perseusomega9 wrote:That hypothesis does not seem able to explain MacDonald's idea that sections of the pastorals were a literary reaction to the Paul/Thecla stories circulating orally, especially among the order of widows, as in the gossipy old women that "Paul" writes about.
My response would be to contend that the correspondences so found may also represent that the "Acts of Paul and Thecla" was a literary reaction to the Pastorals.
The pastorals also go on a normalization campaign to bring christian community praxis in line with Roman family values. Hence the encouragement to marriage, women being saved through childbirth, exclusion of young virgins from the order of widows, encouragement of widows to remarry, and forbidding women to teach.
A very male dominated model of the church to be sure. Why in fact was the church under Constantine and following to this very day male dominated? Why was it unheard of that there were women members of the church clergy who could baptise?
The hypothesis explains that the Thecla story appears, like in a romantic novel, to parody this male dominated pastoral model.
The ideal of Thecla inspired too many young women to forego family obligations by abandoning marriages, becoming celebate within marriage, and having children.
The hypothesis attempts to explain that the Thecla ideal was a literary reaction to the male pastorals. Many of the non canonical acts are described by scholarship as "romantic novels", "popular entertainment" for the masses. Using the hypothesis being discussed here, the person who would soon become a the post Nicaean author of the "Acts of Paul and Thecla" had just read the Greek Constantine Bible containing the pastoral letters, and the gospels and Acts, and Paul, and the LXX. His response was to write a story featuring "Paul" in which a key character was Thecla - a "Woman Baptiser", a female "church minister". This was blasphemous! This was heretical! This was totally unauthorised ... with respect to the emperor's agenda with the caonical books.
Do you understand this alternative explanation, in which the correlates are from the Pastorals to the "Thecla Story"?
Those ideals conflicted heavily with the Roman idea of the family as the basic unit of society. Furthermore, by not marrying or leaving marriages, many widows were left without support since their care was dependent on the son-in-law. That caused further disruption within Roman society.
One of the greatest disruptions to Roman society, it may be argued, occurred in the 4th century when Constantine brought in the Christian religion and its Canonical Books as a "holy writ" of a centralised monotheistic state. Let me be clear that I am sketching a political history here. The massive controversy and disruption to Roman society following Nicaea has been ameliorated by the victors - the history of the Arian controversy commencing 325 CE. Our sources for this are three 5th century Ecclesiastical historians, who appear to have overlooked many 4th century sources, now lost.
The first attestation to an "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" (Index of Prohibited Books) is found with Eusebius c.325-337 CE. Prohibited were the books of these vile gnostic heretics. The hypothesis explores the contention that these books appeared during the lifetime of Eusebius, and in response to the appearance of the "Sacred Scriptures" of the canonical books - in the form of the Constantine Bible.
This all fits well in the 2nd century as the church was moving away from apocalypticism (which has no need for marriage) and battling some gnostic systems with respect to celibacy and asceticism.
The battle between orthodox and heretics was made political under Constantine. Until Gnostic literature was discovered (including the Nag Hammadi Codices) all that everyone thought they knew about these gnostic heretics (authors of the non canonical acts and gospels) was taken from the reports and mentions and references in the writing of the heresiologists - Irenaeus via Eusebius, etc, etc, etc. Can we expect the orthodoxy to represent their worst enemies (the heretics) without any conflict of interests? Not likely. The orthodoxy seems to have written pseudo-historical polemic against all the heretics.
The idea being explored is that the heretics and their books "suddenly appeared" in reaction to the status and appearance of the Constantine Bible.
So if you grant the pastorals could be written in the 1st-2nd century, how does your 4th century literary reaction idea explain the Paul/Thecla stories?
The correspondences are two way as outlined above. One is dependent upon the other - but in which order [chronologically]?
It may be argued that the story of Thecla appears as a reaction to the male dominated pastoral messages, and Acts, and Paul and the Gospels. But the story of Thecla is not alone, because the heretic gnostics wrote many gospels and many acts and many apocalyses and indeed "Letters". We need to study all of them in order to evaluate the idea that all of them were a reaction to the Constantine Bible, in Greek, after c.325 CE. Many of these non canonical stories are described as "Greek romance novels".