Violated and Transcended Bodies

Streete
Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal

position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found
embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic.
Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two
broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of
being in, yet not of, it. The first response, martyrdom, was Elements in Religion and Violence
witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies,
particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to
overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life.
The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued
martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and
Violated and
Violated and Transcended Bodies

participation in the spiritual world.
Transcended Bodies
About the Series Series Editors
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009053372 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Violence motivated by religious James R. Lewis
beliefs has become all too Wuhan University
Gail P. Streete
common in the years since the Margo Kitts
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interest in the topic of religion University
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and Violence addresses this
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of c. fifty individual Elements.
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examine a range of topics,
including violence in major world
religious traditions, theories
of religion and violence, holy
war, witch hunting, and human
sacrifice, among others.
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ISSN 2397-9496 (online)
ISSN 2514-3786 (print)
Elements in Religion and Violence
edited by
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Margo Kitts
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VIOLATED AND TRANSCENDED

BODIES
Gender, Martyrdom, and Asceticism in Early

Christianity
Gail P. Streete
Rhodes College
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accurate or appropriate.
Violated and Transcended Bodies
Gender, Martyrdom, and Asceticism in Early
Christianity
Elements in Religion and Violence
DOI: 10.1017/9781009053372
First published online: May 2021
Gail P. Streete
Rhodes College
Author for correspondence: Gail P. Streete, [email protected]
Abstract: Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal

position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found
embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic.
Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two
broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of

being in, yet not of, it. The first response, martyrdom, was
witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies,
particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to
overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life.
The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued
martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and
participation in the spiritual world.
KEYWORDS: asceticism, concepts of body, early Christianity, gender,

martyrdom
© Gail P. Streete 2021
ISBNs: 9781009054157 (PB), 9781009053372 (OC)
ISSNs: 2397-9496 (online), 2514-3786 (print)
Contents
1 About Bodies, Gender, and Identity 1
2 Equal Opportunity: Martyrs and Ascetics 8
3 Martyrdom as Asceticism: Thecla and the

Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 22
4 Bodies That Save the World 48

5 The Bodies of the Blessed 56
Abbreviations 59
Bibliography 60
Violated and Transcended Bodies 1
1 About Bodies, Gender, and Identity

This Element is about embodiment (Streete, 2009: 12). Specifically, it is
about the way in which bodies are used as symbolic arenas for the perform-
ance of identity and vehicles for the inscription of that identity: in this case,
a Christian one (Streete, 2018: 40).1 Given its orientation toward the end of
the present age, and its marginal position in the Roman Empire, emergent
Christianity found embodiment a problematic aspect of being in the world.
Christians developed two broad responses to that world as they embraced
the idea of being in, yet not of, it. The first response, martyrdom, was
a testimony to the strength their faith leant to fragile bodies, particularly
those of women, perceived as the “weaker sex” (1 Pet 3:7), and the ability to
overcome bodily limitation to attain the resurrection life, one that was
conceived of as being in a bodily, if not fleshly, form. As will be shown in
Section 3.2, Candida Moss (2019) demonstrates how hazy this idea of
“bodily” form was in early Christianity.
The second response, asceticism, complemented and later continued
martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence, with participation in the

spiritual world while still in the physical flesh, which was perceived as either
a burden or an envelope. As Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey
(1987: 14) remark,
Martyrdom and asceticism are two forms of the same event:

humanity’s encounter with the divine, specifically through
the imitation of Christ, God incarnate. In times of peace it is
the saint’s Life that is shown to mirror the work of Christ,
usually with asceticism providing the manner of imitation.
In times of persecution, it is the saint’s death, or rather the
manner of the saint’s death, that proves significant: martyrs’
passions pivot on that event and what led up to it.
1
While early Christianity was not monolithic, so that one might more properly
speak of “Christianities,” discourses about martyrdom and ascetic behavior were
shared by several varieties of Christianity, even those that might oppose them as
deviating from “true” Christianity.
2 Religion and Violence
As Mary Douglas (1996: 65) famously observed, bodily representation is

inseparable from the society in which those bodies are located: “The social
body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical
experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through
which it is known, sustains a particular view of society.” The microcosmic
body reflects the macrocosmic society (its universe), and vice versa.
Whatever form of Christianity they practiced, early Christians thought
a good deal about bodies, their thinking developing from the intersection of
cultures in which Christianity as a distinct religion emerged. From Judaism,
Christianity developed the idea of the person as a living being, an animate
entity made in God’s image, one that God had endowed with breath (Gen
2:7), and, later, one that would be raised by God with the righteous in some
recognizable, perhaps bodily form (4 Macc 18:17–19). In Hellenism, par-
ticularly in Greek philosophy and medicine, Christian writers and theolo-
gians found the concept of the “soul” ( psychē), usually identified with mind
or intelligence, and the mind’s often problematic relationship to the body, in
which the body, characterized as sarx, or flesh, and its passions could prove
an impediment to the soul and its reasoning powers. The Roman contribu-
tion to Christian thinking about bodies seems to have been one of display or
spectacle: captive bodies marched in the triumphs of victorious Roman
generals, or the disposable bodies on show in the arena in the agon (struggle
or contest), to be dispatched by gladiators or beasts: “For the Romans . . .
killing was not clandestine, nor was it to be ignored: the killers, the killing,
the dying and the dead all were to be seen” (Kyle, 1998: 2). Yet from the
Romans also, via Greco-Roman Stoicism, came the performance known as
the heroic or noble death, the release of the embattled soul from the body by
one’s own hand at the appropriate moment. Marcus Aurelius (Meditations
11.3) claimed that noble suicide had to be “without theatrics,” exhibiting an
aristocratic Roman distaste for Christian martyrdoms (Droge and Tabor,
1992: 162). What the average person may have thought or felt about their
bodies is unclear, since most of our evidence comes from texts written by
the literate, but one thing is certain: bodies and their breakability and
expendability were visibly present on a daily basis in the social and political
realms of slavery, warfare, childbirth, gladiatorial combat, executions, and
routine torture of slaves and criminals.
For the early Christians, as for their contemporaries, “Bodies mattered

as much . . . as they do now – and particular bodies mattered more and
embodied more power and authority than others” (Vander Stichele and
Penner, 2009: 40–1). Bodies, moreover, had status as well as gender. For
example, slaves were routinely referred to as “the bodies, ta sōmata” in
Greek (Glancy, 2002: 10). Even when the Roman Empire became Christian,
the bodies of female slaves and those of the underclasses (the humiliores)
were not expected to be held in the same honor as those of the freeborn and
upper classes (honestiores): as Theodosian Codex 9.7.1 (326 CE) indicates,
the virtue of chastity was neither expected nor possible for these lower-class
women because of their “worthless life” (Brown, 1988: 24).2 The ancients
also understood the concept of “performing gender” long before postmod-
ernism used the phrase and did not employ a strict gender binary, using
a sliding scale or spectrum of masculinity and femininity, but this is not to
say that women’s and men’s bodies remained physically undifferentiated, at
least in the literature. As Vander Stichele and Penner (2009: 67) note,
“Gender [in the ancient world] was not so much a given, but rather
something that had to be acquired and proven,” by demonstration and

observation. Gender, in other words, was performed. Bodies perceived as
passive, ones that could be dominated and penetrated, whether male or
female, were defined as “feminine,” while those that were active and
dominant were defined as “masculine” (Vander Stichele and Penner,
2009: 61). Torture was a violation of the body that made even male bodies
technically female but could also make female bodies male through their
steadfast endurance of pain (B. Shaw, 1996: 293). In the Martydom of
Perpetua and Felicitas, for example, Felicitas’ birth pains are portrayed as
more painful than what she will endure in the arena (Martyrdom, 15.6),
childbirth being an ancient site of pain and the need for endurance for
women, as envisioned by men. Euripides’ Medea declares, “I would very
much rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child”
(Medea, 250–1).
2
For a more developed discussion of the intersection of gender and class in
martyrdom and asceticism, see Section 4.1, “Bodies and Status.”
The body itself was classically understood as having two and possibly
three components or realms: sarx, the flesh, which humans shared with
animals; psychē, mind or soul; and pneuma, spirit or breath, an element that
humans sometimes shared with the divine life, along with the psychē’s ability
to reason. The fleshly part of the person was linked to the passions; the
mind, if properly developed, was the seat of rationality and could control
the body and its passions, as in Plato’s Allegory of the Charioteer (Phaedrus,
246 c–254 c); while the spirit was the immortal part of the person, sometimes
identified as soul, but in Jewish and Christian teaching, as the divine breath
that God shared with human beings (Gen 1:26–27). Like their Greek and
Roman contemporaries, the early Christians often saw the domain of flesh
as inimical to that of the spirit, which was allied with God (Miles, 2013: 142).
In its most extreme expression, found in some forms of Gnosticism, with its
emphasis on the division between material and spiritual, this conflict was
outright warfare: the true human, like the Divine, inhabited the spiritual
realm, even while physically in the flesh, and any regard for the realm of the
flesh – the material world – was a form of delusion. Some Gnostic
Christians3 even inveighed against martyrdom, the use of the body as

a form of testimony, as a cruel deception about the means of redemption.
In the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (6. 79. 22–31), for example, Christians are
deceived into thinking that they imitate Christ in their deaths – an essential
feature of martyrdom – when in fact the “living Savior” is “glad and
laughing” (Streete, 2018: 42). Nonetheless, the orthodox Christian teachers
and theologians4 who later dominated Christianity could not depict the flesh
or the body, the entity that held together flesh and spirit, as wholly evil and
still subscribe to the canonical view that God had created a good material
universe that included human beings along with their mortal bodies.
Because of their Greek philosophical studies, however, they struggled
3
“Gnostic” in this context refers to those who believe that we are saved by the
secret knowledge the “Savior” (Jesus) came to impart: that the true human in the
image of God is spirit.
4
“Orthodox” refers primarily to the Christian beliefs as developed in the third to
eighth centuries, based on creeds, an accepted canon, and several Ecumenical
(worldwide Christian) councils.
with this concept. Given the evidence of the gospels and the letters of Paul,
these theologians had to understand the body of Christ as sacrificed, dead,
and buried, which rose in bodily form, and as the body celebrated as
redemptive in the ritual of the Eucharist. In the end, by attaching desire
to the unruly flesh (sarx), they managed to exempt Jesus Christ, though
incarnate, from human desire, and also to problematize human sexuality,
locating it in the lower element of the body, and assigning the fallibility of
the flesh primarily to the female gender (Miles, 2013: 141–2).
1.1 Bodily Existence in the New Testament

This development happened over some time. The pages of the New
Testament, perhaps more than the writings of the early Church fathers,
members of a classically educated literate elite, give some indication of
ordinary Christian belief and practice, although highly redacted by literate
members of the community, from the mid-first century to approximately the
late second. Here we see Christian teachers, as the end of the present age
and the return of Christ recede further into the future, having to deal with
the bodily here-and-now but also with the continuing anticipation of

a bodily resurrection, however far in the future. Paul’s writings especially
wrestle with defining “body” and its struggle between the competing realms
of spirit and of flesh. In Galatians, Paul treats flesh versus spirit as an aspect
of anti-circumcision (for Gentiles), but he does not limit it to that: “If you
sow in your flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh, but if you sow
from the spirit, you will reap eternal life from the spirit” (Gal 6:7).5 He also
expresses a belief that would become highly influential in martyrologies: “I
carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body,” as if on the body of a slave
(Gal 6:17). The fleshly mark of belonging to God was for him no longer
circumcision, but the imprint of service, persecution, and self-denial. Paul
again uses the conflict of flesh versus spirit in his letter to the Romans: “I see
in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me
captive to the law of sin that dwells in my [bodily] members. Wretched man
that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:23–4).
5
All scriptural quotations in English, unless otherwise noted, are from the New
Revised Standard Version.
Paul continues to set flesh against spirit: “For those who live according to
the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live
according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Rom
8:5–6).6
The letter to the Colossians, whose authorship by Paul is disputed, does
not emphasize the conflict of spirit versus flesh so much as it does the victory
through bodily suffering of the witness to Christ: “I am now rejoicing in my
sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh. I am completing what is lacking in
Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body: that is, the church” (Col 1:24).
Christ’s own body was the vehicle for the “indwelling” of the Deity (2:9).
Similarly, in 2 Corinthians, Paul distinguishes his authentic apostolic
authority from that of the would-be “hyper-apostles” because he and his
companions are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the
life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies” (2 Cor 4:10).
1.2 Body Metaphors in the Corinthian Correspondence

The Corinthian correspondence gives us Paul’s most memorable use of body
as metaphor. It is a metaphor for unity: the newly baptized become part of an

actual new creation or foundation (ktisis; 1 Cor 5:17), the church as the body
of Christ: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the
members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in
the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body . . . and we were all made to
drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). Here, body and spirit have no conflict and
together symbolize the unity of the “body of Christ,” the church, in which the
spirit dwells (12:27). Paul continues to emphasize bodies, both actual and
metaphorical, in two ways: first, through the importance of sexual self-control
in Chapter 7, which is later to become a major influence on norms of ascetic
behavior; and second, in his discourse on resurrection in Chapter 15. In the
first, Paul acknowledges but does not endorse marriage: for him, it is
a stopgap for sexual immorality and lack of self-control (7:2–9). Far better,
he thinks, is to “be anxious about the affairs of the Lord” rather than to be
anxious for worldly things like pleasing one’s spouse (7:12–13). Paul offers an
athletic training metaphor (askēsis) for earthly life, one that he delineates
6
See also Jn 3:6.
more fully in 9:26–7: “So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though
beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it.” Here, he seems to imply
a distinct mind/body hierarchy, in which the body (here, the realm domin-
ated by flesh) should be a slave, disciplined by the mind.
In Chapter 15, Paul addresses the problem that the Gentiles in his
audience had with the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the body: clearly,
when one dies (however one dies), it is the physical body, allied to the flesh,
that dies. How can that be raised? Paul envisions a spiritual “body” that
involves the transformation of the human entity: “It is sown a physical
body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also
a spiritual body” (15:44). Otherwise, Paul believes, the resurrection of
Jesus, whose incarnation and crucifixion are foundational for his faith,
makes no sense. This idea of the transformation of the transitory physical
body into the eternal resurrected body plays a great role in the stories of the
martyrs, as we will see in Section 4.1 with the afterlives of Perpetua and
Saturus in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas (11:2; 12:27; 13:4).
1.3 The Discipleship of Equals

Although Paul initially may seem to have advocated a “discipleship of
equals,” in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s (1983: 95) phrase, claiming that
“in Christ” differences such as male and female do not prevail (Gal 3:27–8);
nevertheless, as Christianity departs from its radical roots and comes closer
to conformity with “this world,” the divide between women’s and men’s
physical bodies persists in this life, if not in the resurrection. Despite Jesus’
saying that “In the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in
marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30), later letters like the
Deutero-Pauline, Pastoral, and Catholic Epistles, which are concerned more
with taking the existing world as it is and transforming it in a Christian
direction, characterize women who reject marriage as “silly” and “over-
whelmed by their sins, and swayed by all kinds of desires” (1 Tim 3:6–7);
subject to their passions (Tit 3:3); and also as the “weaker sex” (1 Pet 3:7).
A wife can even be considered the “body” belonging to her husband (Eph
5:28). Similarly, slaves, whose bodies were at the disposal of their owners,
especially female slaves, who were the “reproductive bodies” of their
masters (Glancy, 2002: 11), were enjoined to be obedient (Eph 6:5–8; Col
3:22–4; Tit 9–10) and even to endure being beaten because Christ also
suffered (1 Pet 2:18–25). Suffering is a form of imitation of Christ.
2 Equal Opportunity: Martyrs and Ascetics

