Paul's Teaching on Sex Liberated Thekla. For the Rest of Us, It's More Complicated.

On The Acts of Paul and Thekla, celibacy, and sexually frustrated women

When our women's group sat down to read The Acts of Paul and Thekla together, we passed the text around and each woman read a section aloud. In the first few passages we encountered this: "blessed are they that have wives as not having them, for they shall receive God for their portion."

A few lines down we find, "blessed are the bodies of the virgins, for they shall be well pleasing to God, and shall not lose the reward of their chastity; for the word of the Father shall become to them a work of salvation...."

I had already read it myself, and had covered my copy with margin notes. They laughed at those notes — a running series of "Sex? Sex? No sex? ??????" and at least one "WTF?????" at the passage (I underlined for emphasis) where Paul tells married men to act as if they do not have wives.

I was having a PTSD response; believe me, the physical, second-chakra ache of being denied sex when you have someone sleeping beside you every night is profound. I have heard other women speak of this too. It's a common phenomenon, and none of the men I knew were trying to follow Paul. They just were selfish enough to turn their backs – literally – and let their wives suffer.

Here's where I would normally describe what my friends around the women's circle were saying and doing, but I can't. Wrestling with my own feelings blinded me for the most part to what was going on with anyone else around the room. Trauma can cause us to lock doors and draw the curtains, rather than opening up.

Looking back, I'm sure some of the women knew what a partner's persistent rejection feels like...in fact, one has spoken of her daughter's sexless relationship. Others have never conceived of such a problem, or why it might continue. I can't help feel both resentment and envy of the women who have never had to beg for sex from their partners — women who have been married to people who valued their happiness and wanted to share their love physically. Being married to someone who behaves as if they are not married is tragic. It's scarring.

I know what it feels like because my first husband told me, storming off down the hall toward the bathroom after our last intimate interlude: "I haven't got TIME for this shit." He was overwhelmed with work. Sex was taking time away from that. I understood, in a way. What I couldn't unhear was the other thing he said, in a quieter moment: "I can see intellectually that you're a beautiful woman, but I just don't want to have sex with you."

This, after years of couples therapy that did diddly squat. Sometimes, there's just no fix except to leave.

The "wife with a headache" was a stand-up trope when I was a kid, in seemingly every comedy routine. Here's the irony: only about half of the married women I've known have been satisfied with the amount of sex they're able to get from their husbands. I remember my sister-in-law describing how she'd double over with a real, physical ache because her live-in boyfriend wasn't having sex with her. Many of the women in our group are post-menopausal now, and I sensed a broad spectrum of experience around sexuality in those retirement years. Several are single again after divorce. Looking back, I suspect there were a lot of things going on within the women themselves. I can see now that there was a sense of relief that we could name this thing — this issue — and talk openly about sex as a need, a benefit, a blessing.

My husband was waiting in the parking lot for me at the end of the meeting, dinging through his Duolingo. When I climbed in the car, he said, "all the ladies said hi to me today." We chuckled, because after my confession about my ex, and why he's my ex — they now probably see my new husband as someone who brings the goods in the bedroom.

So. Paul.

Most Christians have never really reckoned with what Paul actually says about sex and marriage — not in the Acts of Paul and Thekla, but in his own canonical letters. They'll cite Leviticus chapter and verse on any number of topics, with razor-sharp precision, but breeze right past 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul states his clear preference that people remain celibate, and tells those who are married to live as though they are not.

What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short.From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not.... For this world in its present form is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:29-31)

In fact, he begins the 7th chapter with:

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. (1 Corinthians 7:1)

The Acts of Paul and Thekla doesn't invent this Paul. It amplifies him.

What's unusual about encountering Paul in this text, though, is that we see him in the third person. In his letters, Paul is always presenting himself — the way he wants to be seen, the way he sees himself. Here, someone else is describing him.

What we see is a man going from city to city preaching that the holiest women are virgins, and that married men should treat their wives as if they don't have them. The crowd's reaction, frankly, was not so different from mine. In Iconium, Thekla's furious fiancé Thamyris dragged Paul before the proconsul and shouted:

O proconsul, this man, who he is we know not, who makes virgins averse to marriage; let him say before you on what account he teaches these things." The whole city, the text tells us, was saying: "Away with the magician; for he has corrupted all our wives.

I understand that rage.

No wonder Thekla, who was engaged to be married — and perhaps looking at the prospect with trepidation — found her ticket to freedom in Paul's preaching. I don't think she gave up anything by following him, although that is how she is portrayed in subsequent literature. She gave up wealth, it seems, but she probably didn't feel like she was sacrificing a marriage to Thamyris as much as escaping it.

To understand what she was escaping, you have to understand what marriage meant for a woman of her class in second century Asia Minor. Thekla was apparently from a prosperous, established family — her fiancé Thamyris is shown to be prominent, and says of himself "I am the first man of the city." Her mother Theocleia is powerful enough to demand Paul's execution.

A woman in Thekla's position was not an individual making a romantic choice. Her marriage was an economic and social transaction between families. A wedding for a woman of her standing transferred her person, her body, her fertility, and her labor from her father's household into the permanent ownership of her husband's family. Her role was to manage his home (beneath the strict oversight of his mother and other female relatives), bear as many children as possible, and disappear into his identity.

Her own desires — even her desire to sit at a window and listen to a traveling preacher — were seen as rebellion. We contemporary readers assume Thamyris is angry because he loves Thekla and she rejects him; if that's truly what's going on, then he would be a usual man for his time. It's more likely that he is angry because his plans are thwarted. A rich young man from a powerful family, it's possible that he's never heard the word, "no."

Worse still, he's watching his soon-to-be property walk away. When he drags Paul before the proconsul, he is filing a complaint about breach of contract.

Into that world comes Paul, preaching that the body's highest calling is renunciation. The call that so enthralled Thekla may not have been to asceticism, but to a door, to a different life, to self-determination.

For Thekla, Paul's teaching was an opportunity. For women like me, Paul's teaching is an open wound.

I didn't have language for this disconnect until I started talking to my Jewish friends. They have a completely different framework for this. Sex, in Jewish tradition, is a mitzvah — a blessing, a commandment even. One of the reasons the Sabbath exists, they tell me, is so that people can rest, be present with each other, and yes — roll around and make love with their partners. Sex is a gift from God. To reject it seems not only personally sad but theologically insulting — a refusal of something the divine specifically offered. The rabbis understood something Paul apparently did not: that to be fully human, embodied, and loved is not a distraction from holiness. It may be the point.

My first husband could see intellectually that I was a beautiful woman. He just didn't want to have sex with me. "I wish that all of you were as I am." (1st Corinthians 7: 7). Paul, as we can see, would have called that a spiritual achievement.

I do not.

NB: In the same chapter of 1st Corinthians, Paul says this about sex:

The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. (1st Corinthians 7:3-4)

So yeah. Paul plays both sides here. I wonder if he needed to tone down his rhetoric, in order to keep people happy and not get tossed in prison more than was absolutely necessary. Perhaps he was of two minds. Either way, he thought that celibacy was the more holy way to live, but also thought that both people in a marriage owed hot, steamy sex to their partners. Or, at least good sex – sex in which you both bring your A game.

So, no excuses, folks. Have those hard conversations. Drag Paul into it if you have to. He's already in the middle of this.

This is the first in a series on The Acts of Paul and Thekla. Next up: the mentor who kept disappearing. Subscribe so you don't miss it.