant in Syriac and in fact were actually included in Efrem's Syriac New Testament in the fourth century. A fourth-century papyrus leaf from Berlin and a parchment one of about the same age from Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrhynchus Papyri xiii. i6oz) helped to build up the text in the original Greek. But more recently, the discovery at Hamburg in 1927 of eleven pages of the book in Greek, in a papyrus written about A.D. 3oo, has given us the concluding part of it in its original language.[25]