There were nonetheless two realms in which men and women, slave and
free, were truly equal or, rather, one in which women became men and were
therefore equal to them: martyrdom and the ascetic life. In the first part of
what follows, on the subject of early Christian martyrdom, I will examine
a selection of martyrologies, focusing on those collected by Herbert
Musurillo (1972), the hagiographies from the Apocryphal Acts of the
Apostles (J. K. Elliott,1993), and Palladius’ Lausiac History (Clarke,
1918), together with Brock and Harvey’s (1987) Holy Women of the
Syrian Orient. I will not attempt to examine whether or not some or all of
the martyrologies are “authentic”: Allison Elliott (1988: 25) claims that
“seventy authentic passiones survive.” Moss (2013: 18) considers far fewer
authentic or historical: she holds that six “can be treated as reliable”: the
Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, the
Apologies of Justin Martyr, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (which will not
concern us here) and the Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, as recorded by
Eusebius in his History of the Church. Nonetheless, the point is not the
historicity or reliability of these martyr accounts. As L. Stephanie Cobb
notes, these texts are never meant to be history but to be “rhetorically
effective” and “religiously instructive” (Cobb, 2016: 9). With regard to
their depiction of women, Ross Kraemer offers the caveat that we need to
attend “far more carefully to the degree to which the rhetorical uses of
gender obscure our version of antiquity” (Kraemer, 2011: 11).
2.1 Martyrologies and Hagiographies as Propaganda

for the Virtues
Martyrologies, like hagiographies – the stories of ascetic holy men and
women – provide examples for Christian behavior and model definitions of
Christian identity, not only as they adopt and modify accepted Greco-Roman
definitions of virtue but also as they add specific Christian virtues to the list,
virtues that imitate, surpass, and ultimately replace Roman public, as well as
private, virtues. These virtues (for men) include parrhēsia (the open speech of
free citizen males), which is often eschewed rather than embraced by women,
in favor of imitating the silence of Jesus during his ordeal. Only in the gospel
of John does Jesus have any extended speech: otherwise, as the evangelist
Luke indicates, his silence is that of the sacrificial lamb (Acts 8:30–55, quoting
Isa 53:7–8). In martyrdoms, moreover, actual speech is not necessary: like the
body of Jesus, the bodies of the martyrs embody speech. Their public
martyria (witness) in the arena becomes a form of free and open speech
even more potent than their spoken responses at their trials.
One of the most important, maybe even central virtues in these accounts
is andreia (Greek) or virtus (Latin), both of which literally mean “manli-
ness” but are usually translated as “courage.” Courage or fortitude is one of
Stoic philosophy’s cardinal or governing virtues, together with sōphrosynē,
self-control, or in its more severe form, enkrateia, self-mastery (Cicero, On
Invention, 2.53; Cobb, 2008: 6–8; Cooper, 1996: 17). Women’s virtues are
more often characterized by the private qualities of modesty and chastity.

But in the arena, women could also imitate and often surpass the primary
male virtue of andreia, effectively becoming men (Cobb, 2008: 5; Streete,
2018: 41). Yet private female virtues could also be publicly displayed:
Perpetua demands that she and Felicitas not be exposed naked in the
arena (although she has no problem being naked as a male gladiator in
one of her visions, Martyrdom, 10.7), and she even straightens her torn dress
and pins up her disheveled hair when she is tossed by the mad heifer, “more
mindful of shame (pudor, modesty) than of pain (dolor),” as the narrator in
the Latin version of the Martyrdom puns (20:4–5). Susan Hylen (2015: 119),
who calls Thecla a “modest” apostle, demonstrates that there was
a “complexity” in both Roman and Christian norms of modesty that did
not necessarily make women passively obedient but might also be willingly
embraced by them as a marker of Christian identity. In the less public, but
still visible, arena of ascetic practice, women also became men by exercising
sōphrosynē and enkrateia, often adopting male dress and living as men.
Stories of “harlot saints” who chose this route as a form of penitence
abound, as will later be shown in Section 3.5. For the most part, however,
the main virtue of the female martyr is andreia, the public virtue by which
she becomes a man; the main virtue of the female ascetic is enkrateia,
another prime masculine virtue, which entails mastering the passions and
controlling sexual desire and its expression. Both virtues are complementary
rather than separable or exclusive.
2.2 Martyrdom and Christian Identity

Christians as an entity, although not always under that name, made
their first appearance in the writings of Roman historians of the second
century CE. Suetonius (69–122) mentions an expulsion of Jews from
Rome by the emperor Claudius (41–54) in 49 CE, because of riots
impulsore Chresto, “at the instigation of [one] Chrestus” (Claudius, 25),
which has often been taken to refer to disputes between Jewish sects,
including the upstart followers of Jesus. “Chrestus,” however, is a fairly
common slave name, and the expulsion may have occurred because of
Roman fears of another slave uprising like that of Spartacus and his
allies in 73 BCE. Suetonius also commends the emperor Nero (Nero, 16)
for regulating several organized groups, including his “punishment

inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a mischievous
superstition.” This punishment is briefly mentioned by Suetonius before
he passes on to Nero’s regulation of chariot drivers: he seems to treat
both equally and to approve of both as contributing to the Roman
order.
The Roman historian Tacitus (56–120) describes this punishment of
Christians in greater detail in his Annals 15.44–5. In his account, the
emperor Nero was suspected of having started the Great Fire of Rome in
64 but cleverly “fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures
on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.”
Tacitus goes on to trace the “most mischievous superstition” to its origin
with “Christus,” who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of
Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” Tacitus
relates how those who pleaded guilty (presumably after torture) gave
information that convicted a “multitude,” not so much because of the fire
but of their hatred of mankind.” He describes the spectacle of their punish-
ment in the Circus Maximus as including “mockery of every sort,” in which
Christians were “covered with the skins of beasts,” set upon by dogs,
crucified, or burned alive as human torches at night, when Nero “offered
his gardens for the spectacle,” driving around dressed as a charioteer.
Tacitus has no sympathy for those Christian “criminals,” who “deserved
extreme and exemplary punishment,” but he reluctantly admits that
a “feeling of compassion” arose from the populace, because Christians
were not being executed “for the public good” but “to glut one man’s
cruelty,” an example of the disdain this senatorial aristocrat felt for the
gauche emperor.
Tacitus’ friend, the younger Pliny, governor of the Roman province of
Bithynia and Pontus, sheds further light on the early relationship of
Christians to the Roman imperial administration. Pliny writes to the
emperor Trajan for advice on how to conduct examinations and trials of
those who have been accused of being “Christian” (Pliny, Letters, 10.96).
He informs the emperor of his procedures and looks for approval of his
conduct. When Christians are arrested, they are asked three times if they are
Christian, have been Christian, or have given it up. He wonders whether he
should apply torture to anyone accused of being Christian (thus assuming

they are not citizens or have forfeited their right to be so), regardless of age,
gender, or “bodily weakness.” He says that he has already questioned under
torture – standard Roman legal procedure – two slave women (ancillae)
who are called ministrae, ministers, presumably functionaries in the
Christian community. He found nothing other than “a depraved and
excessive superstition” that seems not to pose a real threat to Rome,
“superstition” designating any practice that is not legally sanctioned by
the Roman definition of religion, as a public affair that supported the state.
Pliny says that he has accordingly executed those who persist in their
Christianity because of their “obstinacy” and “stubbornness.” Trajan
replies as an “enlightened” and modern emperor that Pliny’s procedure is
correct, but Christians are not to be hunted down, neither are anonymous
accusations to be credited.
This exchange of letters provides a model for the stories of Christian
martyrdoms; although, as the correspondence indicates, for much of the first
three centuries of Christian development, there was little organized persecu-
tion. When it did occur, it was sporadic, even during the three empire-wide
proscriptions against the Christians: in 250 (Decius), in 257–8 (Valerian), and

in 303–11 (Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus) (Moss, 2013: 233). Those
accused of practicing the non-sanctioned religion or superstition known as
Christianity were brought to a public trial before a Roman official. There,
they were given the opportunity to offer their martyria, their testimony in
their defense against the criminal charge of subverting the Roman peace by
practicing asebeia, or disrespect of the gods (atheism). As Margo Kitts has
noted, the concept of martyria as “witness” or “testimony” had changed by
the first century CE, especially in the New Testament, from the idea of
a divine spectator invoked to punish violators of oaths, accompanied by
a ritual slaughter of animals, with their supposed willingness to die and an
emphasis on their suffering, to “the victim who suffers and dies in testimony
to a perceived truth” (Kitts, 2018: 77). Spectacle and suffering have thus
become essential elements of martyrdom.
In Christian martyrdoms, the accused often refuse even to give their
actual names, preferring instead to be known by the name of “Christian.”
Perpetua claims that she cannot be called by any other name than that of
Christian: “Christiana sum” (Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 3.2). In the

Martyrdom of Saints Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike, from the late second
century CE, Carpus, although crying and screaming under torture, keeps
claiming, “I am a Christian” (23). In the account of the Martyrs of Lyons and
Vienne (Eusebius, HE 18–19), even when her “entire body was broken and
torn,” Blandina admits, “I am a Christian, and we do nothing to be ashamed
of.” The soldier Maximilian (Acts of Maximilian, 2) refuses to give a name
other than “Christian,” while Dasius, also a soldier, simply gives the name
“Christian” (Martyrdom of the Holy Dasius, 8), and Euplus acknowledges
the fate his confession will bring him: “I want to die; I am a Christian” (Acts
of Euplus, 1).
These martyrs also disavow earthly family ties and connections in favor
of this new eschatological identity of Christian, as they believed Jesus had
taught them (Lk 14:26–7). Perpetua rejects her father; her husband is
nowhere in the picture; and eventually she has to give up her infant son,
who was a source of concern to her in the prison. Felicitas gives her
prematurely born baby girl to be raised by a Christian “sister.” Papylus,
a Roman citizen, claims that he has “many children,” but only in the faith.
Agathonike, when urged to “Have pity on your son” (44), and in the Latin
version, to “have pity on your children,” says only that “God will pity”
them (6).
The trial of these Christians, and their subsequent condemnation to
execution, which takes various forms depending on their social rank,
provides a public forum for the Christian witness, in both speech and act.
It also provides a space for the demonstration of identity with Christ and for
the particularly Christian virtues of humility (Gk. tapeinōsis, Lat. humilitas)
and patient endurance (hypomonē). The suffering and “humiliating” deaths
of the martyrs transform them into “consecrated warriors” and noble
athletes, male and female alike (Kitts, 2018: 276–7). Christ is of course the
supreme sacrificial victim, whose body and blood were celebrated in one of
the earliest of Christian rituals, the Eucharist (1 Cor 11:23–6). He is also the
exemplar of the Christian virtues of humility and hypomonē, as demon-
strated in Paul’s letter to the Philippians 2:6–11, virtues that his followers
were urged to imitate. Christ “emptied” his being of divinity, taking on the
“form of a slave,” enduring even death on a cross, for which God has
“exalted him.” The letter to the Hebrews mentions a “great cloud of

witnesses (martyres)” to the faith, including not only the patriarchs and
prophets but also the unlikely “Rahab the prostitute” (11:29; Josh 2.1–21,
6:22–5). The “pioneer and perfecter” of their faith is Jesus, who “endured
(hypemeinen) the cross.” The same hypomonē should be demonstrated by his
followers as imitators (Heb 12:1–2).
The deaths of Jesus’ followers and confessors at the hands of their
opponents, the imperial Roman authorities, were also redemptive, not
only of the martyrs themselves but also of others. The redemptive quality
of martyrdom appears in the Hellenistic Jewish apocryphal work from
the second century CE,7 4 Maccabees, especially in 12:11–17, where the
martyrs are guaranteed eternal life with God and the patriarchs, avoiding
the torment of those who deny God. The early account of the death of the
first Christian martyr Stephen in Acts 7 mentions that he sees just before his
death “the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of
7
The actual date of composition is uncertain.
God!” (Acts 7:56). The gospel of Luke, by the same author as that of the
book of Acts, relates the story of the repentant thief who confesses to Jesus
as the messiah and is promised entrance into Paradise “today” (Lk 23:42–3).
The first epistle of Peter (1 Pet 4:1) is quite specific about the redemptive
quality of Christian suffering: “Since, therefore, Christ suffering in the
flesh, arm yourselves also with the same intention (for whoever has suffered
in the flesh has finished with sin).” Martyrs, and even confessors, those who
are imprisoned for their faith but have not died for it, are also believed to
have the power to atone for the sins of others. The slave Blandina is hung on
a post in the arena “in the form of a cross,” silently encouraging her fellow
martyrs in their ordeal as they see “in the person of their sister him who was
crucified for them” (Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 74). Imprisoned for her
faith, the noble Perpetua is granted the power of prophetic vision and also of
intercession for her dead brother Dinocrates, who is suffering in a “dark
place” (Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 4.1). The same narrative relates
a vision of the martyr Saturus, in which he and Perpetua are called from
heaven to intercede between Optatus the bishop and Aspasius the presbyter
(13.4). Thecla, about to be martyred by the beasts in Antioch, is urged by

her protector Tryphaina to intercede for her dead daughter, Falconilla, so
that she may be translated to “the place of the just” (Acts of Paul and Thecla,
28).
2.3 Christian Bodily Witness (Martyria) as Propaganda

In the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, one’s identity as
a Christian depends exclusively on one’s willingness to become a martyr,
“a faithful witness to the truth” (Rev 3:14; Kitts, 2018: 275–6). Indeed, the
author of the book, who identifies himself as John, shares with his audience
his own “persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance
[hypomonē]” and claims to be on the island of Patmos “because of the
word of God and the testimony [martyria] of [or to] Jesus” (1:9).
Martyrdom as depicted in this book means not only verbal testimony but
also willingness to suffer and die for this witness, with no compromise with
those who are allies of the Great Whore: namely, the Roman Empire (2:13;
19:10; 20:4). The reward of those who have died for their faith is to
“conquer” their enemies by paradoxically enduring suffering at their
hands, in loyalty to a superior empire, the Kingdom of God. Following the

model of the Book of Revelation, martyr account after martyr account
shares this language of conquest, as if the martyrs are soldiers in battle or
noble athletes in a contest, fighters in the arena, rather than despised noxii,
criminals accused of trying to overthrow the Roman state by their stubborn
refusal to participate in its religiopolitical rituals (Kyle, 1998: 91). As
Elizabeth Castelli (2000: 197) notes, “The discourse of martyrdom is
a discourse of power,” but it is a paradoxical power that is acquired by
those who have little or no earthly power or authority, “a strength made
perfect in weakness,” as Paul claims for himself in 2 Cor 12:9. God (or God
in Christ) becomes the ally of the weak and powerless, including women
and slaves, to defeat the powers of this world, just as in the accounts of the
ascetic holy people, as will be shown in Section 3.4, the power of bodily self-
control and dedication to God defeats the demons.
Martyrologies as propaganda for encouragement and exhortation take
two approaches. In the first, the apologetic approach, the martyrologist
attempts to show, as we have previously noted, that Christians are not, as
the Roman authorities think them, subversives of the state; they subscribe to
the same virtues as do other Romans and, in fact, are better at demonstrating
them. Christian martyrs “embraced, rather than replaced, Roman defin-
itions of honor, strength, and reason” (Cobb, 2008: 2) and in doing so
transformed them. In the second approach, the martyrologist enlists the
sympathy of the readers/hearers to inspire them, if not to imitation, at least
to admiration.8 Justin Martyr (110–165), who has the unique position of
being Christianity’s first philosopher/apologist/martyr, asserts that
Christians serve God “rationally,” as true philosophers (First Apology,
13).9 He responds to a possible charge that if the Christians believe they
8
Augustine (Sermon 280.1.1) on the dies natalis (literally, “birthday,” but actually
the date of martyrdom) of Perpetua and Felicitas, says that men (viri) may “more
admire than imitate them.” Rubén Rosario Rodriguez (2017: 259) suggests that the
purpose of the martyrs’ witness is nonviolent social resistance, a precursor to
liberation theology.
9
The Stoic-leaning author of 4 Maccabees similarly represents Judaism as the “true
philosophy,” one that is worth dying for, and one that teaches a noble death.
must resist the state, an act that makes them criminals, why not perform
a “noble death” by suicide rather than risking a horrible death in the arena?
Justin’s answer is that without the public witness, the “speaking the
martyrdom” (Boyarin, 1999: 94–5; A. Elliott, 1988: 24–5), their death is
meaningless: “If, then, we all kill ourselves we shall become the cause, as far
as in us lies, why no one should be . . . instructed in the divine doctrines”
(Second Apology, 4). Tertullian, more flamboyantly, asserts, “the blood of
the Christians is seed” (Apologetic, 50).
Although we do have the early martyria of Justin and his fellow
Christians (Acts of Justin and Companions), one of the most important
testimonies to the way in which literate, elite Christians thought of their
possible “dying for God” is that attributed to the Syrian bishop Ignatius of
Antioch, who supposedly died sometime within the reign of the “enlight-
ened” emperor, Trajan. In a letter to the Roman Christians at the center of
the empire, Ignatius, arrested because of his status as a bishop and leader of
other Christians, as was often the case, writes that Christians should not
prevent or oppose his martyrdom because of their “carnal affection” for
him. Instead, he envisions his body as being transformed into something

