Recent scholarship on the Pastoral Epistles shows that they are addressing several controversies. The author, on one hand, claims to be the legitimate heir to a long-standing Pauline tradition and, on the other, he seeks to advance a doctrine that provides important information about gender roles at the beginning of Christianity. The present article, drawing on Mary Douglas' theory on the relationship between the social and the physical body, compares the gender ideals contained in the Pastoral Letters with those in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla.