The ''Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla'' () is a

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

hagiography A hagiography (; ) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian ...

Thecla Thecla (, ) was a saint of the early Christian Church, and a reported follower of Paul the Apostle. The earliest record of her life comes from the ancient apocryphal '' Acts of Paul and Thecla''. Church tradition The ''Acts of Paul and Thecla ...

, the reputed follower of

Paul of Tarsus Paul, also named Saul of Tarsus, commonly known as Paul the Apostle and Saint Paul, was a Apostles in the New Testament, Christian apostle ( AD) who spread the Ministry of Jesus, teachings of Jesus in the Christianity in the 1st century, first ...

. The text was composed between 445 and 474.Jacobs, Andrew S., "Life and Miracles of Thecla", North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature, February 2024
/ref> It consists of two books, the first a biography and the second an account of 46 posthumous

miracle A miracle is an event that is inexplicable by natural or scientific lawsOne dictionary define"Miracle"as: "A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divi ...

s wrought by Thecla. The ''Life'' is an expansion of the earlier Greek ''Acts of Thecla''. The full ''Life and Miracles'' is about ten times longer than the ''Acts''. The ''Life'' circulated independently of the ''Miracles'', but the ''Miracles'' was always transmitted with the ''Life''. There are a total of twelve

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s of the ''Life'', but only four of those include the ''Miracles''. The manuscripts that include the ''Miracles'' are: *Vaticanus gr. 1667 (10th century), which is lacunose *Mosquensis synod 26 (11th century) *Atheniensis 2095 (12th century), which is in the best condition *Vaticanus gr. 1853 (10th century), a

palimpsest In textual studies, a palimpsest () is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid ski ...

with only fragments of the ''Life and Miracles'' "The Miracles give some vivid slices of life in and around the shrine of Hagia Thekla in the last third of the fifth century." The ''Life and Miracles'' is an anonymous work written in

Seleucia Seleucia (; ), also known as or or Seleucia ad Tigrim, was a major Mesopotamian city, located on the west bank of the Tigris River within the present-day Baghdad Governorate in Iraq. It was founded around 305 BC by Seleucus I Nicator as th ...

. In the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

, it was usually attributed to Bishop

Basil of Seleucia Basil of Seleucia was a Roman Bishop and ecclesiastical writer. He was archbishop of Seleucia ad Calycadnum by 448. He condemned Eutyches in the year 448, "acquiesced" while "rehabilitating" at the Latrocinium in 449, "but recanted and signed" th ...

, a contemporary of the actual author.''

Patrologia Graeca The ''Patrologia Graeca'' (''PG'', or ''Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca'') is an edited collection of writings by the Church Fathers and various secular writers, in the Greek language. It consists of 161 volumes produced in 1857–18 ...

'', LXXXV, 477-618. This may have been based on the remark by

Photios Photius I of Constantinople (, ''Phōtios''; 815 – 6 February 893), also spelled ''Photius''Fr. Justin Taylor, essay "Canon Law in the Age of the Fathers" (published in Jordan Hite, T.O.R., and Daniel J. Ward, O.S.B., "Readings, Cases, Mate ...

in the 9th century that Basil wrote an verse account of the deeds of Thecla. As the ''Life and Miracles'' is prose, it cannot be the work mentioned. In fact, the author remarks that Basil excommunicated him for a time. Nevertheless, he is still often known as Pseudo-Basil of Seleucia. __NOTOC__

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