very different:
Suffer me to become food for wild beasts. . . . I am the wheat

of God and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that
I may be found the pure bread of God. . . . May they leave
nothing of my body. . . . Then shall I be a true disciple of
Jesus Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my
body. (To the Romans, 4)
He continues, “Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts, let
tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members, let
shatterings of the whole body; and let all dreadful torments of the devil
come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ” (To the Romans, 5).
Ignatius’ perfervid imagination of his own martyrdom is significant because
he sees his body as transformed into Christ’s body (as Eucharistic bread),
and thence into a fleshless persona (Streete, 2009: 18). Even so, Ignatius’
insistent wishes emphasize his body as central to his martyria (Streete, 2018:
46). This is a male body that he envisions dissolving; although he does not
stress the masculinity of his body, he uses language that suggests appropri-
ately “masculine” behavior under bodily trial: the andreia or virtus (cour-
age) that is the quality of being a man but that is also being defined as the
Christian hypomonē (endurance) – especially of extreme pain. Indeed, as
Cobb (2008: 2–3) remarks, “The stories of the martyrs depict Christians as
more masculine – a principal Roman attribute – than non-Christians. . . .
To be a Christian was to embody masculinity.”
Another martyrology in the form of a letter, perhaps modeled on that of
Ignatius, that uses the same themes of masculine bravery and endurance of
pain is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, who was bishop of Smyrna from 120 to
140 CE. The virtue of hypomonē is present throughout the narrative (e.g.,
2.2, 2.3, 13), as is the theme of the imitation of Christ (1.2; Moss, 2010:
46–7). The young martyr who precedes Polycarp, Germanicus, is described
as “most noble” (Martyrdom of Polycarp, 3.3), because, being urged by the
governor who is presiding at his trial to “spare his young manhood,” he
instead bravely pulls the beast who is attacking him more forcefully on top
of him (3.1).10 A counterexample is that of Quintus, who gave himself up

voluntarily and urged others to do the same; however, on seeing the beasts
he “turned cowardly” and thus became unmanly and recanted (4).
Polycarp, now a very old man, sees in a vision that “It is necessary that
I be burnt alive” (5). As he enters the arena, he hears a voice saying, “Be
strong, Polycarp, and andrizou,” usually translated as “Be the man.” (In
modern parlance it would be “Man up.”) He thus refuses to recant, takes off
all his clothing, and faces the fire naked.11 Polycarp’s body is thence
10
This action recalls that of Thecla, who leaps into the pit of seals prepared for
her death, claiming that she is “baptized on the last day!” (Acts of Paul and
Thecla, 34).
11
Nakedness in martyrdoms has different meanings. For men, it symbolizes
stripping for combat, for the agon or contest in the arena. When Pionius
(Martyrdom of Pionius, Musurillo, 1972) is nailed up, he is naked, so that the
“holiness” and “beauty” of his body are visible (21). For women, nakedness is
a mark of shame, although Perpetua in one of her dreams strips naked when she
becomes a male gladiator.
transformed into something other than human: he is a “noble ram from

a great flock,” a “holocaust,” and a “sacrifice” (14), hoping for the resur-
rection of the “soul and the body,” again recalling the atoning death and
resurrection of Christ. His death on the pyre is described as a “wonder”: his
flesh is “not as burning flesh,” but as “bread being baked” (a possible
reference to the Eucharistic body of Christ) or “like gold and silver being
purified,” giving forth a “delightful fragrance” like “costly perfume” (15).
His body is transformed but not consumed by the fire, and so a dagger is
plunged into his body: the blood quenches the flames. In this way, Polycarp
wins “an incontestable prize,” and his remains are “dearer than precious
stones and finer than gold” (17–18). By his endurance, Polycarp’s body is
transformed into something more than earthly, sacrificed, like that of Jesus,
on behalf of others, and even remains on earth in some form as relics to
encourage his followers.
2.4 Women Acting Like Men

In the Martyrdom of Saint Justin and Companions, all confess before the
prefect Urbicus that they are Christian, confident that even when they are
scourged and beheaded (a death indicating their higher social status),
they will “ascend to heaven” (5). In one version of this text, the presiding
magistrate marks one of their number, Charito (or Charites), for special
questioning: “What is this, woman? Have you been deceived by their
words? You do not, at any rate, present a good reputation,” presumably
because she ought, because of her rank, to have more sense and modesty
than to be found in such criminal company. She replies, “I am not
deceived. . . . Rather, I have become God’s servant and a Christian and
by his power I have kept myself free from the taints of the flesh” (3).
Charito thus implies that purity of the flesh (chastity) is an essential part
of being a female martyr, a theme that we shall find elsewhere, particu-
larly in the Acts of Paul and Thecla and its variants, which blend
martyrdom and asceticism into a single martyrology. Other martyr
texts, like those recounted by Brock and Harvey (1987), also use
a woman’s choice of the virginal or celibate life as the reason for her
martyrdom, a theme that will be explored in the discussion of asceticism
in Section 3.1.
One of the most important and most cited of early Christian martyrol-
ogies is the third-century Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Musurillo
(1972: 56–7) even claims that it is a model for all subsequent martyr texts.
Long considered a part of a “lost tradition” and resurrected in the 1980s
with the intention to recover women’s religious histories, there is no current
discussion of martyrdoms or women’s roles in them without this text, which
is remarkable largely because it contains what purports to be the prison
diary of Perpetua herself, including an account of four visions, although the
actual martyrdom and the introduction and addition of passages about the
deacon Saturus, his visions, and his martyrdom, are clearly by a different
hand (Wilson-Kastner et al., 1981: 1–32). Perpetua is described as honeste
nata, or born into a relatively high social class, and educated (Martyrdom of
Perpetua and Felicitas, 2.1). In this respect, she is unlike the slave Felicitas,
who is a “usable” (and therefore exploitable) body, subject to the sexual
predilections of a master” (Streete, 2009: 40), and so no one would expect
her to be treated the same as her fellow Christians. But for Perpetua, as for
all Christians in the martyr texts, her identity as a Christian supersedes her
identity as a member of a privileged Roman social class, and she refuses to

renounce it, even though her father, at the urging of the governor who
presides at her trial, makes several attempts to persuade her to do so.
Although she claims other privileges, such as better treatment in prison,
they are for her brother and sister Christians and not solely for herself.
Torture, for example, seems remarkably absent in this account, except
perhaps for Felicitas’ suffering during the delivery of a premature baby
(15:6–7).
One reason this martyrdom has been so remarkable to later commenta-
tors is that it demonstrates the unique position of the female martyr. If, as
Cobb (2008: 3) claims, Christianity was the “embodiment of masculinity,”
then women needed to demonstrate a masculine identity, but at the same
time to “exemplify female virtues” (Cobb: 2008: 8). The courage that was
also manliness exhibited by the martyr in the arena was thus doubly
emphasized in the case of women, whose supposed mental and bodily
weakness would make them incapable of such endurance. Instead, these
women, who, as Augustine remarked, were easier for men (viri) to admire
than imitate (Sermon 1.1), in a sense “overcame” their female minds and
bodies even as they battled their opponents to become heroic, “noble

athletes,” just as the torn and broken Blandina becomes in her suffering
(Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 5.1.41; B. Shaw, 1996: 300). In one of her
remarkable visions in prison, Perpetua actually becomes a male athlete,
stripped for combat in the arena: “My clothes were stripped off, and
I became a man” (Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 10.7). Ironically,
however, to show women acting as men, it is necessary for a martyrology to
present them visually as female. Felicitas, whose prayer to give birth to
a premature daughter so that she could suffer with her fellow martyrs is
answered, goes into hard labor and is taunted in her pain (15.6). Perpetua
and Felicitas, at first stripped naked for the arena before being re-clothed,
are pointedly called puellae (girls) in the text, while even the crowd is
appalled by their appearance: one a “delicate girl” (Perpetua) and the other
a mother “with dripping breasts,” who has recently given birth (Felicitas).
When tossed with a “mad heifer,” which is “matched to her sex” (20.1),
Perpetua’s first thoughts are to fasten up her hair and fix her torn dress
(20.4), a sign of her feminine modesty and sense of shame, as previously
noted. She even dies in the classic gesture of feminine suicide (Loraux,
1985: 3), guiding the trembling hand of the young soldier who is assigned to
kill her to her throat, as the narrator exclaims, “So great a woman!”
The Acta Martyrum, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, are rife with stories of
female martyrs whose bodies are displayed for spectators to gaze upon, as
they demonstrate both their physical femaleness and their male courage: the
one reinforces the other. In one version of the Martyrdom of Saints Carpus,
Papylus, and Agathonike, Agathonike voluntarily takes off all of her clothes,
stripping as if for a gladiatorial combat. While the crowd of spectators,
seeing her beauty, grieves for its destruction in her forthcoming death, she
“throws herself on the pyre” (51). The body of Blandina, in the Martyrs of
Lyons and Vienne, is “exposed” as she is hung on a cross; the perfection of
Potimiaena’s body is mentioned as she is about to be raped by gladiators
(Martyrdom of Potimiaena and Basilides, 74–5). Irene (Martyrdom of Agape,
Chione, and Irene) is ordered to be “placed naked in a brothel” unless she
recants. Crispina (Martyrdom of Crispina) is ordered to have her head
shaved by the proconsul Anullinus (304–5), a form of public shame for
women (e.g., 1 Cor 11:5), to achieve her “complete disfigurement.” Thecla,
in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, is displayed naked on a number of occasions:

when she is to be burned in Iconium as a “lawless one,” when she is thrown
to the seals in Antioch, and when she is assaulted by the beasts in the arena
in Antioch. As Gilbert Dagron (1978: 26), observes, she is “depicted naked
more often than usual.” In their accounts of the holy women of the Syrian
Orient, Brock and Harvey (1987) draw many examples of women – Anahid,
Ruhm, Elizabeth the deaconess, Mahya, and Febronia, among others – who
are sexually as well as physically mutilated because they are women:
The sexual mutilation of women by torture and the sexual

annihilation of women by taking on of a male identity [as in
the example of ascetic women] are both about the same issue –
namely, power and dominance in the relationship between
men and women. And these events are found in hagiography
about women, both legendary and historical. . . . What are we
to hear? (Brock and Harvey, 1987: 25)
Perhaps one of the things their audience is intended to hear is the

extraordinary resilience of a body that is devoted to God. As Cobb
(2016: 9) notes, martyr texts were read and heard on the dies natalis, the
anniversary of the martyr’s death and so their “birthday” into eternal life, in
liturgical contexts in churches or at the shrine of the martyr, as the late
fourth-century pilgrim Egeria recounts happening at Thecla’s martyrium in
Seleucia (Wilson-Kastner et al., 1981: 74–83), to “bring the miraculous
deeds of God into the present” (Cobb, 2016: 157). The martyrs may be
mutilated, but most texts depict them as not suffering, as defiant, even as
healed from their wounds. The body of Anahid, for example, is said to be
“without a scar,” after graphically depicted extreme torture, disfigurement,
and captivity (Brock and Harvey, 1987: 94). Cobb suggests that martyr texts
like these imply that the Christian faith offers a remedy for the universal
human condition: “a life of pain” (Cobb, 2016: 157). Female martyrs are
especially notable in this respect because, as the text of Blandina’s martyr-
dom shows, despite the feared “bodily weakness” of a female and a slave at
that, she is “filled with such power” that her torturers become exhausted
(Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 18). More importantly, her endurance of

torture and the “exercises” or “combats” (gymnasmata) in the arena made
irreversible the condemnation of the crooked serpent [who had

deceived Eve], and, tiny, weak, and insignificant as she was, she
would give inspiration to her brothers [male Christians], for she
had put on Christ, that mighty and invincible athlete, and had
overcome the Adversary in many contests, and through her
conflict (agōn) had won the crown of immortality. (36)
3 Martyrdom as Asceticism: Thecla and the Apocryphal

Acts of the Apostles
With the Peace of Constantine in 313 . . . the days of literal

martyrdom largely came to an end.12 The successors of the
martyrs were the desert fathers [and mothers], those heroes of

self-persecution who fled the cities for . . . the uninhabited
deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. But if the goal of these
spiritual martyrs was the same as that of their predecessors, the
kingdom of heaven, the hermits’ methods of attaining it
differed. . . . The vita of the confessor saint stands in the same
relationship to the passio as romance does to epic. The enemy is
now within – the Devil himself and not his public representative
or surrogate, the Roman magistrate. (A. Elliott, 1988: 42)
12
Voluntary martyrdom at the hands of an increasingly orthodox Christian empire,
however, continued to be sought, particularly by North African Christians like
the Donatists and related groups, who believed that the willingness to be
martyred was the mark of a true Christian, and sacraments administered by
Christian clergy who had shunned martyrdom by the Roman Empire were
invalid. Brock and Harvey (1987) recount martyrdoms and persecutions of
Christians in the Syrian Orient attributed to Jews, Zoroastrians, and
Chalcedonian (orthodox) Christians well into the sixth century.
The physical and mental training and discipline required for endurance in
the contests of the arena carried over as the foundation for continued
demonstrations of Christian sōphrosynē, the self-control and subduing of
the flesh that stubbornly remained a part of this world, even though the
world’s end was continually expected. Christian male leaders, the church
fathers, “frequently asserted that asceticism was a new form of martyrdom,
one in which we could be martyred daily” (Clark, 1986: 45). The Christian
athletes contending in the arena were still praised for their “conquests,” but
the arena had changed. Yet, in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, which
are some of the primary documents for the promotion of this continued
combat of flesh versus spirit, the literal arena persists. This is the case with
the Acts of Paul and Thecla in which a “noble virgin” of Iconium (much like
the well-born matron Perpetua) is faced in several instances with physical
trials in public arenas. The Acts of Thecla, a lengthy second-century episode
embedded in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, known collectively as the Acts of
Paul and Thecla (McLarty, 2018: 3), belongs to a genre of what can only be
called Christian “anti-romances,” modeled on the so-called “Greek
romance,” “chastity romance,” or “romance novel” (Hennecke and

Schneemelcher, II, 1964–5: 32), in which a young noble couple fall in
love but are separated and have to undergo a series of adventures and trials
that test their fidelity, and particularly the woman’s chastity. As Peter
Brown (1988: 14) observes, “The novels . . . explored with a new respect
the theme of love at first sight among the young. Both hero and heroine
were presented as passing through dramatic trials to preserve their chastity
for a predestinate marriage.” In the end, however, they are reunited, with
the woman’s chastity intact, to initiate (or resume) a married life together.
Kate Cooper (1996: 27) notes that these novels also show that love
(desire) is “not in tension with the social order” but rather contributes to it,
since marriage is the foundation of stable civic life. Several commentators,
like D. MacDonald (1985) and Burrus (1987), have observed that the
Christian Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles adopt this novelistic pattern,
but, as in the martyr texts that employ the rhetoric of Roman virtues only to
show how much better Christians are at them than non-Christians, these
Acts adopt the rhetoric of chastity and continence to subvert the marriage
plot and to advocate for lifelong celibacy: “The impulse of the [Greek
romance] texts is deeply conservative, social rather than anti-social; their

