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Bart Ehrman—among many others—holds that in Romans 16:7, St. Paul refers to a woman named Junia and that this woman was an apostle.
Is this true? What is the evidence for the claim? Are there other interpretations? And if there was a woman named Junia who was referred to in the first century as an apostle, what are the implications?
Jimmy Akin is your guide to this complex and controversial issue.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Some folks have proposed that there were women apostles in the first century—like Bart Ehrman.
BART: But the thing is he calls her one of the chief apostles. She’s eminent among the apostles. Whoa! Ahh!
Let’s get into it!
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Bart Ehrman & the Misquoting Jesus Podcast
Recently, Bart Ehrman released an episode of his podcast Misquoting Jesus titled “Paul Said WHAT About Women? Debunking Misused Bible Verses.”
I appreciate the main thing he was trying to do in this video, which was to argue that St. Paul was not the he-man woman hater that he’s sometimes portrayed to be.
Part of Bart’s argument hinged on the idea that Paul did not write the pastoral epistles like 1 Timothy, and I don’t agree with that, but I do appreciate his attempt to defend Paul against charges of misogyny.
What I wanted to focus on today was one of the subsidiary points that Bart mentions concerning a woman name Junia, who is claimed to be an apostle.
Setting the Stage
Before we get to the key part of the video for our purposes, I’d like to set the stage, because I want you to see it in context, and I want to acknowledge what Bart says that is right.
He argues that in churches where Paul had an influence there were women who had positions of authority.
Now, there’s a distinction that needs to be made between ordained and non-ordained ministry—a distinction that was made even in New Testament times—but the subject of who could be ordained is a separate question than the issue of who had clout.
And Bart is right that there were women in Pauline churches who had roles with clout or authority.
Much of his discussion has to do with the final chapter of Romans—Romans 16—where Paul discusses a bunch of people. For example, Bart notes that
BART: For one thing, he says, he indicates in chapter 16 verse one, that a woman named Phoebe is a deacon of a local church, a church in a local town, Cenchreae, near Corinth, and that she’s a deacon there. Okay? So that means that she’s one of the ministers. The word deacon is the word, actually, diakonos literally means minister. Okay? So that’s interesting.
Bart is right that Phoebe was a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae, which was a seaport near Corinth.
Some might challenge Bart on this by noting that the word diakonos can also be translated minister or servant, and some English versions do translate it as servant rather than deaconess.
But that doesn’t really affect matters, because Phoebe still had a special role of service in the church of Cenchraea. Whether you want to translate it “servant” or “minister” or “deaconess,” that’s still a special role.
Further, we know that in the early centuries there were women in the Church who were called deaconesses who performed functions like baptizing and instructing women in the Faith. They are mentioned, for example, in the canons of the First Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325.
That’s 300 years later, so one can debate precisely what their role and functions were in the first century, but Bart is right that Phoebe was a deaconess in the first century, whatever that role entailed at the time.
Next, Bart mentions another prominent first century woman.
BART: But then it goes on to greet all these people. The first people he greets are a Prisca and Aquila. These people show up in the book of Acts Prisca. There is named Priscilla, same name, shorter version of a Prisca. But it’s interesting that she’s listed first these two, and we’re told that they are his fellow workers in Christ and that they risked their lives for Paul at one point. And they have a church that meets in their home, and her name is listed first. Normally you list the man’s first if he’s like the priority, but no, Prisca comes first.
And here, Bart is right again. Priscilla or Prisca was a woman with special clout in the first century Christian community.
One way of telling this is exactly what Bart mentions: Whenever Priscilla and her husband—Aquila—are mentioned, Priscilla is always mentioned first.
That’s very unusual for a husband and wife pair, and the fact it happens every time they’re mentioned indicates that Priscilla had the more dominant personality in the Christian community. She was the mover and shaker in the family—at least when it came to other Christians.
That doesn’t mean Aquila did nothing. Paul describes both Priscilla and Aquila as his fellow workers in Christ, which means that they were both active in Christian ministry.
But the name placement means that Priscilla had special clout. She was the one that authors like Paul and Luke mentioned first, because she made the stronger impression.
Luke also indicates that Priscilla had a role in instructing others in the faith. In Acts 18:26, he indicates that, since the evangelist Apollos only knew about the baptism of John, Priscilla and Aquila took him aside privately and helped complete his Christian education. So she helped as a teacher, though not in a liturgical setting.
