The Girl Who Baptized Herself

This riveting exploration of a buried, nearly erased, and still discounted first-century scripture reveals that the foundation of Christianity is far more radical and embracing of personal and collective change than we are often led to believe.

In the middle of the first century, in Roman occupied Turkey, a seventeen-year-old girl named Thecla is sentenced to burn at the stake for refusing to marry. Thecla, who had overheard the apostle Paul share stories about Christ from her bedroom window, finds her life turned inside out. She transforms through seven spiritual stages, and by the end, Thecla inspires an entire arena of women to join in her efforts of saving herself. And when Thecla’s free, the scripture reads, “the women all cried out in a loud voice, as if from one mouth.”

This is the story at the heart of The Acts of Paul and Thecla, and when Meggan Watterson, a Harvard-trained feminist theologian, first encountered it in seminary, she felt like she had finally found the most personally relevant and liberating piece of scripture. For Watterson, Thecla’s refusal to marry has everything to do with power, and how she went about reclaiming authority at a time when she wasn’t free to do so. Here, finally, was a scripture that read like an ancient template for finding our own source of power within– a power that, rather than perpetuating the relentless pursuit of trying to fulfill the expectations of others, encourages us to know the truth of who we are.

The Acts of Paul and Thecla, along with scriptures like The Gospel of Mary, were excluded from the formation of the New Testament and ordered to be destroyed by the church fathers. In this revelatory new book, Watterson uncovers why. Chapter by fiery chapter, Watterson synthesizes scripture, memoir, and politics to pass the mic from the Christian right. What emerges is a story that has been left out of the canon for far too long, one that follows a girl freeing herself from a path that made her feel unworthy. A story that shows us when someone with no apparent power in the world claims a more ultimate power from within, they can become what others once deemed impossible.