Christian transformations are far from it” (Cooper, 1996: 37).
One of the best examples of this transformation/subversion is the Acts of
Paul and Thecla. In the part of these Acts that describes her actions, Thecla,
a noble virgin of Iconium, while she is still enclosed in her house, as a chaste
unmarried woman should be, listens from her window, the precarious
liminal space between her home and the outside, to “the word of the celibate
life” as spoken by Paul, in the neighboring house of Onesiphorus (Acts of
Paul and Thecla, 7). His voice enchants her, although Paul himself is
depicted as a scarcely erotic object in his physical appearance: “small in
size, bald-headed, bandy-legged . . . with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-
nosed” (3). Perhaps his attraction is spiritual: he is also described as “noble
in mien,” and sometimes “had the face of an angel.” Troubled, because her
daughter will not move from her post, fearing that she is attracted by a “new
and terrible passion” (9), Thecla’s mother Theocleia calls for her fiancé,
Thamyris, to summon her back to her civic responsibilities and her social
role therein. But like the martyrs who precede her, Thecla is “dead” to her
mother, her fiancé, and above all to her household: even the maids mourn
for her (10). Shamelessly, Thecla leaves her house and seeks Paul in prison,
where she kisses his chains and rolls on the ground where he sat. Ironically
and paradoxically, these actions are not portrayed as erotic in the strictly
physical sense, but in the sense that Thecla is enamored of something other
than her role as a virgin bride and potential upholder of her city’s values.
Theocleia, all too aware of the threat Thecla poses to the social order (and
perhaps Theocleia’s own standing within it, like that of Perpetua’s father),
calls for her daughter’s burning as an “unbride” (anymphon), one who is
“lawless,” and who, like the Roman noxii, threatens the state and its stability
through deviant religious practices.
But just as the martyrs were delivered from their pain because they were
prepared to suffer for God, Thecla, led to the pyre, is delivered by divine
intervention from being burned: God sends a sweeping hailstorm to put out
the blaze (22): “Thus ends the first part of her story, the destruction of
a former identity and the emergence of a new one, as the unassailable and
powerful virgin slave girl of God,” without an earthly master (Streete, 2009:
84). The death of her old identity is reinforced when she meets Paul and his
host family at a tomb, where she declares that she has essentially risen from
the flames. Paul, however, hesitates to let Thecla become his disciple,
because her beauty might be a temptation: he offers the torturous argument
that although she would not tempt him, she might herself be tempted to fail
at “enduring” and thus to “act like a cowardly man” (Streete, 2005: 270). It
seems that Paul here is treating Thecla like a woman who could potentially
act like a man but has not yet completed the process and thus is threatening
to him because of her dangerous femininity (which is possibly his own male
fallibility).
As in the stories of the female martyrs, Thecla’s beauty and feminine
appearance are emphasized only to prove their ultimate insignificance.
Following Paul to Antioch, Thecla is accosted by the Asiarch Alexander,
in a parody of the Greek romance theme of “love at first sight.” For
Alexander, however, it is lust at first sight: he believes the lone Thecla is
a loose woman and that Paul is her pimp. When questioned, Paul shame-
fully repudiates Thecla, saying he does not know her nor is she “his,”
leaving her to the tender mercies of Alexander: when she refuses his
advances, he condemns her to the beasts (27). Clearly, as in Iconium, so

also in Antioch, Thecla’s “crime” is to refuse to assume the role assigned
her as a freeborn female citizen: she will not marry or submit to sexual
intercourse; therefore, she is “an affront to the social order” (Streete, 2009:
87) and must be executed as a “sacrilege” (28. 32).
Unlike the situation in Iconium, however, Thecla finds support in the
women of Antioch, especially the noble Tryphaena, who protects Thecla
and keeps her “pure” – not subject to rape or violation in prison – until
her trial in the arena. Tryphaena becomes a replacement mother to
Thecla, her motherhood all the more emphasized because she is grieving
for her own dead daughter, Falconilla. In a possible reminiscence or echo
of the visions of Perpetua about her dead brother Dinocrates, Falconilla
appears to her mother in a vision and asks her to request that Thecla pray
for her, that she might be “translated to the place of the just” (28).
Tryphaena nevertheless cannot prevent Thecla from appearing in the
arena: she must endure her agon, in the manner of other martyrs. The
beasts she faces, however, a lioness and a she-bear (we may be meant to
think of Perpetua and Felicitas being matched with a wild heifer,
“suitable to their sex”) can kill her: the lioness, in fact, defends her, until
she herself is killed. Thecla’s survival does not mean she is released:
although even the governor of Antioch weeps for the coming destruction
of her beauty, he condemns her again to beasts, this time to ravening
seals. Undaunted, Thecla treats this occasion as an opportunity to seize
for herself the baptism Paul has denied her: she leaps into the water with
the seals, claiming, “I am baptized [or I baptize myself] in the name of
Jesus Christ on the last day!” (34). Thecla’s action is obviously approved
by God, because he causes a lightning bolt to kill the seals (fortunately,
Thecla escapes being electrocuted), and a cloud to cover up her naked-
ness, her virgin’s modesty a concern of the narrator, just as Perpetua’s
modesty in mending her torn dress and fixing her disheveled hair is
emphasized by the narrator of her martyrdom.
The “seal” of baptism, the mark of belonging to Christ together with her
resolute chastity for Christ protect Thecla in her last two trials of combat
with the beasts. Again, God rescues her from assault by causing the ropes
that bind her to be burnt through: “Lust’s last assault is finished” (Streete,
2009: 88), and the governor “marvels” at the force field that surrounds
Thecla. This final miracle, in a Greek romance, would be the opportunity
for the happy ending. But since this is an anti-romance, the reunion of Paul
and Thecla is not one of two sundered lovers, but as two apostolic equals.
Thecla travels to Myra, wearing a man’s clothes, together with her own male
and female followers, and finds Paul. Their reunion is rather disappointing:
Paul is “astounded” to see her and still imagines that “some other temptation
was with her” (40). Thecla, however, is emboldened by the baptism that she
has given herself. Perhaps with relief, Paul sends her back to Iconium, with
the words, “Go, and preach the word of God” (41). Commissioned by the
apostle Paul, Thecla herself becomes an apostle, “a traveling evangelist,”
essentially becoming Paul rather than being united with him, a celibate
itinerant rather than a married householder (McLarty, 2018: 229).
3.1 Persecution for Chastity

Thecla’s story is one on a spectrum of narratives of holy women persecuted
and even martyred for their choice, not simply of chastity in marriage but
for the more extreme form of chastity: celibacy before, within, and outside
of marriage. In their stories, Christian rhetoric was once again using Roman
moral values – chastity and self-control – and shifting their emphasis away
from their locus in familial duty and civic virtue (Cooper, 1996: 17). Syrian
Christianity in particular, with its “ascetic” understanding of religious faith
(Brock and Harvey, 1987: 7) contains several martyrologies in which
women who had made their choice for celibacy and the virgin life, by
becoming “daughters of the covenant,” were given the choice of marriage,
exposure in a brothel, or martyrdom. Martha, daughter of Posi, is urged to
save her life by marrying, having children, and renouncing this “disgust-
ing” covenant of celibacy. She refuses because she is “betrothed to Christ,”
for which she is “slaughtered like a lamb” (Martyrdom of Martha, Daughter
of Posi, who was a Daughter of the Covenant, 240; Brock and Harvey, 1987).
In his treatise On Virgins, Bishop Ambrose of Milan praises the example of
Thecla as one that should teach virgins “how to be offered [martyred],”
because of her “refusal of nuptial intercourse,” which changed even the
disposition of the wild beasts intended for her slaughter, ceasing because of
their reverence for virginity (On Virgins, 2.3.19). Ambrose also holds up the
example of another legendary virgin, Agnes, who as a girl of twelve refused
marriage as a mark of conversion during the persecution of Diocletian,
urging the executioner not to delay, but to take her tempting body out of
this world: “One victim, but a twofold martyrdom: Agnes preserved her
virginity and gained a martyr’s crown” (On Virgins, 1.2.8–9). Jerome also
commends Agnes, who “by her martyrdom hallowed the very name of
virginity” (Jerome, Letter 130.5). Christian women who were martyred
because of their choice of celibacy removed themselves from the world and
from the church: they could be admired and imitated, but they did not
provide models for authority in the church, as did Thecla.
3.2 “My Sister, My Spouse”: Ascetic Women as Brides

of Christ
Agnes’ refusal of marriage is prompted by her belief that her true spouse is
Christ: to have an earthly bridegroom is therefore to commit adultery, as in
the story of Martha, daughter of Posi. Similarly, Mary, niece of Abraham,
believes that in losing her virginity she has sinned against her “heavenly
bridegroom,” Christ (Mary, Niece of Abraham of Qidun, 18; Brock and
Harvey, 1987). In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, when Thecla is condemned to
be burned as an “unbride” by the Iconians, led by her mother and the civic
authorities, she believes that she is actually already married to a heavenly
bridegroom and cannot commit adultery against him. Marriage to Christ
and fidelity to him are often the Christian justification for female celibacy,
playing on the Roman regard for wifely chastity. As Elizabeth Clark
(2008: 2) notes, “Although a young virgin’s rejection of earthly nuptials
might shock the aristocratic society of the late Roman Empire, she [i.e.,
Thecla] could nevertheless be imaged as someone’s wife.”
In the Symposium of Methodius, which substitutes female Christian
celibacy for Greek homoeroticism, Thecla leads other virgins in an epitha-
lamium, a song traditionally sung at a wedding, at the entrance to the bridal
chamber, but here, for the “marriage” of the “celibate bridegroom,” Christ,
to the virginal church, represented by the twelve virginal “apostles” of the
symposium. In the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the apostle Thomas converts
a young bride and groom to practice continent marriage at the very entrance
to their bridal chamber, by singing an epithalamium in praise of celibacy.
When advising young women like Paula’s daughter Eustochium
against earthly marriage, the ascetic church father Jerome is quite
eloquent about its drawbacks: “pregnancy, the crying of infants, the
torture caused by a rival, the cares of household management” (Jero
me, Letter 27.2). These belong to the unappetizing legacy – unappetiz-
ing from a male perspective – of worldly intercourse. Marriage to
Christ, on the other hand, confers on a virgin royal status. In his
allegorical interpretation of Psalm 45:13, a favorite of clerical advocates
for virginity, the virgin is not only the “king’s daughter,” who is “all
glorious within” her chamber, symbolic of her virginity, but is also to
be the wife of the heavenly king. Consequently, Jerome addresses
Eustochium, “the Lord’s bride,” as “lady” (domina). He also quotes
constantly (more than twenty times) from the Song of Songs, another
allegorical favorite of the church fathers, as he commends the true
spiritual eroticism of this heavenly marriage that is all honeymoon
and dalliance and no drawback:
Ever let the privacy of your chamber guard you; ever let
your Bridegroom sport with you within. Do you pray?
You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to
you. When sleep overtakes you He will come behind and
put His hand through the hole of the door, and your heart
shall be moved for Him; and you will awake and rise up
and say: I am sick of love. Then He will reply: A garden
enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up,
a fountain sealed. (Letter 27.25)
In a similar letter to the young virgin Demetrias, who has had the courage
to “come out” to her parents as a celibate and to refuse an aristocratic
marriage in preference to virginity, Jerome cites a ceremony in which
a virgin is “consecrated” ritually by the bishop as a bride to Christ, again
citing verses from Psalm 45, in which the virgin is actually called the
“daughter of the king” and Christ is the king (Letter 130.7; Clark, 2008:
11). As has been previously observed, Jerome was not alone among the
church fathers in using the highly erotic language of the Song of Songs to
elevate and celebrate the symbolic marriage of Christ “quite polygam-
ously – to virgins, widows, to men, to the Church, and indeed, to all
Christian believers” (Clark, 2008, 11). Clark cites Alexander of
Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Eusebius of Emesa, Cyprian, Aphrahat,
Ephrem Syrus, Athanasius, Ambrose, Basil of Ancyra, and Methodius as
evidence that nearly every church father who wrote treatises on virginity at
one time or another envisioned Christian virgins to be married to Christ and
to have spiritual intercourse with him, thus being incapable of earthly
marriage and its “contamination” (Clark, 2008: 11–15). Moreover, marriage
to Christ ensured that virgins did not act under their own authority, but
under obedience to their heavenly husband. Like the church, the wifely
body of Christ (Eph 5:25–32), they were subject to Christ through his
representatives, the male church leaders.
To emphasize this union as fully spiritual rather than physically erotic, as
often as the church leaders who give advice to celibate women praise the
disfiguration of their appearance as female, becoming thin, pale, tottering,
with shrinking breasts (Jerome advises Eustochium to bind her breasts
tightly, thus disguising her female shape), they also emphasize the “beauty”
of their spiritual bodies as brides of Christ. In the early Christian world, for
female martyrs as well as for female ascetics, physical beauty, a means of
sexual attraction, was perceived as dangerous to spiritual life. It had to be
transformed, by removing from the earthly body the social markers of
feminine beauty, to emphasize and to develop inner, spiritual beauty,
symbolized by the king’s daughter who is “glorious” but only within her
(virginal) chamber, or the enclosed garden and sealed fountain of the Song
of Songs.13
3.3 Ideal Celibates: Women in the Apocryphal Acts

of the Apostles
The various versions of Thecla’s story show her facing martyrdom, but
miraculously escaping it by the intervention of God, the miracles ratifying
her difficult choice of celibacy. The power of her decision, despite its ability to
disrupt and destroy her household, is iterated in other apocryphal Acts, in
which the choice of the ascetic life is a similarly empowering one for women,
both those who are married and those whose destiny would be marriage, if not
for their choice. In this sense, the apocryphal Acts function as propaganda for
a choice that leads to autonomy and authority, even as it challenges and
undermines existing civic values and the role of women in their respective
societies (Burrus, 1987: 2; Streete, 1986: 154). If martyrdom became a route to
attain the resurrection body and the immediate life eternal through death,
asceticism, as expressed largely through virgin celibacy, was the way to live
the “life of the angels” while in the mortal body here on earth, as the third-
century writer Methodius asserts in his Symposium, which features Thecla as the
main speaker. Praising virginity at the banquet of virgins, Thecla declares that
partheneia, virginity, is partheia, equality to God (Methodius, Symposium 8.1).
As in many of the martyrologies, most of the women depicted in these
apocryphal tales belong to the pagan14 elites of the empire: wealthy,
13
On notions of beauty, physical and spiritual, in the ancient Roman and early
Christian world, see Moss, 2019: 90–113.
14
There is no good substitute for the term “pagan,” which is usually used for
non-Christian Romans, not including Jews.
aristocratic women, who were expected to shore up the state by the most
basic form of a citizen’s duty, the propagation of children, and the raising of
those children to shoulder their civic duties in return. The resistance to
these ideals was written on the bodies of the women who made the choice
for renunciation as surely as it was on the bodies of the martyrs. As in the
martyr stories, the ascetic woman’s power helps to defeat the demonic
powers of this world, represented by non-Christian Roman society, and
to win a victory for God against them. Again, as in the martyr stories, these
women are described as “noble athletes” and “champions” as they contend
for the cause of God. The apocryphal Acts depict the conversion of women
by male apostles to a Christianity that is understood as celibate and which,
as in the story of Thecla, is actively contested by their high-status families
and households. The correctness and power of their choice is nonetheless
proven, as in the case of Thecla, through the miraculous powers granted by
God because of this choice. In several of these texts, the male apostle
disappears after converting his female disciple, either being threatened
with or actually suffering execution because of his “perversion” of the
woman, or else his role is downplayed: in the end, he is simply the catalyst
for the woman’s conversion (Burrus, 1987: 43). For example, in a version of
the Acts of Andrew, a young virgin (unnamed), called an “ascetic cham-
pion,” defeats a demonic power unleashed on her by a magician.
Vanquished because of her resistant purity, the demon instead possesses
her brother. While the girl is told that the apostle Andrew can heal her
brother, he tells her that the demon has already been routed, thanks to the
“holy hands” of the virgin sister (Pap. Copt. Utrecht 10.6–8; 14.30).15
Thecla’s story is perhaps the best known of several on a spectrum of
women persecuted and facing martyrdom for their choice of celibacy, and
those likewise delivered miraculously because of it. In other apocryphal
Acts, married women are also converted to abstinence. An interesting early
15
Magicians are often combatants in stories of the Christian apostles, claiming to
possess power but defeated by the power of Christ as embodied by the apostle,
for example, Simon Magus in Acts 8:18–24. Several tales of the Syrian holy
women depict their persecution by “Magi,” or “Magians,” their Zoroastrian
opponents, who are portrayed as resentful sorcerers.
instance of an elite Christian convert, a female martyr manquée and potential