Furthermore,
BART: Then he goes on and he greets other people. He talked about coworkers of his, including somebody named Mary. He greets a number of people who have churches meeting in their homes, and he names the women as these people who have the churches in their home. He names one woman that he says is my mother. It doesn’t mean his literal mother, but he looks up to her as a mother. But, so you can go through this whole list. He greets over 20 people, and a lot of these are women.
Again, Bart is correct.
The Mary that Paul greets lived in Rome and so was not the Virgin Mary; Mary was an extremely common female name among Jewish women at this time. But Paul indicates that this Mary had some kind of Christian ministry. He says that she has worked hard among the Roman Christians.
We can only speculate what that ministry was. It could have been anything from evangelizing to catechizing to cooking for the common meals Christians would eat. Maybe all three, and maybe more!
Paul also mentions the mother of Rufus as his own mother, so at a minimum Paul had a special regard for her, though he doesn’t tell us why.
Incidentally, given the link between Mark’s Gospel and Rome, it’s at least possible that this Rufus is the same one mentioned in Mark 15:21, where we’re told that he was the son of Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross.
Bart is on a little shakier ground when he says that he greets a number of people who have churches in their homes and that it’s the women who have these home churches.
Paul only explicitly mentions one such church—the one that Priscilla and Aquilla were running—though some writers, including myself, have held that the patterns of names Paul mentions in Romans 16 can be used to deduce the structure of the Christian community in Rome at the time by breaking it down into local congregations that would have met in people’s houses.
However, the name groupings associated with these apparent churches aren’t uniformly headed by women.
Still, Bart is definitely right that Paul had a high respect for women and that women could have prominent roles in Paul’s churches.
In fact, they had prominent roles in other first century churches, too, because at the time he wrote Romans, Paul had not yet visited Rome—you can see Romans 1:10-13 and 15:22-33 for more on that.
Paul had met some of the Christians that lived in Rome on their trips elsewhere—like Priscilla and Aquila and—apparently—Rufus’s mother. But he’d never actually visited the city, which raises the question of how he knew the names and relationships of so many people living there.
My own suspicion is that he learned these from Tertius—the scribe who wrote down the letter for Paul and who was himself known to the Romans, suggesting that he had been there and maybe was from there. Tertius sends his own greetings to the Romans in 16:22.
Andronicus and Junia?
Having said that, we’re now at the point where Bart starts to discuss a woman who may be an apostle.
BART: The most interesting is in verse seven, where Paul says, greet Andronicus and junior, my kinsman and my fellow prisoners. This is so funny. I’m reading an older translation here. I just happened to pick up this thing. I think this is the original revised standard version or something. Lemme read the translation that this thing gives me, because that kind of makes my point. It says, green andron and genus. My kins men and my fellow prisoners, they are men of note among the apostles for they were in Christ before me.
The reason I’m laughing is because the translators have taken the woman out of the text. What it literally says in the Greek, as everybody knows, I mean who reads this thing? And people have written books on this thing, but it’s very quite clear what it says is Greek and Andronicus and Junia, it’s a woman’s name. He doesn’t say My kinsmen. He says my compatriots. And he, in other words, they’re probably means they’re fellow Jews and they are people of note. Oh, it just says they are of note among the apostles. So what’s happened here? It’s a very interesting thing that translators have done for a long time. They take this woman’s name, Junia, and they take and they make it a man’s name, Junias, which would be a male name, but the Greek, it’s a woman’s name.
So now we’re into the meat of the matter, and I have to say that Bart is partially right and partially wrong in what we’ve heard so far.
One of the points where Bart is a bit mistaken, or at least misleading, is regarding the translation “kinsmen” in this text. The Greek word that corresponds to this is sungeneis, and this is a masculine plural form. It can be translated “kinsmen.” That is a legitimate translation.
In fact, Paul uses a string of masculine plural designators for these two individuals: Fellow kinsmen, fellow prisoners, even the plural pronoun “who.” All of those are masculine in Greek.
But it doesn’t decide the argument because New Testament Greek has—like English has had historically—an inclusive masculine, especially in plural forms.
I could say “Robert and Roberta are my fellow kinsmen,” meaning that they’re both from the same family I am, and even though kinsmen is masculine in grammatical form, it’s not gendered in its meaning. In other words, it doesn’t tell you the biological genders of all the people being discussed.
It’s like in Spanish, you could say, “Mis padres son Pedro y Maria” or “My parents are Peter and Mary. Padres is the plural of padre, which means “father.” So, “my fathers” or—less literally but more accurately—“my parents.”
