# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S172
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

172 From the Ecclesiastical Present.

virgins and about Theodotus, who had stolen their bodies and then, unmoved as a rock in the sea, had suffered unspeakable torments unto death. They also told him of the wonder concerning his body, and how they had been charged, for the Christians' sake, to guard it. Then Fronto perceived that this was the holy Theodotus himself, thanked God, and asked his aid for his undertaking. Löhe's account grows shorter here. He does not say that Fronto made the guards drunk, but only "that the guards had fallen asleep after copious wine-drinking." He passes over in silence that the she-ass, on which Fronto loaded the martyr's head and trunk, went alone, led by an angel, along trackless paths to the place called Malus — Fronto, he says, "let the she-ass go on ahead of him, in all quiet, back into the fortress of Malus." It seems as if neither Fronto's action nor the concluding wonder with the she-ass had found his approval. But by what right — seeing that at everything earlier, to which the wondrous close of the tale fits perfectly, he took no offense? We call this a principle-less and arbitrary selectiveness, and hold, moreover, that one need not pay homage to a narrow, unbelieving Protestantism in order to become uneasy at such a lavishing of wonders for the purpose of rescuing the relics of the saints.

It is a remark as often made as it is correct, that from the apocryphal reports about the life of Christ and of the saints of the New Testament one can learn the difference between these apocryphal wonder-tales and the New Testament ones, and thereby be convinced of the truth of the latter. We fear that the sense for this difference — and let us confess it openly — the joyful certainty of faith in the truth of the evangelical reports, must perish where one can retell legends like that of Theodotus and the seven virgins without wishing to let any doubt arise as to their credibility.

Things stand similarly with Thecla, the holy disciple of Paul (p. 278). It is true that "the greatest fathers of the church, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, etc." speak very approvingly of Thecla's example. And we, too, are not minded, with Ittig, to hold the story of Thecla for a pure fable. But to narrate her life-course as Löhe does, one must go back to acts of the martyrs which Löhe himself admits are not genuine. And yet he tells it, speaking of that "which deserves belief and has been attested from ancient times." The testimonies of the above-named church fathers cannot be used to establish the historical kernel of the legend: they lie too far removed, or say too little, or themselves rest on the invented narrative of the Acts. So Löhe himself has, presumably, "with a discerning mind," selected out the "attested" part. But with what certainty can one distinguish genuine from spurious at all in a narrative that grounds Thecla's conversion to a virginal life on a speech of Paul's, whose most essential part is a