ascetic, occurs in Justin Martyr’s Second Apology, even though here the
focus is not so much on the unnamed matron as upon her Christian teacher
and pagan husband (Buck, 2002: 542). According to Justin (2 Apol 2:1–20),
a Roman matron (unnamed) described as “self-controlled,” who tried to
persuade her licentious and intemperate husband to join her in a sober
Christian life, could not get him to reform. When she threatened divorce, he
was so outraged that he accused her to the emperor of being a Christian.
When she appealed to the emperor to get her affairs in order before her trial,
assuming because of her status that she had such affairs – he granted her
request. The husband then accused her Christian teacher Ptolemaeus, who
was arrested, tried, tortured, and executed along with two other Christians.
The matron subsequently vanishes from the story. She does not undergo
martyrdom, nor is it clear that she renounces anything except the husband,
a case of the failure of the advice Paul gave to couples in mixed marriages in
1 Cor 7:11–12, on remaining together in the hope of conversion. This may
be yet another case of a Christian female believer being better at a Roman
virtue (self-control) than her pagan spouse. The matron’s resistance to and
rejection of her husband because of sexual intemperance is a pattern fol-
lowed by subsequent matrons in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.
The third-century Acts of Thomas takes the theme of marital self-control
in an encratite direction. In it, the apostle persuades the married noble-
woman Mygdonia, wife of Charisius, to abhor even marital intercourse so
much that she flees naked from her husband when he will not accept
a celibate marriage with her, going Justin’s matron one better. When
even Thomas tries to persuade her to return, Mygdonia remains steadfast,
so far as going to prison with the apostle and her faithful nurse, Marcia, her
own first convert. From prison, she converts another noble wife, Tertia.
When released miraculously from prison, this “celibate fellowship” is
joined by Mnesara, the wife of the king’s son,” who is “healed of
a strange disease” as soon as she gets her husband to join her in a celibate
marriage. Thomas recognizes Mygdonia’s leadership of this female celibate
group by giving her the authority to baptize her “sisters” with “the
victorious power of Jesus” (Acts of Thomas 157–8; Streete, 1986: 156).
In the fourth-century Acts of John, the celibate apostle converts the noble
Drusiana, and when she consequently refuses to have intercourse with her
husband, Andronicus, he shuts her up in a tomb as punishment (perhaps in
recognition that she is symbolically “dead” to him, as Thecla was to her
household). Drusiana does die, slain because of Andronicus’ unrestrained
desire to possess her. Another noble, Callimachus, who also lusts after her,
attempts to violate her dead body. Drusiana is miraculously raised from the
dead by John, while Callimachus and the venal steward Fortunatus, who has let
him into her tomb, are both bitten by a poisonous snake (a reference to the
original tempter?) and die. John also raises Callimachus, but Drusiana, having
pity on Fortunatus, raises him herself. The ungrateful and unregenerate
steward flees these “dreadful people” (Acts of John, 80–3; Streete, 1986: 161,
n.55).
In these stories, which represent legendary embroidery on the tales of the
apostles in the canonical book of Acts, those women who reject the earthly
social and sexual roles that are expected of them find their choice ratified by
God through miracles that both rescue them and give them power equal to
that of the male apostles. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that these are
idealized, fictional women, women being written about by men as perhaps
impossible role models. Just as with Perpetua, Felicitas, and other women
martyrs, they are more to be admired than imitated (Augustine, Sermon
280.1.1), and any claims to authority within the church that invoke the
example of these women are marginalized by church fathers like Tertullian,
who, while praising women martyrs, vilifies as “impudent” any woman who
claims the authority of Thecla to teach and baptize (On Baptism, 17).
3.4 “Real” Renouncers: The Desert Mothers, Jerome’s

Circle and the Lausiac History
As fictionalized narratives about women, perhaps adapted from legendary
material and used in the service of Christian encratite propaganda
(D. MacDonald, 1985: 90–1), the Apocryphal Acts also served as a defense
of those “committed to the virgin state” who by the end of the 200s faced
a new and different threat of persecution: “attempts at sexual violence” and
threats of “condemnation to the brothels” (Brown, 1988: 192). In the ancient
world, “life-long lay celibacy was rare” for women and even rarer for men
(Burkert, 1985: 98). Celibate marriage was unthinkable: it undermined the
very foundation of society by its failure to produce children. Even the
majority of the Christian clergy, as Peter Brown (1988: 25) notes, were
initially as averse to “disrupt[ing] the institution of marriage as they had
been to contemplate the abolition of household slavery,” with the possible
exception of the as-yet-unmarried young. Even among pagan authors, how-
ever, there were arguments for the primacy of virginity over marriage. In
the second half of the first century, the physician Soranus discusses the
question of “Whether Permanent Virginity Is Healthful”; he contends that
those virgin priestesses who are “in service to the gods” are less susceptible to
disease, while those who are overweight and have difficulty menstruating are
so, not because of virginity but because of “idleness and inactivity”
(Gynecology, I.vii.31). Because bodies of both men and women are “made
ill by desire,” permanent virginity for men and women both is healthful, even
though Soranus admits, perhaps reluctantly, that intercourse is “consistent
with the general principle of nature” (I.vii.30–2). Furthermore, it was neces-
sary for those who could not achieve the virgin life to create the progeny that
not only would continue civic life and its public virtues but who could also
furnish support for those who chose the opposite: withdrawal from civic life
altogether.
As Aline Rouselle (1988: 131) points out, “asceticism in general may be
explained by the aim of recapturing the heroism of martyrdom,” but also by
the literal acceptance of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:12, on making oneself
a “eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven,” and Paul’s argument for
sexual self-restraint to focus on the “affairs of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 7.
Adopting their example, “the first Christian writings on sexuality were
addressed [by men] to women: Tertullian’s On the Veiling of Virgins and
Cyprian’s Virgins and Their Apparel” (Brown, 1988: 202). Asceticism made
its appeal not only to men but also especially to women. Peter Brown
observes, “By the year 300,” a short time before the last empire-wide
persecution of the Christians, and about a decade before the Edict of
Toleration made Christianity legal, “Christian asceticism, invariably asso-
ciated with some form or other of perpetual sexual renunciation, was a well-
established feature of most regions of the Christian world” (Brown, 1988:
202). Young men and women dedicated to the celibate life were found
“piled up, like pack-ice,” around Christian communities (Brown, 1988:
192), while men and women alike sought solitude in the deserts of Egypt,
Palestine, and Syria to pursue the life of withdrawal not only from sexual
but also from social intercourse. Withdrawal into the desert to pursue the
life of an anchorite (literally, “withdrawer”) symbolized “total rejection of
and alienation from society” (A. Elliott, 1988: 92). But as the Life of
Anthony, the laudatory biography of one of the most celebrated of anchor-
ites, shows, withdrawal was simply an invitation for visits from lay society
and from other monastics, all hoping for contact with a holy power. As
Brown notes of the Life of Pachomius, the renouncer who may be regarded
as one of the founders of Egyptian monasticism, people prayed, “Send me
a man, that I may seek salvation from him” (Brown, 1982: 149). In Pseudo-
Basil’s Life and Miracles of St. Thecla, the saint shuns Seleucia and its
“idolatry,” living in a cave outside the city, but she is nonetheless constantly
consulted, particularly by women, for advice (even about marriage), for
healing, and for miracles (Streete, 2009: 98).
As the collected sayings of the desert fathers and mothers demonstrate,

however, male and female anchorites and hermits fought their demons
differently. Male ascetics like Jerome were in constant despair about their
inability to combat sexual desire and vanquish it once and for all, even by
withdrawing into the desert. After abandoning the temptations of Rome,
and despite all attempts to mortify his flesh, he expresses his frustration:
“My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting, yet my mind was
burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when
my flesh was as good as dead” (Letter 22.7). On the opposite side, the desert
mother Amma Sarah “waged war against the demon of fornication for
thirteen years,” simply by praying for strength; in the end, her ascetic
manner of life enabled her to conquer him through the power of Christ
(Swan, 2001: 37–8). She even proved herself superior to male ascetics. As
related in the Sayings of Amma Sarah, two male “great anchorites” visited
her, solely “to humiliate this old woman,” urging her not to be vain because
they condescended to visit her. She says merely, “According to my nature,
I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts” (Swan, 2001: 39). Amma
Syncletica describes her battle against the demons of worldly desire in the
same way that martyrs described their contests: “Those who are great
athletes must contend against stronger enemies” (Swan, 2001: 54). Pseudo-
Athanasius, her biographer, compares her agon to that of the “blessed
Thecla,” as she imitates her contests “through her virtue and sweaty
sufferings” (Pseudo-Athanasius, Life, 8). Amma Theodora endorses the
distinctly Christian virtue of humility in dealing with demons: not fasting,
vigils, or withdrawal, the common practices of the desert ascetics, could
overcome them. They tell her, “Nothing can overcome us, but only
humility” (Life, 67), humility being not only one of the chief Christian
virtues, but perhaps one special to women, as Amma Sarah’s story also
shows. In the Life of the Syrian desert mother Susan, the narrator says that
“weak, feeble, frail women” are “mightily given courage [against evil
spirits] and they mock them as a powerful man mocks a band of children
or infants preparing to come to fight against him.” Because she recognizes
the frailty of the men who come seeking to live alongside her female celibate
community, she makes a concession to their inability to withstand tempta-
tion, secluding the sisters from the men. Susan faces demons “in the form of
men,” but “she mocked them, as a mighty man would despise sickly men
threatening him” (Life of Susan, Brock and Harvey, 1987: 138–9).
These legendary female desert ascetics had their counterparts in the
women of noble status who chose the ascetic life but who continued their
social role as patronesses. As Gillian Cloke (1995: 6) observes, the fathers of
the “patristic” age of Christianity (350–450) – “Augustine, John
Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Palladius,
Rufinus, and most conspicuous of all, Jerome” – were “surrounded and
supported by women,” women who were often of a rank socially higher
than that of these clergymen, and who acted as their benefactors, perhaps
provoking them by their very status to write material that attempted to level
these women socially, and to confine them to primarily although not
exclusively female social roles. Macrina, the sister of Basil of Caesarea
and Gregory of Nyssa, the latter of whom wrote her laudatory biography,
was highly influential in the careers of her brothers, including that of her
younger brother Peter, to whom she was ‘father, teacher, paedagogue,
mother, and counsellor” (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, 12.13–14).
The wealthy Olympias of Constantinople, founder of a large monastic
institution for widows and virgins, was a staunch supporter of the church in
that city and also of John Chrysostom, even in the controversies that led to
his exile. Palladius, also a follower of Chrysostom, and later bishop of
Helenopolis, spent a number of years with the desert anchorites in Egypt
and Palestine; in his Lausiac History (419–420), dedicated to Emperor
Theodosius II’s imperial chamberlain Lausus, he writes: “It is necessary
also to mention in my book certain women with manly qualities, to whom
God appointed labours equal to those of men, lest any should pretend that
women are too feeble to practice virtue” (Palladius, Lausiac History,
41.4–5). Among these aristocratic gynaikes andreiai (“manly women”) are
Veneria, “wife of Vallovicus the count”; Theodora, “wife of the tribune”;
Hosia and Adolia; Basanilla, “wife of Candidianus the general”; Photina,
“venerable in the extreme, daughter of Theoctistes, the priest near
Laodicea”; Chrysostom’s own aunt, the deaconess Sabaniana; Avita, her
husband Apronianus, and their daughter Eunomia, “all so desirous to please
God that they were publicly converted to a life of virtue and continence”;
and on this account were “freed from all sin”: the virgin Silvania, “sister-in-
law of Rufinus, the ex-prefect,” who dared to chide a bishop for washing,
even with ice water, because he catered too much to the flesh; Olympias,
“daughter of Seleucus, the ex-count”; the “blessed” Candida, daughter of
a general, renowned for her fasting; and Galasia, “a tribune’s daughter”
(Palladius, Lausiac History, 41:4–5; 55:1–3, 56.1–2; 57.1–3; Castelli, 1986:
63, n.9).
Palladius emphasizes particularly the example of Paula of Rome, “a
woman of great distinction in the spiritual life,” of whom, according to
Palladius, even Jerome was jealous because of her greater spiritual distinc-
tion. He includes her daughter Eustochium, whom Jerome advises on the
virgin life in his Letter 22. Palladius also praises the “thrice-blessed” Melania
the Elder, widowed at twenty-two, who decided to lead a life of renunci-
ation as “a female man of God” (Lausiac History, 9), spending a good deal of
time in Egypt with the desert fathers, about whom she provides Palladius
with information and travels with them in their exile to Jerusalem. Her story
recalls that of Perpetua, in the sense that she left her minor son with
a guardian. Because she had “dressed like a young slave” to serve the
fathers, bishops, and priests who were banished by the orthodox prefect of
Alexandria to Palestine, the “consular of Palestine” tried to intimidate her

by throwing her into prison, ignorant of who she was. Like Perpetua,
Melania sees this as an occasion to use her rank: she may be Christ’s
slave, but the consular should know her true status: he is suitably apologetic
(46.1–6). She later founds a monastery at Jerusalem, and “as the most
scholarly of late-ancient ascetic women,” of whom there were
a considerable number (Clark, 1999: 522), she influenced both of the church
fathers Evagrius Ponticus and Rufinus of Aquileia; for the support of the
latter, she earned the opprobrium of Jerome, who had previously admired
her.
The story of Melania’s granddaughter, the younger Melania, illustrates
the dilemma that young Christian women (and men) of rank and wealth
faced. Was it the higher duty, even if unwillingly undertaken, to raise
offspring for their families and thus to support a Christianized civic life,
a life like that praised by theologians such as Augustine? Although prefer-
ring “holy virginity” to marriage, he says that the “sober mind” will prefer
Catholic Christian women who had been married “even more than once” to
non-Christian or heretical virgins (On Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.4.5;

