The core of the dissertation concerns the first critical edition of the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Passio Theclae or passion of Saint Thecla, also known as the originally apocryphal acts of apostle Paul and his female pupil Saint Thecla (APTh, or BHG 1710). This text was written in Greek towards the end of the second century: its popularity throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is reflected in the abundance of extant Greek manuscript copies, and the many paraphrases and additional texts based on this Passio.
Only a selection of this corpus in Greek has been translated into Old Church Slavonic, namely the original Passio BHG 1710 and the alternative ending BHG 1713e, together with the additional miracula BHG 1718m and 1718n, in Palaeoslavic studies referred to as the Passio BHBS 1a (Ivanova 2008: 221) and its second version 1b, accompanied by the miracula BHBS 3, 0 and 2 (Ivanova 2008: 222-223). This entire hagiographical corpus dedicated to Saint Thecla has most likely been translated as a whole at the same moment in time, although this hypothesis cannot be confirmed entirely because of lacking evidence and a gaping hiatus in data from that period, that is, from 893 until 969.
This translated Passio has been preserved in forty-seven manuscripts, dating from the eleventh until seventeenth centuries and presenting different Church Slavonic spellings. Only six of them are known to the broader scholarly community through diplomatic editions, and digital reproductions are available online of an additional six manuscripts. No attempt has yet been made to provide a critical edition of this text: with this dissertation, I aim to fill this gap in the scholarly investigation of Saint Thecla.