Life and Miracles of Thekla

The Life and Miracles of Thekla offers a unique view on the reception of classical and early Christian literature in Late Antiquity. This study examines the Life and Miracles as an intricate example of Greek writing and attempts to situate the work amidst a wealth of similar literary forms from the classical world. The first half of the Life and Miracles is an erudite paraphrase of the famous second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla. The second half is a collection of forty-six miracles that Thekla worked before and during the composition of the collection.This study represents a detailed investigation into the literary character of this ambitious Greek work from Late Antiquity.

A revision of Fitzgerald Johnson’s Oxford thesis, this volume contributes significantly to recent scholarship on early Christian Thekla devotion by treating the afterlife of the Acts of Thekla through the “crowning jewel of Thecla devotion in late antiquity”—the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla (LM)...Throughout, Fitzgerald Johnson points us to the interplay between the anonymous author of the LM and the figure of Thekla, and, in so doing, he reminds his readers that “text and cult mutually interacted to the point that there is no way today to separate them without doing damage to the surviving record.” In Fitzgerald Johnson’s important study, the LM provides a window onto that complex historical web of narrative production and ritual devotion.

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Postclassical and Byzantine Greek in the Classics Department at Georgetown University.