Unforgivable!

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I believe art is the most significant development in human history. It is our means of communication. It is both how and why we got out of the trees. And Who Arted is a podcast dedicated to celebrating art in all of its forms. Each week, we focus on a different artist and artwork to help you learn a little something and find some good in the world. So follow Who Arted on your favorite podcast app. That's Who Arted, weekly art history for all ages.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

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Dan McClellan (1:01)

Go ahead and have your occasional prophylactic passionless sex to keep down the urges, as the great poet Ned Flanders once said about cornstarch. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:22)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:23)

This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:35)

Chilly with a chance of showers. No, things are fine.

Dan McClellan (1:40)

All righty. It is chilly, though, that's not a lie.

Dan Beecher (1:43)

It's pretty cold here in this Salt Lake Valley of ours. I am looking forward to what we're going to this week's show. Yeah, we got some interesting stuff coming up.

Dan McClellan (1:56)

Agreed.

Dan Beecher (1:58)

The first one I was entirely unfamiliar with. I think a lot of our listeners will be entirely unfamiliar with it. It is a book that could have been in the Bible, just didn't quite make the cut. So we're going with some some apocrypha. We're going with the the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Dan McClellan (2:23)

That's the one.

Dan Beecher (2:24)

I think that's going to be fast. And I promise, if you think that doesn't sound interesting, it's going to get interesting. Yeah, buckle up for sure. And then in the second half of the show, we're going to be doing a What's That and The That that we're going to be asking about is the unforgivable sin. Skunt, dun, dun. So that, yeah, Dave, definitely stick around for that because you may have committed it. What if you have? Who knows? Yeah. You won't know until the end of the show. So I vote we just dive in with Apocryphilia.

All right. And this week's Apocryphilia, I said it before, it's the Acts of Paul and Thecla. I had never heard of it. You know, I've heard of some of some of the books that that never quite made the cut. You know, you got your your gospel of Thomas or your your cut. Just just that. I've heard of a few Mary, Gospel of Mary Magdalene. She's out. Yeah. But I had never heard of an act that was that got the acts.

Dan McClellan (3:39)

Also cut.

Dan Beecher (3:40)

So so talk to me about before we dive into sort of what's in it, talk to me about the history and the the what we know of the acts of Paul and Thecla.

Dan McClellan (3:52)

So it's a text that probably comes from somewhere in the second century CE. There's there's a dude named Tertullian. We've talked about him before on the show. Around by the time of about 200 CE, he's talking about this text as a well-meaning but spurious documents. And it's part of kind of the broader acts of Paul. There would have been a lot of stories and texts circulating about the further exploits of Paul, beyond what we have in the Paulian epistles in the Acts of the Apostles. And some people think maybe this is early second century, mid second century, late second century. We don't really have a way of knowing. Some people think that some of these stories circulated independently about Thecla prior to being worked into the manuscript as we have it now.

But this is...

Dan Beecher (4:47)

So one of the theories is that maybe we already, Thecla was already sort of out in the world, and someone just stapled it on to Paul to give it a little more oomph.

Dan McClellan (4:58)

Something like that. Thecla was probably associated with Paul early on in the life cycle of these traditions. But there might have been just kind of stray stories about Thecla and Paul. But as we go through, Paul kind of is mostly on the sidelines of the narrative, but there are large chunks where Paul is not in the narrative at all. And so these stories could very well have circulated prior to the involvement of Paul. So yeah, who's to say which of those situations is most accurate? Maybe they're accurate in different ways to different parts of the narrative.