A commentary on the shorter text of the Acts of Thecla and its new testament parallels

Abstract

The thesis is a study of the shorter Greek text of the Acts of Thecla edited by Constantine Tischendorf in 1851. In 1891 R. A. Lipsius re-edited the Tischendorf text and dramatically changed the principles on which the text was chosen. This led him to support the longer text of the Acts of Thecla. The longer text of the Acts of Thecla was available to Tischendorf, though he decided against it. This thesis argues in detail that R. A. Lipsius has not followed the accepted scholarly methods for choosing a more original text and he has not demonstrated that he has convincing reasons for the choice of the longer text. Dennis MacDonald and others have posited an early oral tradition of the Acts of Thecla, without recommending the Tischendorf text as evidence of a written text earlier than that of Lipsius. This thesis recommends returning to the Tischendorf Greek text until a scholarly twenty first century version of the shorter text is available. As a written text, the Tischendorf edition reads earlier than the commonly accepted Lipsius text, perhaps by as much as almost one hundred years.