Clark, 1983: 56–7). Or was it better to take oneself symbolically out of this
world, renouncing not only possessions but also family, in favor of the
higher “life of the angels,” and thus “defrauding even their children?”16
The younger Melania’s parents, perhaps seeing the elder Melania as too
attractive an example, although Albina, the daughter of the elder and the
mother of the younger Melania, herself later chose the ascetic life, “made
her marry a man of the highest rank in Rome.” But the granddaughter,
inspired by tales of her intrepid grandmother, became “unable to perform
her marriage duty,” especially after having two sons, both of whom died,
and begged her husband, Pinianus, to “practice asceticism . . . according to
the fashion of chastity,” with her, or to “take all my belongings and set my
body free.” Pinianus finally agreed to the former, and they both “renounced
the world.” Melania is said by Palladius to have further renounced her status
16
Palladius (Lausiac History, 66.1–7) admires Verus and Bosporia, who spend all
their income on the poor and in support of orthodox causes, thus leaving nothing
for their heirs.
by working along with her slave women, “whom she made her fellow
ascetics,” and in her monastic group included both slave and free, eunuchs
and virgins (Lausiac History, 61.1–7).
Needless to say, many if not most of these aristocratic women’s choices,
however independently made they might seem, were influenced by or
modeled after male church leaders like John Chrysostom and Jerome, just
as the women of the apocryphal Acts had become “spiritually enamored” of
the “charismatic itinerant [male] apostles” (Clark, 1983: 77). As Castelli
(1986: 63–4) remarks, “Treatises and homilies on virginity and renunciation
had their origins in the third century in Africa and seem to have become
a favorite of writers in the fourth century and afterwards.” At least a dozen
of the church fathers, from Tertullian to Methodius, wrote at least one and
several wrote more than one treatises on (female) virginity (Castelli,1986:
63, n.9). Augustine’s teacher, Ambrose of Milan, held up the rather impos-
sible ideal of the Virgin Mary, whose life of modesty, fasting, prayer, and
vigils he improbably describes, pairing her with the legendary ideal of
Thecla: “Let, then, holy Mary instruct you in the discipline of life, and
Thecla teach you how to be offered [i.e., die as a martyr]” (On Virgins,
2.1.7). Ambrose combines the ideals of virginity and martyrdom in citing
the example of Agnes, who refused the marriage that would save her during
the Diocletian persecution because of her “Spouse,” Christ. Like other
women idealized by the fathers, the beautiful young Agnes despises the
beauty that attracts men to her: “If eyes that I do not want can desire this
body, then let it perish” (1.2.8–9). These stories raise important questions.
Did virgin and celibate Christian women follow the direction of male
Christian leaders to gain the freedom of and from men by rejecting the
social roles their female bodies assigned to them? Or did these male
Christian leaders, afraid of the temptation of what they perceived as the
“toxic femininity” of the female flesh, seek to transform their women
adherents into men, or at least to erase them effectively as female sexual
beings? Was it then more acceptable to translate Scripture and debate
theology with a “brother” rather than a “sister,” or even a superior in rank?
Jerome and his circle, even more than John Chrysostom and his sup-
porters, provide a case in point. Jerome’s entourage of aristocratic Roman
patronesses, like Lea and Marcella, as well as Paula and her children Blesilla
and Eustochium, chose, nearly to a woman, to renounce their privilege in

favor of the ascetic life that always entailed celibacy, not simply chastity or
sexual continence. But did they do so of their own volition or because of
Jerome’s urging? Jerome, like other church fathers, prescribed the more
stringently restrictive behavior for young unmarried women that he dared
not give the wealthy widows or celibate couples on whose support, as a social
unequal, he depended. The virgins, however, might be held up as examples.
Perhaps to avoid charges of heresy for proscribing Christian marriage, he
writes, “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me
virgins” (Letter 22.20). In his often-cited Letter 22 to Eustochium, as previously
seen, Jerome urges Paula’s daughter Eustochium against marriage (Letter 22.
26). Paula’s other daughter, Blesilla, widowed at twenty, was converted to
a life of “fierce asceticism,” with a particular emphasis on fasting, through
Jerome’s influence (T. Shaw, 1998: 106–7). Jerome praises Blesilla’s extreme
self-abasement that made her physically weak and unattractive, aspects that he
praised in a letter to another Christian virgin (Letter 39.1). In the same way, the
female martyrs’ tortures destroyed their bodies and physical beauty to refash-
ion them as spiritual “champions.” In his praise of the virgin Eustochium,

Jerome commiserates with her because of Blesilla, her sister, who by dying has
lost both the “crown of virginity” and the “pleasure of wedlock” (Letter 22.15).
But in his letter to Blesilla’s mother, Paula, he suggests that Blesilla, through
the severity of her fasting, which has his approval, and because of the “burning
fever” that would eventually cause her death, learned “to renounce her over-
great attention to that body which the worms must shortly devour” (Letter
38.2). When Blesilla dies, and Jerome is accused of urging her to a course in
which she was “killed with fasting” (Letter 39.6), he turns ferociously on her
grieving mother Paula, citing the example of Melania (on whom he also later
turned), who, when her husband was still unburied, lost two of her sons:
“Motionless she stood there; then, casting herself at the feet of Christ, she
smiled . . . ‘Henceforth, Lord,’ she said, ‘I will serve you more readily, for you
have freed me from a great burden’” (39.5).
Encouraging and envisioning the destruction and eventual death of
female bodies is not unique to Jerome. As Teresa Shaw observes, Basil of
Ancyra urged women, whose sole power over men consisted of their
appearance, to erase the attraction of that appearance (On Virginity, 3;
T. Shaw, 1998: 236). According to Basil, virgins who, “although clothed in

the female body,” have “by means of asceticism beaten off the shape
engendered from it for the sake of the soul, and have made themselves
appear like men through excellence (aretē),” an excellence that could also be
equated with andreia as “manliness,” like the Latin virtus (Basil, On
Virginity, 57.60; T. Shaw, 1998: 237). Other accounts of ascetic women
task them with making themselves unattractive so that they will not cause
men to stray. In an encratite section of the Apocryphal Acts of John, the
apostle argues with a young man who has killed his father, who tried to keep
him away from his neighbor’s wife. The apostle raises the father from the
dead, but only on the condition that the young man will keep away from
“the woman who has become dangerous to you” (48). In the Life of Susan,
“holy and manly in Christ,” a woman who is “stone, and instead of flesh she
is iron,” the narrator tells us that Susan has not seen a man’s face for twenty-
five years, not because she would “suffer harm at the sight of a man,” but
that he would be harmed at the sight of her (Brock and Harvey, 1987: 133–4,
141). Alexandra, as recounted in Palladius’ Lausiac History 5.1–3, becomes
an anchoress and shuts herself up in a tomb for ten years. When the elder
Melania asks her why, she replies, “A man was distressed in mind because of
me and, lest I should seem to afflict or disparage him, I chose to take myself
alive into a tomb rather than cause a soul made in the image of God to
suffer.” To avoid the sin of accidia (sloth), she prays and spins flax (a typical
female occupation) daily. She fills the rest of the time with meditation “on
the holy patriarchs and prophets and apostles and martyrs.” The matriarchs
are not mentioned, but one hopes some of the martyrs she meditates on are
female. These and similar texts are composed by men who urge women to
become men, or at least to cease being visibly women, thus removing the
threat of their dangerous sexuality. For whatever reason, the women oblige,
but ironically they appear to be the stronger and not the weaker sex, because
of their vigilant and strenuous self-control.
3.5 Repentant Harlots and Cross-Dressing Sisters

A number of tales from this period of late ancient Christianity feature
women who have led a life of sexual promiscuity: the so-called harlot saints,
who retreat from society, dress as men, and live as male monastics or
anchorites. Other women, like Thecla, adopt male attire, perhaps as
a protection against attack by lustful men because of their female appearance
and solitariness, or for the greater freedom that dressing as a male afforded.
Stephen J. Davis (2000: 15–17) mentions the stories of Susannah (Life of
Susannah) and Eugenia (Life of Eugenia), in which the heroines cut their
hair and dress in men’s clothing, the first to escape a mandated marriage,
the second after reading the Acts of Paul and Thecla, both imitating Thecla
in their quest for the “ascetic vocation.” Male dress also signified the
transition from a perceived female preoccupation with appearance (an
idea largely promoted by male authors) to the public persona adopted by
males, especially male monastics, who were markedly careless of their
appearance as a means of rejecting the vanity, a mark of worldliness, that
was supposed to beset women.
One of the most prominent of the first type of story – the harlot saint – is
that of Mary Magdalene, a Magdalene far different from the one in the
gospels or the Gnostic writings, where she appears as a follower, benefac-
tor, and teacher (e.g., Lk 8:1–3; Gospel of Mary). In the sixth century, Pope
Gregory the Great conflated her with the “woman of the city” in Lk 7:39,
who was a “sinner.” She may have been combined with other repentant
“sinners” as well, including Mary of Egypt, who, according to her Life, lives
promiscuously in Alexandria but wishes to travel to Jerusalem for the
Exaltation of the Cross. Having no capital, she prostitutes herself to gain
money for the passage. When she reaches the Holy Sepulcher, she is
prevented by a kind of holy force field from entering, but she prays to the
“ever immaculate Virgin, who always kept [her] body and soul chaste and
clean from all sin” to intercede for her and is able to enter, once she vows
“never again [to] defile my flesh by immersing it in horrifying lusts.” The
Virgin Mary tells her to cross the Jordan River, and the former prostitute
lives in the desert for forty-seven years. In an instructive dialogue with the
monk Zosima, who has come to visit this phenomenon, Mary reveals how
often and how strenuously she fasts, in words that recall those of Jerome
about his struggles in the desert but also echo Amma Sarah’s about her
defeat of the demon of fornication with the help of Christ: “Believe me,
father, I struggled for seventeen years with the wild beasts of huge and
irrational desires” before prayer to the Virgin enables her to withstand

them. She asks Zosima to come again in a year, and to bring her the
sacrament, but when he does so, he sees her lying dead, with a written
request to bury “Mary the sinner.” With the help of a friendly lion, à la
Thecla, he is able to dig her grave (Ward, 1987: 56–66).
Another Mary, the niece of Abraham of Qidun, is the heroine of the
fourth-century Syriac Life of Abraham (17–29; Brock and Harvey, 1987:
24–37). Mary is not mentioned as wearing male garb specifically, but she
nevertheless dresses in ascetic garments like those of her uncle, and as
a repentant harlot later wears sackcloth. In this narrative, Abraham trains
his young niece “to attain to the perfection of his virtues.” Mary,
however, is seduced (or possibly raped) by a man purporting to be
a monk and believes that she has lost all hope of salvation, with the
loss of the virginity she was keeping for her “heavenly bridegroom,”
Christ. She establishes herself as a prostitute in a “low tavern,” where she
is found by her uncle Abraham, who dresses like a soldier, not only to
blend in but also to do battle with the Adversary, Satan. Pretending to be
a patron, he asks for the “quite exceptionally beautiful” Mary, raising the
question of whether beauty could have led to her downfall, but as she
embraces the supposed soldier, she smells “the smell of asceticism” and,
reminded of her earlier life, runs away in a panic. To “save one soul,”
however, Abraham commits the worldly sins of eating meat and sitting
on the bed with a woman, but he later reveals his identity to Mary and
convinces her that she can be forgiven if he intercedes for her. Mary goes
beyond his forgiveness to repentance, leaving behind her fine clothes and
ill-gotten gains, dresses in “sackcloth and humility,” and engages in the
repentant practices of weeping and nightly vigils. When Abraham dies,
Mary keeps weeping, but at the time of her own death, her face is radiant,
showing the power of her redemption.
The tale of Pelagia of Antioch, referred to in John Chrysostom’s Homily
on Matthew 67.3 simply as “that harlot that went beyond all in lasciviousness,”
is perhaps “a reworking of a pagan romance” (Brock and Harvey, 1987: 40,
n.4). The romantic theme is combined with “the theme of a woman who
disguises herself as a monk [who] was to become something of a historical
[Christian] topos” (41). On his initial encounter with Pelagia, she appalls the
good bishop Nonnos as he is preaching, when she comes by with her

entourage, gorgeously adorned with pearls, silk, and precious stones: her
perfume alone is alluring (Jacob, Life of Pelagia, 4–6). Despite her beauty and
this shameless display, Pelagia is dressed “almost like a man,” because she is
not “covered” like a woman, or because prostitutes, as public persons, would
dress like men (6). Bishop Nonnos is less appalled by her “shamelessness”
than he is “astonished at her beauty” and is saddened that she is a “snare and
a stumbling block” to others (7–8). As Nonnos preaches, albeit without
rhetorical skill, because he has had no secular education (an indication of
his sincerity and divine inspiration), Pelagia comes into the church and is
moved by the homily that already has driven the congregation to tears: she
herself groans and sobs “loudly.” At the shrine of the “glorious martyr
Julian,” Pelagia prostrates herself and confesses that she is “Satan’s evil
snare,” begging for an immediate baptism, to make her a “bride of Christ”
(18–26). With the aid of Romana, the head deaconess of the church, she is
baptized, recalling baptisms of women by women in the apocryphal Acts
(28–9). Romana thus becomes Pelagia’s spiritual mother. When Satan inevit-
ably appears, as he always does at baptisms, in a last attempt to prevent

Pelagia’s “sealing” by Christ, she is able to rebuke him: she and Romana
make the sign of the cross, and he is gone (31–3). Adopting an ascetic
lifestyle, Pelagia, “dressed as a man” disappears into the desert.
Later, the deacon Jacob, the purported author of her Life, is told to seek
out “a certain monk Pelagius, a eunuch,” who is “perfect in his service,”
living on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (43). When Jacob visits her/
him, he finds that
she [as Pelagia] had lost those good looks I used to know,
her astounding beauty had all faded away, her laughing and
bright face that I had known had become ugly, her pretty
eyes had become hollow and cavernous as the result of much
fasting and the keeping of vigils. The joints of her holy
bones, all fleshless, were visible beneath her skin through
emaciation brought on by ascetic practices. Indeed the
whole complexion of her body was coarse and dark like
sackcloth. (45)
Toxic, seductive femininity has been routed into holy ugliness through
asceticism. Jacob, moreover, does not notice anything about “her” that
would indicate she is a woman, noting only that she was a “male eunuch
who was a renowned monk, a perfect and righteous disciple of Christ.”
Pelagia/Pelagius has become a “man of God” and erased any signs of her
being female. Only when s/he dies and a “great crowd” of clergy and laity
has gathered to anoint the saint’s body, do they find she is a woman. They
then praise God for the “hidden saints,” and “not just men, but women as
well!” (49). Hiding herself as a woman, essentially becoming a man, Pelagia
has thereby become a saint.
Another repentant harlot, Thaïs, is also a courtesan from Alexandria,
“wealthy and beautiful,” a standard description of the women in these tales.
When one of the most famous of the desert fathers, Paphnutius, visits her in
a secular guise, he warns her about the coming judgment, and she immedi-
ately repents, “burned all of her goods,” and departs for the desert, follow-
ing Paphnutius’ example. There she immures herself in a cell attached to
a convent, in the classic female anchoritic tradition. When Paphnutius visits
her later, offering her forgiveness for her sins, she insists on staying where
she is and dies shortly afterward (Life of Thaïs, Ward, 1987: 76–7).
In a cycle of narratives from the late sixth century, the noble Anastasia,
in the tradition of holy fools, at first appears to be a “mad girl” and is
mistreated by her fellow nuns; however, when she demonstrates holy
power, she leaves the convent, dressed in male attire, perhaps confirming
that this power has made her a man. Later, the two monks who had initially
visited the convent and discovered the apparently mad but holy Anastasia
and chastised the nuns for their treatment of her are sent by their superior to
visit “an old man, a eunuch.” The dying eunuch prays that they will not
unclothe him for his burial, but when one of them seeks to put another
garment on top of what “he” is wearing, he notices “women’s breasts,
shriveled up like leaves.” One of the disciples then informs his master that
the “eunuch” was a woman, and the master tells him the following story.
She was a patrician lady of the highest rank under the emperor Justinian and
was also a deaconess of the church. The emperor wanted to introduce her to
his court, not only because of her beauty but also because of her great
virtue. His jealous wife, the empress Theodora, sent her into exile.
Anastasia fled the court to Alexandria, where the emperor pursued her after
Theodora’s death. Again she fled – this time to Skete in Egypt, renowned
home of monastics, where she received a man’s clothes and lived as a man
for twenty-eight years. The narrator said the lesson of this story was as
follows: “See, my son, how many people have been brought up at court, yet
have performed battle against the adversary, battering their bodies, and
living like angels on earth” (Life of Anastasia, 5–9; Brock and Harvey, 1987:
145–8). Like Anthony, Anastasia flees further and further from society,
which continues to praise her as “she” becomes “he” and is victorious over
the power of the female flesh that is a snare to men.
Another cross-dressing saint, Hilaria, supposedly the daughter of the
Byzantine emperor Zeno, fled her privileged life “disguised as a [male] knight”
and eventually joined one of the monasteries at Sketis [Skete] in Egypt, where
she become renowned for her feats of “ascetic endurance and self-renunciation”
(Davis, 2000: 20) and became ordained as a monk under the name of “Hilary,”
presumed a eunuch. Through her ascetic practice, s/he ceases to be identified
physically as a woman: her breasts are “shrunken with ascetic practice,” and her
menses cease (28, n.70; Life of Hilaria, 6.75). When her sister Thaopesta
becomes ill, her parents send her to the renowned eunuch, Hilary, at Sketis
to be healed by “his” prayer. Thaopesta is healed, but she enjoys an intimacy
with the supposed eunuch that makes the emperor suspicious, so that he sends
for the eunuch. In the end, Hilary/Hilaria is compelled to confess who s/he is.
Although the imperial couple are reluctant to lose their daughter a second time,
s/he goes back to Sketis, where five years later s/he dies, no one knowing his/
her identity as a woman until after his/her death (Coptic Orthodox Church
Network, Commemorations for Toba 21). As Davis (2000: 21) notes, Hilaria’s
Life imitates that of Anthony, especially in his anchoritic practice and is
“understood to be actualizing a distinctively male piety” (29). Similarly, in
the Life of Matrona, the heroine “flees her abusive husband, disguises herself as
a eunuch called Babylas, and enrolls in a male monastery in Constantinople,”
where she is “completely transformed into a man” (29). Davis also points out
that the friends who have helped Matrona to his/her transformation are named
Eugenia and Susannah, thus referring to other stories of “women disguised as
men,” while s/he eventually ends up at the monastery of the “blessed Hilaria,”
a reference to another cross-dressing saint (31).
As Davis (2000: 32) suggests, the categories of male and female are
“de-stablilized” in these narratives, perhaps expressing Paul’s claim in Gal
3:27–8 that “in Christ” binary categories like male and female have been
dissolved. In his sermons, Augustine also suggests a similar ambiguity of
identity in the martyr narrative of Perpetua and Felicitas: “According to the
inner human, [they were] found to be neither male nor female” and thought
“women in body,” their bravery of mind “took away the sex of their flesh”
(Sermon 280.1.1). I would suggest, however, that in the case of cross-
dressing saints, female identity is decisively rejected, and male identity is
claimed and valorized as a marker of a superior way of living. These
“female men of God” are performing masculinity. Indeed, as Castelli
(1986: 77) observes, “manliness” (andreia) is used to describe ascetic
women from the time of the Shepherd of Hermas in the early second century.
The spiritual “life of the angels,” as depicted in the narratives of ascetic
women who dress and live as men, is one of women deliberately erasing
a female identity to become male, much as Jesus says to Peter in the Gospel
of Thomas, Saying 114, that he will make Mary (Magdalene) male, that she
will become “a living male spirit, similar to you. . . . Every woman who
makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Fifth Gospel, 32).
T. Shaw (1998: 246) notes the physical effects of strenuous ascetic practices,
especially fasting, on the bodies of women: “If we consider the protological
association of sexuality, death, and the fall with the female, or with gender
differentiation and hierarchy, then for a female ascetic to mortify her body
to the point of unrecognized femaleness, even to the point of sterility, is
truly to return to paradise.”
3.6 Dismembering and Disfiguring Female Bodies

