I quote from Turner’s review of Ramsay’s _Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170_: “The Acts of Paul and Thecla do not . . . come to us . . . in the best of company . . . and contain all the marks which characterize this whole class of forgeries.” He then refers to mistakes in the place names of the Bodleian copy and the belittling of marriage which betrays the author of this manuscript as a Gnostic or Essene; “and yet . . . the details have probability . . . and it is doubtful . . . how far it is possible to disentangle the original matter from . . . recasts.” It was on Paul’s first missionary journey (Acts XIII, 51). He was following the Roman Road of Augustus and branched to Iconium. He is described as “small, bald and bow-legged, with close-meeting eyebrows and long nose, but graceful, gracious and radiant.” Ramsay accepts this description of Paul in the Thecla legends. At Iconium, his host was the Onesiphorus, mentioned in his letters, and he was pestered by the frantic jealousy of the Demas and Hermogenes, also mentioned in his letters. Paul was accused of causing friction between man and woman; and he was scourged and expelled from the city. There follows the story much as I have given it here, with long details and repetitions and embellishments left out. When Nero used the bodies of Christians as torches for his pleasure gardens and a Herod daughter had to flee from an old satyr, whom her dowry had bought—it is a pretty sound inference without any legendary exaggeration that a young girl, who joined the despised Christians and refused to marry her lover, would be treated without mercy in an age so sensual that sex had become an untellable part of religious worship. And now we come to one of the proofs that Thecla was more than legend. The _grande dame_ who adopted her is variously named Trifina, Trefina, Tryphæna of the house of Polemon (date of reign 37 B.C. to 63 A.D.). It was to one of the Kings of the house that Bernice was the second time married and from whom she fled to Jerusalem. He was a converted pagan to the Jewish faith, probably to get Bernice’s dowry. The Herod daughters were half Arab, but they were also half of the Jewish high-priest blood; and union with what one historian calls “these half-breed brutes” proved too strong for even Herod blood. Trefina was daughter of a Polemon from 44 A.D. to 63 A.D. This Polemon’s wife had been a first cousin to the Emperor Claudius and ruled over Pontus jointly with her son till about 40 A.D., when she retired. Her daughter had died, and the query is—was her son the man who married Bernice; or had Trefina’s husband discarded her and married Bernice? Her son was reigning at the time she passed through Iconium. Her dead daughter’s name is given as Falconilla, the same as in the legend of Thecla. To know the type of the vice of this house one must read Apollonius’ _Life_.