So just because sungeneis can be translated “kinsmen” doesn’t tell you that the people Paul names are both men. They are both Jews, but one of them easily can be a woman.
What’s in a Name?
Now let’s look at Bart’s argument for why we should understand the companion of Andronicus as Junia—a woman’s name—rather than Junias—a man’s name.
BART: And the name Junias—the male named Junias—is not a name in the ancient world. Junia is a woman’s name, but translators just can’t believe he’s greeting a woman. And so they call her a man and a man of note. So yeah, that’s bad, but that’s an older transl. That must be the RSV or something. But it’s Greek. This is a woman.
Here Bart is at least exaggerating. What it says in Greek is neither Junias or Junia. It’s Iounian—with a nu or N-sound on the end of the word. This is because in Greek nouns change their forms and take different endings depending on what function they’re playing in a sentence.
Here the word is in what’s known as the accusative case, and so it takes an ending that has a final nu or N—Iounian. You therefore have to infer—or sometimes just guess—what word is being modified by being put into the accusative case. In this instance, it could be either Junias or Junia.
Now, Bart is correct that Junias is not a name we find mentioned in ancient documents. That’s quite true.
That doesn’t mean nobody in the ancient world was called Junias. Maybe some men were, and it’s just not a name that’s recorded in our surviving documents. However, this is an unlikely possibility, so we will set it aside.
Still, the matter is not as simple as Bart makes it sound. Translators aren’t normally in the business of just imposing their views on the text with no basis for it, so how have recent translators justified the rendering Junias?
Well, one of the things that could tell you what the gender of Iounian is concerns the way the word is accented, and the accents don’t seem to have been in the original New Testament manuscripts. They were added in later centuries.
Consequently, there’s some room for discussion here. In his commentary on Romans in the Word Biblical Commentary, James Dunn writes:
Iounían has usually been taken in the modern period as Iouniân = Junias, a contraction of Junianus. But the simple fact is that the masculine form has been found nowhere else, and the name is more naturally taken as Iounían = Junia (Lampe indicates over 250 examples of “Junia,” none of Junias), as was taken for granted by the patristic commentators, and indeed up to the Middle Ages (s.v. Romans 16:7; references omitted).
On the same matter, Joseph Fitzmyer comments in the Anchor Bible Commentary:
The masc. name Iounias is attested nowhere else, but it is often claimed to be a shortened form of the Latin name Junianus, Junianius, or Junilius. If this claim were right, such a name would indicate that he was at first a slave, then freed by a dominus [or lord] named “Junius” (s.v. Romans 16:7, references omitted).
So even though we don’t have any records of the masculine name Junias, commentators have proposed that Paul is using a shortened form of another masculine name, like Junianus, Junianius, or Junilius—which are all based on Junius as opposed to Junias.
And people in the ancient world did use shortened forms of names or nicknames, just like we do today. Today, Jim is a shortened form of Jimmy, and even Paul called Priscilla by the nickname Prisca.
BART: Prisca there is named Priscilla. Same name, shorter version of Prisca.
So while it’s true that—as far as we can tell—Junias was not a name in the ancient world, it could have been a shortened version of several names that we know existed.
Bart doesn’t mention that possibility and thus presents his case against the masculine name as stronger than it is, but I don’t want to blame him too much, because—frankly—I agree with him.
Junia—the feminine name—is the more likely reading here. One of the reasons why—in addition to the fact that Junias is an unknown name while Junia has many attestations—is that this is how everybody in the early Church understood it. As Joseph Fitzmyer points out:
Many ancient commentators up to the twelfth century understood either Iounian or Ioulian to be the wife of Andronicus. . . . Giles of Rome (1247–1316) is said to have been the first to break with the patristic tradition and to interpret Andronicus and Julia(!) as two men (ibid.).
And you’ll recall that James Dunn pointed out that it’s in the modern period that the name has been taken as masculine, but in the patristic period and up into the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that it was feminine.
So, between the fact that Junia is a well-attested feminine name, that Junias is unknown as a masculine name, and everyone for more than a thousand years understood the name to be Junia, I have no problem at all saying that Junia is the more likely reading.
Bart is right about that; it’s just not quite the slam-dunk case that he portrays it as.
Junia the Apostle?
Now we come to the core of the matter that I wanted to discuss.
BART: But the thing is he calls her one of the chief apostles. She’s eminent among the apostles. Whoa! Ahh!