Women martyrs become men by having their female bodies disfigured by
torture, mutilation, and dismemberment; women ascetics become men by
eroding their female bodies through severe practices like fasting to refash-
ion them as far as possible into those of males. If in both cases, the goal is an
“imagined return to paradise,” then, as Candida Moss (2019: 17) has aptly
said, “It is here . . . that our values are most nakedly displayed,” often quite
literally. Clearly, the premier value to be displayed is that of manliness or
manly courage – but why? What could possibly have motivated these
women to adopt this male value for themselves, if indeed they actually
did so? There is precious little evidence from the women: Perpetua’s prison
diary, if it is authentically hers,17 in which she seems rather to morph into
a man than to achieve manhood, and the sayings of the desert mothers
(collected from an oral tradition). Some of the Apocryphal Acts may have
originated in orally circulated tales of celibate and independent widows
(Burrus, 1987; Davies, 1980; D. MacDonald, 1985), but that is conjectural
(Kraemer, 2011: 150). We also have an exchange of letters between Melania
the Elder and Evagrius Ponticus, preserved in Armenian (Castelli, 1986: 62,
n.4). Otherwise, we have the writings of a large number of male Christian
leaders who either dictated these women’s actions or speculated on their
motives and used their examples for men to admire and imitate, lest they be
shamed into being less “manly” than these “female men of God.” If women,
perceived as weak by nature, could perform extraordinary feats of bodily
endurance in the arena and bodily confidence in the monastic cell, why
should not men, the stronger in body and more spiritual by nature, do the
same? To quote Augustine on the case of Perpetua and Felicitas, these

women were the equals of even the “bravest of men,” their male comrades,
“not so much because women should surpass men in the dignity of their
morals, but because even a women’s weakness conquered the ancient enemy
[i.e., Satan] by a greater miracle, and manly virtue fought for perpetual
felicity” ( felicitas perpetua; Sermon 282.3; Streete, 2009: 62). Tertullian even
goes so far as to say that Perpetua saw “only martyrs” on her entry into
Paradise that was closed to Eve but opened by the martyr’s redemptive
death not only to women but also to men (On the Soul, 55.5).
4 Bodies That Save the World

The bodily endurance and sexual continence of these women, martyrs and
ascetics alike, serve as a means of redemption, not only for the women
themselves, redeeming the “sin of Eve,” but also for others. As with
17
On the authenticity of Perpetua’s diary, see the summary by Hunink (2016:
146–55).
Perpetua and Thecla, martyrs and confessors are depicted as having the
ability to free others from the consequences of their sins in the next life and
even to perform reconciliation on earth and in heaven. By transforming
themselves, effectively ceasing to be women in body, the ascetic women and
virgins especially were able to redeem the fallenness of their female sexual
nature and to sanctify others as well, following the example of Mary, the
“mother of virgins,” who, according to Ambrose, “worked the salvation of
the world . . . the redemption of all” (Letter 49.2). While condemning the
worship of Mary by the sect known as the Collyridians, and women’s
ministry in general, Epiphanius declares nevertheless that Mary is the virgin
who remedies the “defect” of Eve (Medicine Box, 79.2–3, 9; Streete, 1999:
348).18 The fourth-century Canons of Athanasius even go so far as to say
that virginity has a vicarious power of salvation: “In every house of
Christians, it is needful that there be a virgin, for the salvation of that
whole house is one virgin. And when wrath comes upon the whole city, it
shall not come upon the house wherein a virgin is” (98.62–3; Streete, 1999:
348). Augustine does not share that view. In his City of God, citing the rape
of dedicated virgins during the sack of Rome by the Arian Alaric and the
Visigoths (410), he asserts that this disaster may have happened lest they
take excessive pride in managing their own chastity (City of God, 1.16–19).
But he urges the women not to feel such shame and defilement as to kill
themselves, following the example of Lucretia, since “purity is a state of
mind,” not body.
4.1 Bodies and Status

As Joyce Salisbury (1991: 29) notes, and as has been shown previously,
“The spiritual power that came with a life of chastity was similar to the
power martyrs achieved through their sacrifice. Virginity, too, was seen as
a sacrifice, a sacrifice of sexuality and personal fecundity.” But to sacrifice or
renounce property and status, one must have them to begin with. Slave
women and many freed or freeborn women of a low social status could not
achieve practical sexual renunciation: an important difference between
18
The idea that the Collyridians are a heresy created by Epiphanius has been
challenged by Ally Kateusz (Kateusz, 2013: 75–42, 2019: 19–51).
martyrdom and asceticism. Even the sex worker Pelagia was rich and
independent (Life of Pelagia of Antioch, 4; John Chrysostom, Homily on
Matthew, 67.3). The stories of martyred women slaves like Felicitas and
Blandina demonstrate that in death for Christ, the “worthless,” weak, and
even “ugly” bodies of slave women were ennobled. In Eusebius’ recounting
of the martyrdoms at Lyons and Vienne (HE v.1.3–28), the pagan slaves of
Christian masters, fearful of the tortures that they saw the latter suffering
and fearing justifiably for those they might themselves suffer, accused their
masters of incest and cannibalism, the usual charges against Christians in the
Roman Empire. On the contrary, the slave Blandina’s “mistress in the flesh”
fears that Blandina’s body will break under torture “because of her bodily
weakness,” but Blandina is filled with such power that even her torturers
grow weary and exhausted. After she is exposed in the arena and subjected
to more tortures, Blandina, “tiny, weak, and insignificant,” is transformed
into Christ, “that mighty and invincible athlete,” and even into a “noble
[eugenēs] mother,” a status that she could not have attained in her earthly
existence. Thus Blandina demonstrates that what is thought to be “cheap,
ugly, and contemptuous” – the body of a slave woman – has become

“worthy of glory before God” (Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, HE v.1, 17).
In the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, the slave woman Felicitas is
taken to the prison when she is eight months pregnant. We do not know the
father of her child: it may have been her master, or another slave. Unlike
Perpetua’s son, whose father is similarly absent, but who is cared for by her
own father’s family, of which he may well be the heir, Felicitas’ daughter is
given up at birth to be raised by another Christian woman, a “sister.”
Because of her status, Perpetua is able to make demands, even of her
captors, initially to keep her baby with her (Martyrdom, 3.9), for better
treatment of all the Christian prisoners (16.3) and, finally, for her execu-
tioners to remember their agreement not to clothe her (or Felicitas) in the
garments of a worshiper of pagan deities (18.5). Even after death, Perpetua
retains her status: from heaven, she and the deacon Saturus reconcile two
quarreling clergy (13.4), she speaking to them in the educated clerical
language of Greek (Streete, 2009: 39). There is no extra-death vision for
Felicitas, and no public defense, as with Perpetua. Instead, we witness her
suffering, the suffering that foreshadows the agon in the arena, when she
struggles in prison with the pain of a premature childbirth, while a soldier

mocks her by saying that she will soon experience much greater agony. She
replies that for now, she struggles alone, but in the arena, she will not be
herself: “Another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I also will have
suffered for him” (15.6). Like Blandina, the lowly Felicitas, in mirroring the
suffering of Christ, who “put on the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7), has “put
on” and therefore become Christ, attaining spiritual power.
Stories about the relationship between ascetic women and their servants,
before and after their renunciation, are more problematic. The elder
Melania may have dressed like a slave; however, as we have seen, she,
like Perpetua, could still pull aristocratic rank (Lausiac History, 46.1–6).
Melania the Younger works with her slave women, whom she has “made”
her fellow ascetics, but are they still her slaves? Did they choose, following
her example, to become ascetics? Palladius, her admirer, does not tell us. It
may be that an ascetic life of working along with their earthly mistress was
preferable to being nothing more than exploitable sexual property. But
Melania’s toiling along with her slave women seems like a Marie
Antoinette – like a pose of simplicity when set alongside the Latin Life of
Melania, according to which she and her husband Pinianus still owned
slaves on their vast properties even after their renunciation and were
concerned that a slave rebellion on their estate near Rome would spread
to other estates in “Spain, Campania, Sicily, Africa, Mauretania, Britain,
and other lands” (Life, 11; Clark, 1986: 77).
Other stories of ascetic women, particularly those who suffered martyr-
dom for their choice, imply equality. In the Syrian Martyrdom of Tarbo, Her
Sister, and Her Servant, Tarbo’s (unnamed) servant, like her mistress, is
“pure and chaste,” a “daughter of the covenant” (Martyrdom, 254) and is
martyred along with her and her sister, ignominiously left “naked by the
roadside” (259; Brock and Harvey, 1987: 73–6). In an anti-Jewish epistle
(Simeon of Beth Arsham’s Second Letter; Brock and Harvey, 1987: 105–15),
depicting the burning of a Christian church, the maidservants of Ruhm,
a woman “of high standing” and beauty, are offered freeborn husbands if
they convert to Judaism. They refuse and are martyred (ix). Another
servant, the “disagreeable maid” Mahya, who is “always very masculine,”
accordingly asserts an unusual freedom of speech ( parrhēsia) for a woman
by going about in public urging Christians to battle “the Jews” as killers of

Christ. She is dragged by her feet, tied to an ox and a donkey, respectively,
and thus achieves status (and “blessedness”) in death as a “martyr of Christ”
(xviii–xxii). Martyrdom, it seems, can be a great leveler, of both gender and
status.
The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles is more equivocal on the matter of
status and gender. We have already seen that the maidservants in the Acts of
Paul and Thecla weep for “the loss of a mistress” when Thecla chooses the
itinerant life of a celibate (Acts of Paul and Thecla, 10). In the Acts of Peter,
Xanthippe, wife of Albinus, “a friend of the emperor,” and thus a woman of
high status, is converted to the ascetic life by Peter’s preaching. When
Albinus complains to the prefect Agrippa that his wife denies him his sexual
“due,” he discovers that Agrippa, too, has lost his concubines to the celibate
life as promoted by the apostle, giving the men a reason to seek Peter’s
execution (Acts of Peter, 34[5]).19 Here, women of higher as well as lower
rank are determined to choose asceticism, to the distress of husbands and
masters.
The Acts of Thomas portrays a triple conversion in conjunction with the

