Thecla.  Who, you may ask.  Let's take a slight step and talk women of the Bible.  Why?  A friend of mine has mentioned to me several times that the women of the Bible are often over looked, and she of course is correct.  i cannot recall a time of sitting a church where the book of Ruth was used or even talked about.  Last night I sat down to do some research on all the women that had some role to play in the Bible, I came up with about 53 women.  So, I am starting with someone least know because she is not mentioned in the Bible but she is a companion to the apostle to certain extent and her tale is one of hope and tragedy.  Thecla was a young woman in Ionia who was promised to a young man but when she heard Paul speaking about Jesus and God, Thecla listened from her window above the crowd.  She decided to follow God and Paul and dedicate her life to help spread the gospel to the masses, and to that extent she became a traveling companion to Paul.  According to the Acts of Paul in the Apocrypha, there is or seems to be a romantic connection between Thecla and Paul, so much so that she dons a man cloak and bribes several guards to let her into the jail where Paul is being kept because she wanted to hear what Paul had to say and pledge her life to doing so right there before she was discovered and removed.  I am skipping details and watering this story down a bit because the focus is on Thecla and her deeds.  Theoclia, Thecla's mother was so angry that Thecla chose to follow Paul to help spread the word of God that she sent her own daughter to be burned at the stake, God intervened and sent rain to extinguish the flames and as a result Thecla managed to escape and find Paul hanging out in tomb with others from the city after which they journeyed to another city where Thecla was again arrested and sent to the "slave pits" where she would put into an arena stripped naked except for a single sword (girdle, weapon sheath).  There in the arena a lioness protected her from other lions and even a bear for which the lioness gave her life, Thecla was released and was soon reunited with the woman who sponsored her freedom and would follow Thecla because Thecla was like a second daughter to her.  The eventuality is that Thecla would die a tragic death but left an impact on the lives she touched.

While this may be a very watered down version, the message is clear that because a woman named Thecla held her beliefs beyond all doubt she was a child of God and protected by God and her deeds and words made known.  

So why isn't there a book of Thecla in the Bible like there is for the book of Ruth?  The Bible itself like the time it was written and the laws that govern Jewish behavior is theologically misogynistic.  Men writhing anything especially the ancient Greeks tended to focus on men being the ones who would read and disseminate the information.  Women were background noise, property, slightly higher up than animals and when have this ideology governing theology women get ignored and over looked for their significant contributions.  

Unfortunately, there are no records of the teaching of Thecla just an account of her story, probably partially from the apostle Paul but there are no official records of who wrote the Apocrypha or the Acts of Paul in the Apocrypha.

-Comments are welcome