That’s sounds very dramatic, but let’s take a look at what Paul actually writes. And here I’m going to use my own literal translation to avoid prejudicing one interpretation over another. Paul writes:
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me (Romans 16:7, author’s translation).
Now, there are two ways that you could take the statement that Andronicus and Junia were “of note among the apostles.” It could mean that the two were apostles who were noteworthy in that role—so they were apostles who had become well known.
Or it could mean that they were noteworthy to the apostles—that is, they were not apostles but the apostles had taken note of them. As Fitzmyer says:
The [Greek] prep. phrase en tois apostolois may mean “those of mark (numbered) among the apostles” or “those held in esteem by the apostles” (ibid.).
Fitzmyer goes on to point out that scholars are divided on which sense is to be preferred in this passage, though most of the ones he cites prefer the former.
The debate ends up centering on the precise nuances of the word I’ve translated “of note,” which is episémos, but this word occurs only twice in the New Testament, and I hesitate to build a case off of nuances.
Also, if the passage does mean that Andronicus and Junia were famous apostles, it’s rather surprising that we never hear of them elsewhere and we know nothing else about them. As Fitzmyer notes:
Apart from the identification that Paul himself gives in the following phrases, they are otherwise unknown converts to Christianity (ibid.)
So it’s odd that they would be famous as apostles in the first century even though we know nothing at all about them beyond what is said here. I think of Peter and Paul as famous apostles, and I’d even extend that to others, like James and John and Andrew—or even people like Barnabas—but not people like this.
Still, I’m ultimately agnostic on which reading is to be preferred. I can go either way. Maybe Andronicus and Junia were simply well known to the apostles, or maybe they were apostles who were well known. I have yet to encounter an argument that would convince me one way or the other, though maybe one day I will.
But ultimately, I don’t think it matters much.
Who Is an Apostle?
The reason that people are concerned about this issue is that they tend to identify the apostles with another group, which in the New Testament is known as the Twelve. But the two groups are not the same.
The Twelve were a group of 12 men who were eyewitnesses of the ministry and resurrection of Christ. That’s why—when they replace Judas—Peter says:
One of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection (Acts 1:21-22).
The Twelve are among the apostles, but they are not identical groups. In fact, the term apostle is really found only in Luke and Paul. It’s their term. But—among the Gospels—Matthew and Mark each only use the term once, and John doesn’t use it at all. Instead, they speak about the Twelve.
Paul was not a member of the Twelve, but he was an apostle, and so were other people, like Barnabas. In fact, Luke calls both Paul and Barnabas apostles in Acts 14:14. The term is also used for other people. In Galatians 1:19, Paul refers to James the Just or James the brother of the Lord as an apostle. In Philippians 2:25, Paul refers to Epaphroditus as the apostle of the church of Philippi. In 1 Thessalonians 2:7, Paul refers to himself and his coauthors Sylvanus and Timothy as apostles.
We also have references to other, unnamed individuals as apostles. In 2 Corinthians 8:23, Paul refers to his traveling companions as apostles of the churches. And in 2 Corinthians 11:4, he refers sarcastically to a group of people as “super” apostles. A few verses later, in 2 Corinthians 11:13, he refers to them as false apostles, which is a pretty good clue that he’s not talking about the Twelve since he elsewhere says that—in contrast to the Twelve—he’s not worthy to be called an apostle because of his persecution of the Church. So he’s not likely to call the Twelve false apostles.
And in Hebrews 3:1, we meet the ultimate apostle, who is Jesus himself since God sent him as his ultimate messenger to mankind.
So the term apostle has more than one meaning in the New Testament. As Hanz Deiter Betz writes in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary:
The basic definition given by Origen is simple: “Everyone who is sent by someone is an apostle of the one who sent him.” The concept involves legal and administrative aspects and is basic to all types of representatives, envoys, and ambassadors. In the area of Christian religion, the term “apostle” can refer to a messenger, human or divine, sent by God or Christ to reveal messages or to reveal the message of the gospel (s.v. “Apostle”; references omitted).
We thus see different kinds of apostles in the books of the New Testament:
- At the top is Jesus, who was sent by God
- Then there are the Twelve, who were commissioned by Jesus
- Paul also was commissioned by Jesus, but not as one of the Twelve
- Then there were others who we know were sent by churches, like Epaphroditus
It’s debatable which category some individuals fall into. For example, James the Just may go in the same category as Paul, since he says in 1 Corinthians 15:7 that Jesus appeared to him after the Resurrection. And Barnabas may go in the same category as Epaphroditus since in Acts 13:2-3 Luke presents Barnabas as being sent by the church of Antioch at the direction of the Holy Spirit, but there is no mention of Jesus appearing to him.