wedding of the Indian king’s daughter. At the wedding banquet, a Hebrew
flute-girl, a woman of slave status who was usually brought in to entertain
guests not only with music but sexual favors, serenades Thomas, whom she
especially loves. On being asked by the king to bless the young couple’s
marriage, Thomas preaches the “incorruptible and true marriage” that
avoids “filthy intercourse” and converts the bride and bridegroom to
celibacy before consummating their marriage. When the angry king’s
servants seek Thomas in the inn where he was staying, they find the flute-
girl weeping because he has not taken her with him. But on being told the
story of the conversion of the “princess bride” and her groom, the flute-girl
rejoices, because she, too, has “found repose” in the chaste life. Although
how this would have been possible, given her profession, is unclear, it is best
to remember that this is a Christian tale in which both royal and slave
19
Concubines, who held an intermediate status between slave and free, might be
presumed to have greater choice than the merely enslaved.
women find and are able to choose renunciation as the only acceptable form
of Christian life (Acts of Thomas, 11–15).
Throughout, the Acts of Thomas portrays this equality through Christian
asceticism. In the Ninth Act, when Mygdonia, wife of Charisius, a relative
of the king, is borne on a palanquin by her slaves to hear the apostle preach,
he delivers a kind of mini–Sermon on the Mount, with ascetic behavior
added, preaching first to the slaves, the “heavy laden,” and urging them to
“contend in the stadium of Christ,” as noble athletes, by embracing chastity,
temperance, and holiness, the latter of which is personified as an “invincible
athlete.” Mygdonia is herself converted by Andrew to the ascetic life and
refuses from then on to sleep with her husband, from whom she flees, naked,
to spend the night protected by her faithful nurse Marcia. Mygdonia’s status
as an ascetic is ambiguous, however, at least initially, as she moves from her
former state. In the Tenth Act, as she is about to receive the coveted “seal”
of baptism as an ascetic Christian, for which it was appropriate to maintain
a kind of fast, she asks Marcia to bring her some minimal nourishment,
“having regard for my birth” (120), presumably meaning that she is not
used to scanty rations and is used to being waited on. In the end, both the
high-ranking Mygdonia and her servant Marcia are baptized as (celibate)
Christians. Later, at Thomas’ invitation, Mygdonia baptizes two other
women of high status: Tertia, the wife of King Misdaeus, and Mnesara,
the wife of his son Vazan (157), who has already been living with her
husband in celibate marriage. Misdaeus and Charisius are utterly outraged
at the work the “magician” has done in bewitching their wives, destroying
their households, and frustrating their hopes of offspring. They imprison
not only Thomas but also all the women as well. In this case, as in the
Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, Christian women of differing ranks are
treated equally as enemies of the public order. The apostle Thomas recog-
nizes their equality to him and to one another by addressing them as
“Daughters and sisters and fellow-servants . . . ministers of my Jesus”
(159). When Thomas is martyred, Misdaeus and Charisius seize their
wives and “afflict them,” but surprisingly, “When they perceived that
Mygdonia and Tertia did not obey them, allowed them to live according
to their own desire” (169). We are not told what happened to Marcia:
perhaps, as Mygdonia’s “mother and nurse,” she remains with her as part of
the fledgling Christian ascetic community.
A more disturbing and complex situation prevails in the Acts of Andrew.
Maximilla, wife of the proconsul Aegeates, is converted to celibate
Christianity by the apostle Andrew, following her brother Stratocles, who
has been converted when Andrew heals his servant. Subsequently,
Maximilla refuses sexual relations with her husband and wants to spend
all of her time with Andrew, her celibate beloved. She adopts a scheme
whereby, acting as her benefactor, she procures a “comely, exceedingly
wanton servant-girl named Euclia” (17) to sleep with Aegeates, who
supposes that she is his wife. The scheme improbably succeeds for eight
months, until Euclia starts making demands of Maximilla commensurate
with her supposed status: her freedom, jewelry, and fine clothing, and she
becomes boastful and arrogant before her fellow slaves, who finally expose
the plot. Using his power as proconsul, Aegeates tortures Euclia until she
confesses. Instead of raging against Maximilla for duping him, he spends his
fury on the slave Euclia, cutting out her tongue, “mutilating her,” and
exposing her in the street until she dies and is eaten by dogs. Wishing to
keep the affair secret for fear of humiliation, Aegeates crucifies rather than
rewards the slaves who revealed the plot. He still loves his wife, but even
when she tells him that she loves another “not of this world,” and wishes to
have intercourse with “it” [sic], he cannot “commit any impropriety against
the blessed woman, for her pedigree far outstripped his” (23–4). Despite her
Christian conversion, Maximilla retains the privilege of her high status,
heartlessly exposing her slave to exploitation, torture, and death. She also
has a faithful slave named Iphidamia, who accompanies Maximilla to the
prison where Andrew is held, thanks to Aegeates’ rage at the “disruption”
of his household, especially after Maximilla rubs salt in the wound by
rushing to the praetorium to tell her husband that she has bidden “farewell
to wickedness, the mother of the flesh, and to all things pertaining to the
flesh” and so will not sleep with him (46[14]), making Aegeates resolve to
martyr Andrew by crucifixion. On Andrew’s death, Maximilla lives with
“the brethren,” a life that is “holy and quiet,” to the end refusing Aegeates,
who kills himself (64[10]). We are not told what happened to the loyal
Iphidamia: like Marcia in the Acts of Thomas, she may be presumed to have
remained with her mistress, but the stories even of faithful slave women are
seemingly unimportant when compared with those of high-status converts
to the ascetic life. The autonomy that the choice of a life of renunciation
secured for women of a higher status as depicted in the Lausiac History and
the Acts of the Apostles was seldom possible for slave women, who were
used for other, worldlier ends, sometimes by the “blessed” aristocratic
female renouncers themselves.
4.2 Autonomy: Alleged or Actual?

One might also question whether or not this autonomy, even for the noble
female renouncers, was actual. Several scholars have claimed that the women
described in the apocryphal Acts and in Palladius’ Lausiac History did in fact
already have virtual autonomy and authority, not only over their own lives
but also those of others, and that renunciation of “the world” ironically gave
them some further measure of control over it. The apocryphal stories may
have been initially told by communities of celibate women, to give other
women a template for similar behavior that led to independence but still
remained Christian (Burrus, 1987; Davies, 1980; D. MacDonald, 1985;

Streete, 1986). Nevertheless, in the emerging orthodox churches of
the second century, as evidenced by the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy
and Titus), the behavior of women, married and unmarried (or widowed),
was a source of concern. Not only were wives not to have authority over their
husbands in the church (if we read the gynaikes in 1 Tim 2:12 as “wives” more
narrowly and not generically as “women”), widows also were subject to
regulation by church leaders. The author of 1 Timothy advises the young
pastor on how to identify “true” widows: older women who do not have
families to support them and therefore need church support (5:4–5). Younger
widows, who may have vowed themselves to celibacy as brides of Christ,
nevertheless should not be relied on to keep this promise. Like the young
widows in Jerome’s letters and the Lausiac History, these may have been
women of high social status, as they seem to have the leisure to “go from
house to house,” unanchored by the duties of other women (1 Tim 5:13). But
widowhood – or even a vow of celibacy – did not for this Pastoral author
provide a reason for autonomous behavior (Streete, 1998).
Without question, a good deal of spiritual authority was accorded to

women martyrs; however, even if they had become “male” or embodied
Christ, they did so when they were on the border between life and death.
They had passed from earth, and their authority as ideals was available to be
harnessed in the interests of an increasingly male-led church, and not as
a reason to give living women authority in it. One has only to recall
Tertullian’s fulmination against the “impudence” of Quintilla for claiming
the authority to teach and baptize, citing the example of Thecla (On Baptism,
17). Similarly, Augustine uses Perpetua and Felicitas as models for men (the
specific viri rather than the generic homines, Sermon 280.1.1). Clark observes
that John Chrysostom, writing about the singular institution of celibate
women living with celibate men – the so-called virgines subintroductae –
insisted that “females through martyrdom (in the past) or ascetic devotion
(in his own day) might be fortunate enough to appropriate some of the nobler
masculine qualities (courage, for example), but nowhere did Chrysostom
indicate that women should be praised for assertiveness or the adoption of the
types of behavior permitted to men” (Clark, 1986: 280). So it seems that only
the anchoritic desert mothers, many of whom, like Amma Syncletica, had
been women of some means and social standing, wealthy women like those
depicted in the apocryphal Acts, and the aristocratic, educated members of
Jerome’s and Chrysostom’s circles, achieved some form of autonomy. If, like
Paula, Melania, and Olympias, they founded ascetic and monastic institutions,
then their social standing, even after their choice of the ascetic life, enabled
them to have control over these foundations as benefactors and patronesses.
Nevertheless, we see what happened when the elder Melania asserted her
theological authority and sided with Rufinus and the Origenists: the Jerome
who had so praised her as “the new Thecla” punned caustically on her name:
“The blackness of her name testifies to the darkness of her perfidy,” or, more
scurrilously, “Black by name, black by nature” (Jerome, Letter 133; Murphy,
1947: 59; Streete, 2006: 202–3).
5 The Bodies of the Blessed

We have seen a number of narratives – martyrologies and hagiographies –
that portray what happens to the bodies of female martyrs and ascetics in
this world, while anticipating the next. What becomes of these bodies in the
afterlife? With its apocalyptic and eschatological orientation, early
Christianity had concentrated on the transformation of this world, with
only vague speculations about what the “resurrection life” would be like. As
previously shown, in his diatribe in 1 Corinthians 15 on what happens to the
body in the resurrection, Paul is most emphatic in responding to the possible
mocking question, “But how are the dead raised? With what body do they
come?” He differentiates between kinds of bodies: the body of a seed is not
the body that becomes grain; there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies,
and so on. His point is that a “physical body” is “sown,” like grain, but it is
raised a spiritual body. For Paul, it is a “mystery” how this transformation
occurs (1 Cor 15:35–55). As everyone, men and women alike, were on earth
members of the body of Christ, the church, so they will also become a risen,
spiritual body like that of the risen Christ: here, Paul does not mention
gender.
In the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, although Perpetua dreams
before her martyrdom about being changed into a male gladiator to face
down and conquer the devil in the arena, the author of her martyrology
later mentions her, along with Saturus, in heaven, clearly identified as their
pre-martyred and gendered selves, their authority perhaps enhanced by
their heavenly status. According to Clark, Jerome, in his exposition on the
post-Pauline position regarding marriage in Ephesians 5, claims that women
or wives, whom he calls “bodies,” will in the afterlife become men or
“souls” (Jerome, Against Jovinian, 1.37; Clark, 2008: 21). Under pressure
from critics like Rufinus of Aquileia and his adherents, Jerome later
changed his position, stating that resurrected bodies would be differentiated
as male and female, together with sex organs that they would not use
(Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 1.28–9; Clark, 2008: 22). Jerome is not
alone in this latter claim: Moss (2019: 86) observes that in the writings of
early Christian authors, “nonfunctional genitals become the paradigm of the
Kingdom of God.” Through ascetic discipline, this transformation might
happen even before the arrival into Paradise. The body itself might become
the realm of the spiritual, even while dwelling in the physical world.
Hundreds of years after Paul, Augustine responds to similar pagan
Roman questions about the resurrected body in the final book (22) of his
City of God, but his answers are far more imaginatively detailed. As
summarized in Seducing Augustine (Burrus et al., 2010: 99), “Seeking to
extend his mind toward the end of all ends, Augustine ultimately directs his
gaze to the resurrected bodies unveiled in the heavenly city. Breathtakingly
beautiful, infinitely desirable, these are bodies to die for, for they are bodies
that will not die.” He envisions all bodies, at whatever age and in whatever
state they perished, to attain the same age, the prime of life, which Christ
attained, in the resurrected life (City of God, 22.14–16). As for gender,
Augustine contradicts Jerome’s initial idea that women “will rise again as
men”: he asserts that in the resurrection life women will be “free of the
necessity of intercourse and childbirth,” essentially reversing the punish-
ment of Eve, and that their “female organs” will be “part of a new beauty,
which will not excite the lust of the beholder” (22.17). While the resurrected
body will be free from deformity, irregularity, and ugliness, “harmonious”
and hence beautiful in all of its parts, the wounds of the martyrs will still be
visible, although any of their missing parts will be restored. Their scars will
not be seen as “defects,” but as “proof of their value” (22.19), just as Paul’s
sign of authentic apostleship was the “marks of Christ” branded on his body
as Christ’s slave (Gal 6:17). Nevertheless, Augustine differs from Paul in
envisioning the nature of this restored body: it will be spiritual, but it will
still be flesh, albeit a “spiritual flesh,” created as it was intended to be prior
to the Fall. The roles of flesh and spirit will not be reversed – they will be
transformed: the flesh will no longer rule the “carnal spirit”; the spirit will
rule the “spiritual flesh.” The goal of the ascetic life on earth is thus
achieved in the resurrection life, lived in the Heavenly City, where no
one will be any longer enslaved to passion, and the desires of the flesh will at
last be conquered (22.21, 30).
Abbreviations
ANF Ante-Nicene Fathers. 10 vols. Edited by Alexander Roberts and
James Donaldson. Revised by A. Cleveland Coxe. Reprint,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1994–7.
AThR Anglican Theological Review
BibInt Biblical Interpretation
CH Church History
ET English Translation
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies
JFSR Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
JR Journal of Religion
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
LCL Loeb Classical Library

LTQ Lexington Theological Quarterly
NPNF1 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series. 14 vols. Edited by
Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and Philip Schaff.
Reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994–7.
NPNF2 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series. 14 vols. Edited by
Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, Philip Schaff, and
Henry Wace. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994–7.
PG Patrologia graeca [=Patrologiae cursus completus, series
graeca]. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–86.
PL Patrologia latina [=Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina].
Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris. 1844–64.
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For Further Reading

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144–50.
Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in
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Clark, Elizabeth A. (1994). Ideology, History, and the Construction of
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68 Bibliography
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Religion and Violence
James R. Lewis
Wuhan University
James R. Lewis is Professor at Wuhan University, and the
author and editor of a number of volumes, including The
Cambridge Companion to Religion and Terrorism.
Margo Kitts
Hawai’i Pacific University
Margo Kitts edits the Journal of Religion and Violence and is
Professor and Coordinator of Religious Studies and East-West
Classical Studies at Hawai’i Pacific University in Honolulu.
ABOUT THE SERIES

Violence motivated by religious beliefs has become all too common
in the years since the 9/11 attacks. Not surprisingly, interest in the
topic of religion and violence has grown substantially since then.
This Elements series on Religion and Violence addresses this new,
frontier topic in a series of ca. fifty individual Elements. Collectively,
the volumes will examine a range of topics, including violence in
major world religious traditions, theories of religion and violence,
holy war, witch hunting, and human sacrifice, among others.
Religion and Violence
ELEMENTS IN THE SERIES

Human Sacrifice: Archaeological Perspectives from around the World
Laerke Recht
Islam and Violence

Khaleel Mohammed
Religious Culture and Violence in Traditional China

Barend ter Haar
Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion

Patrick Q. Mason
Islam and Suicide Attacks

Pieter Nanninga
Tibetan Demonology
Christopher Bell
Religious Terrorism
Heather S. Gregg
The Bahá’í Faith, Violence, and Non-Violence

Robert H. Stockman
Great War, Religious Dimensions

Bobby Wintermute
Transforming the Sacred into Saintliness: Reflecting on Violence
and Religion with René Girard
Wolfgang Palaver
Christianity and Violence

Lloyd Steffen
Violated and Transcended Bodies: Gender, Martyrdom,

and Asceticism in Early Christianity
Gail P. Streete
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ERAV


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Streete

Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal

Violated and Transcended Bodies

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009053372 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: Jakub Grygier/Shutterstock

VIOLATED AND TRANSCENDED

Gender, Martyrdom, and Asceticism in Early

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

© Gail P. Streete 2021

Abstract: Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal

broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of

KEYWORDS: asceticism, concepts of body, early Christianity, gender,

1 About Bodies, Gender, and Identity 1

2 Equal Opportunity: Martyrs and Ascetics 8

3 Martyrdom as Asceticism: Thecla and the

4 Bodies That Save the World 48

5 The Bodies of the Blessed 56

1 About Bodies, Gender, and Identity

martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence, with participation in the

Martyrdom and asceticism are two forms of the same event:

As Mary Douglas (1996: 65) famously observed, bodily representation is

For the early Christians, as for their contemporaries, “Bodies mattered

something that had to be acquired and proven,” by demonstration and

Christians3 even inveighed against martyrdom, the use of the body as

1.1 Bodily Existence in the New Testament

the bodily here-and-now but also with the continuing anticipation of

1.2 Body Metaphors in the Corinthian Correspondence

as metaphor. It is a metaphor for unity: the newly baptized become part of an

1.3 The Discipleship of Equals

2 Equal Opportunity: Martyrs and Ascetics

2.1 Martyrologies and Hagiographies as Propaganda

more often characterized by the private qualities of modesty and chastity.

2.2 Martyrdom and Christian Identity

for regulating several organized groups, including his “punishment

should apply torture to anyone accused of being Christian (thus assuming

proscriptions against the Christians: in 250 (Decius), in 257–8 (Valerian), and

Christian: “Christiana sum” (Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 3.2). In the

“exalted him.” The letter to the Hebrews mentions a “great cloud of

(13.4). Thecla, about to be martyred by the beasts in Antioch, is urged by

2.3 Christian Bodily Witness (Martyria) as Propaganda

hands, in loyalty to a superior empire, the Kingdom of God. Following the

him. Instead, he envisions his body as being transformed into something

Suffer me to become food for wild beasts. . . . I am the wheat

of him (3.1).10 A counterexample is that of Quintus, who gave himself up

transformed into something other than human: he is a “noble ram from

2.4 Women Acting Like Men

identity as a member of a privileged Roman social class, and she refuses to

bodies even as they battled their opponents to become heroic, “noble

in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, is displayed naked on a number of occasions:

The sexual mutilation of women by torture and the sexual

Perhaps one of the things their audience is intended to hear is the

(Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 18). More importantly, her endurance of

irreversible the condemnation of the crooked serpent [who had

3 Martyrdom as Asceticism: Thecla and the Apocryphal

With the Peace of Constantine in 313 . . . the days of literal

martyrs were the desert fathers [and mothers], those heroes of

romance,” “chastity romance,” or “romance novel” (Hennecke and

romance] texts is deeply conservative, social rather than anti-social; their

advances, he condemns her to the beasts (27). Clearly, as in Iconium, so