As Roman authorities planned to execute her in a stadium filled with spectators, the pious Christian virgin Thecla, who had been serving as a missionary companion to the Apostle Paul, was prepared to meet her Lord. Remembering that she had not yet been baptized (as delaying the ritual was then a common practice), she determined that now was the moment. As the soldiers cast her into a pool of man-eating seals, Thecla baptized herself! And immediately upon coming back up from the baptismal water, there was a flash which electrocuted and killed all of the seals. Thecla was saved (in multiple senses)! Or so we read in the apocryphal Acts of Paul (II.25), a Christian romance written toward the end of the 2nd century. Although the actions of Thecla, Paul, and other characters in the text strain credulity, the text was enormously popular in Antiquity and Thecla is revered as a saint, especially in the Greek East to this day. John Hamer of Toronto Centre Place will review the Acts of Paul and look at what it can teach us about Proto-Orthodox Christianity as it developed in the 2nd century.