Equal to the Apostles

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

In the East, there is a little-known category of saint that the West never developed, called "Equal to the Apostles", meaning that the saint was instrumental in spreading the Gospel in an Apostolic capacity, saving many in the process. Of these, a vast number of these saints are women, who, unlike we would be led to believe by modern feminists and postmodernists, were essential to the structure and function of the Early Church. They were not priests or bishops. They were evangelists, and their important contributions laid the foundation of the Church in many places and make them extremely important to the Christian Witness and Tradition!

A LITTLE KNOWN SAINT 

St. Thecla was a young noble virgin from Iconium who listened to Paul's "discourse on virginity", espoused his teachings and became estranged to both her fiancé, Thamyris, and her mother. St. Thecla sat by her window for three days, listening to Paul and his teachings. When her mother and fiancé witnessed this, they became concerned that Thecla would follow Paul's demand that "one must fear only one God and live in chastity", and turned to the authorities to punish both Paul and Thecla.

St. Thecla was miraculously saved from burning at the stake by the onset of a storm and traveled with Paul to Antioch of Pisidia. There, a nobleman named Alexander desired St. Thecla and attempted to rape her. St. Thecla fought him off, tearing his cloak and knocking his coronet off his head in the process. She was put on trial for assault. She was sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts, but was again saved by a series of miracles, when the female beasts (lionesses in particular) protected her against her male aggressors. While in the arena, she baptized herself by throwing herself into a nearby lake full of aggressive seals.

St. Thecla in the Lion's Den, AD 600 Coptic Limestone Carving, The William Rockhill Nelson Trust

St. Thecla rejoined St. Paul in Myra, travelling to preach the word of God and becoming an icon, encouraging women to imitate her by living a life of chastity and following the word of the God, and went to live in Seleucia Cilicia. According to some versions of the Acts, St. Thecla lived in a cave there for 72 years. However, she passed the rest of her life in Maaloula, a village in Syria. She became a healer, performed many miracles, but remained constantly persecuted. The story goes, as her persecutors were about to get her, she called out to God and a new passage was opened in the cave, and the stones closed behind her. The passage and caves are still found in Maaloula which became a very important site for pilgrims. After this, she was said to go to Rome and lie down beside st. Paul's tomb, where she died.

St. Thecla of the Beasts, by Hieronymus Wierx (AD 1553 - 1619)

WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT CHURCH 

St. Thecla is not the only superwoman of the first century to be venerated for her belief that chastity was an eschatological category. There are over a dozen women from the same period that the East calls "Equal to the Apostles", who have feast days and are remembered as "Enlighteners of Nations" (Sts. Mary Magdalene, Photina, Nina, Pareskeve, Lydia, Katherine, Cecilia, Sandukht, Empress Helena, and Olga).

The Orthodox Tradition insists that women can, should, and of necessity, must be an equal part of the Church... the only act they cannot take leadership within is the iconographic role of reflecting the Reality of Christ in the Eucharistic Liturgy. Males are chosen for this role, not because they are better than women, but because they are a "place holder" or a reflection of the eternal role Christ plays before the Father, offering Himself up for the Life of the World. It is not their maleness that consecrates, is holy, or is acceptable to God. God accepts all men and women equally into His New Covenant, as Baptism replaces Circumcision of the entrance into His Holy People. It is an act of reflection, of sacrifice, which is tied to the historic reality of Christ’s Incarnation. 

The Acts of Paul and Thecla were recognized at the time of their writing to be heretical (representative of only one person's views). They are interesting, only so much as they express the cultural confusion and imbalances that were occurring in the Greek and Roman cultures because of the debasing and humiliating uses of sexuality as a way to subject slaves, the weak, and people that were not protected by acceptance of an "in crowd". The best way to bully someone in this culture was to rape them... Greek men would laugh and sneer like high school boys at weaklings or "freaks" if they found out that they had been bested by another man. It was a way that "jocks" distinguished themselves and bullied both male and female. Christianity proscribed these uses and freed the individual from the bondage of sexuality as a social weapon, sometimes running the risk of the highly-abused segments of the population rejecting sexuality altogether as a form of "liberation." See St. Barsanuphius, a male-prostitute-turned monk, for a good account of this process occurring in the 4th century. 

The best way to declare the end of the reign of Satan's terror over the human body, the freedom and brotherhood of all humanity, and the end of the age was through chastity. And this is how one of the most sexualized and wonton cultures of history was turned on its head and people stopped worshipping the human body, turning instead to the Lord and Creator of Life, Jesus Christ!