e. =The Acta Pauli et Thecla=, according to Tertullian and Jerome, were composed by a presbyter of Asia Minor who, carried away by the mania for literary forging, excused himself by saying that he had written _Pauli amore_, but was for this nevertheless deprived of his office. According to these Acts Thecla, the betrothed bride of a young man of importance at Iconium, was won to Christianity by a sermon of Paul on continence as a condition of a future glorious resurrection, forsook her bridegroom, devoted herself to perpetual virginity, and attached herself forthwith to the Apostle whose bodily presence is described as contemptible,--little, bald-headed, large nose, and bandy legs,--but lighted up with heavenly grace. Led twice to martyrdom she was saved by miraculous divine interposition, first from the flames of the pile, then, after having baptized herself in the name of Christ by plunging into a pit full of water, from the rage of devouring animals; whereupon Paul, recognising that sort of baptism in an emergency as valid, sent her forth with the commission: Go hence and teach the word of God! After converting and instructing many, she died in peace in Seleucia. Although Jerome treats our book as apocryphal, the legends of Thecla as given in it were regarded in the West as genuine, and St. Thecla was honoured throughout the whole of the Latin middle ages next to the mother of Jesus as the most perfect pattern of virginity. In the Greek church where we meet with the name first in the Symposium of Methodius, the book remained unsuspected and its heroine, as ἡ ἀπόστολος and ἡ πρωτομάρτυς, was honoured still more enthusiastically than in the West. f. The Syriac =Doctrina Addæi Apost.= was according to its own statement deposited in the library of Edessa, but allusions to later persons and circumstances show that it could not have been written before A.D. 280 (according to Zahn about A.D. 270-290; acc. to Lipsius not before A.D. 360). It assigns the founding of the church of Edessa, which is proved to have been not earlier than A.D. 170, according to local tradition to the Apostle Addai [Addæi] (in Euseb. and elsewhere, Thaddeus: comp. Matt. x. 3; Mark iii. 18), whom it represents as one of the seventy disciples and as having been sent by Thomas to Abgar Uchomo in accordance with Christ’s promise (§ 13, 2).[88] § 32.7.