Still, there are several different kinds of apostles. It’s not just the Twelve. And this usage continued in later Christian history, particularly for people who did notable evangelization work for specific groups or areas. Thus:
- Patrick is the apostle of the Irish
- Boniface is the apostle of Germany
- Francis Xavier is the apostle of the Indies and Japan
- Vincent de Paul is the apostle of the poor.
- Demetrius Gallitzin is the apostle of the Alleghenies
- John Bosco is the apostle of the youth
- Damian of Molokai is the apostle of the lepers
- And—way back at the beginning—Mary Magdalen was the apostle of the apostles since she brought the message of the Resurrection to them on the day Jesus was raised!
So, given the flexibility of the term apostle—both in the New Testament and in later centuries—it doesn’t bug me at all if Junia and her husband Andronicus had been commissioned, such as by a local church, perhaps in response to a divine revelation like Barnabas, to evangelize—to carry the message of Christ to others—and so they were referred to as apostles, just like other people we read about in the New Testament.
And this isn’t just me. It also didn’t bug Christians in the first millennium of Church history, who universally understood Junia to be a woman and who tended to assume that Paul referred to her as an apostle.
To quote Joseph Fitzmyer once again:
Indeed John Chrysostom even said of Junia, “How great the wisdom of this woman that she was even deemed worthy of the apostles’ title.” The tenth-century menology of Emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus records for 17 May the feast of Saints Andronicus and Junia: “having with him as consort and helper in godly preaching the admirable woman Junia, who, dead to the world and the flesh, but alive to God alone, carried out her task” (ibid.; references omitted).
And Andronicus and Junia may have been of note among the apostles that had been sent by local churches.
In fact, since Paul says that they’re his kinsmen or fellow countrymen, and since he says they were in Christ before him, it’s been speculated that they may have been among the Roman Jews who Luke records were present on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:10-11.
They even may have been commissioned by the Jerusalem church to go back to Rome and plant the Christian faith there. That certainly would make them of note among local-church apostles!
What We Can’t Infer
But it conveys a misimpression that stretches things beyond what we can reasonably infer to say:
BART: But the thing is he calls her one of the chief apostles. She’s eminent among the apostles. Whoa! Ahh!
Yeah, that’s too much. That makes it sound like Junia is an apostle in the same sense Peter and Paul are—that she’s eminent among the apostles in the way that they are, and that’s not plausible given the fact that we know lots about Peter and Paul and basically nothing about Andronicus and Junia.
It is far more likely that they had been sent—not by Christ—but by a local church, and that they were eminent among that group of apostles.
At a minimum, we can’t rule out that interpretation, so it’s just misleading to convey the impression that she must have been right up there with the Twelve and people like Paul.
We thus need to be careful about how we portray Junia. I think it is likely:
- that Junia is a woman,
- that her husband was named Andronicus,
- that the two of them were Jews,
- that they were early converts—before Paul—
- and I’m open to the idea that they were well-known to the apostles or that they were well-known among the apostles outside the Twelve,
- particularly if they had done early evangelization work in Rome
- and perhaps had been sent there by the Jerusalem church to do that work.
However, we shouldn’t exaggerate their role in a way that goes beyond the evidence we have.
Conclusion
Now, I want to give Bart credit for what he’s trying to do. Concluding this part of his podcast, he says:
BART: So how suppressive is Paul being of the women’s voices here? I mean, he acknowledges that there are women evangelists, women ministers, women apostles in his churches and in Christianity generally. So I think that counterbalances a lot of things that might seem negative in Paul might seem like women are to be subservient, but here it is. I mean, I think he clearly had women leaders in his churches.
Bart’s doing a good thing by pointing out material in Paul that indicates he isn’t trying to suppress women or their voices in the Christian community. He’s just not a member of the He-Man Woman Haters’ Club.
There were women in first century churches like Phoebe, who had a special role as a deaconess. There were women like Priscilla, who had a strong personality and could teach men at least privately, like Apollos. And there were women like Junia, who may have been considered an apostle of a lesser order. So there were women who had special roles of leadership in the early Church.
None of this proves that they had ordained ministry—which, as we said, goes back to the New Testament—but it does counterbalance a good bit of the material that people use to portray Paul as being negative towards women. And while I don’t agree with Bart on everything on this subject, he is right to try to correct this misimpression about Paul.
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God bless you always!
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