An apostle unmade by an accent mark. The masculine name invented to hold her place has never been found in any ancient document, which makes the erasure the best surviving evidence of what was erased.
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Romans 16:7. Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.
Paul's greeting states four things about her and none of them is incidental. She is his kin, συγγενεῖς, a fellow Jew and possibly literal family. She was imprisoned with him, which means she was arrested for the gospel. She was in Christ before he was, which makes her an earlier convert than the apostle to the Gentiles. And she is ἐπίσημοι ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις, prominent among the apostles. This is not a minor figure receiving a courtesy greeting; this is a woman Paul names as his predecessor, his fellow prisoner, and outstanding within the apostolic circle he belonged to.
[See PAUL OF TARSUS · GREAT HOST]
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TWELVE CENTURIES OF RECOGNITION
The church fathers knew exactly who Junia was.
John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, who was no friend to women in leadership, wrote that to be an apostle is something great, but to be outstanding among the apostles is a wonderful song of praise, and asked how great the devotion of this woman must be that she should be counted worthy of the appellation of apostle. What astonishes Chrysostom is not that a woman could be called apostle but that she achieved distinction among them, which means her sex was not the question and her excellence was the marvel.
Origen of Alexandria read the name as feminine. Jerome, translating the Vulgate, rendered it feminine. Theodoret of Cyr wrote that Paul says they are men and women of note, not among the pupils but among the teachers, and not among the ordinary teachers but among the apostles. Hatto of Vercelli, Theophylact and Peter Abelard all read a woman. For twelve hundred years, every witness who commented on Romans 16:7 understood Junia to be a woman and an apostle.
The one complication a careful reader will raise is Origen, because a late branch of the manuscript tradition of Rufinus's Latin version of his commentary carries the masculine. That reading is not Origen's. It is the same emendation arriving later in the transmission of a text that elsewhere reads the feminine, which makes it evidence of the erasure and not evidence against the unanimity.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS · VOCABULARY FORENSICS]
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THE ERASURE
Then something changed, and the change is datable.
In the thirteenth century Giles of Rome becomes the first named author to describe Junia as male. No explanation is given and no manuscript evidence is cited. In 1512 Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples renders the name masculine, though the Latin text in front of him showed the feminine form. Luther's German rendering treats the name as masculine, and the continental translations begin to follow. In 1881 the English Revised Version introduces Junias into English, breaking from the King James tradition of Junia.
Then the scholarly apparatus itself turns. The Nestle Greek New Testament had printed the feminine from its first edition in 1898. In 1927 the thirteenth edition changed the accent to the masculine without any new manuscript evidence, and for seventy-one years the standard scholarly Greek text presented a name that had never existed in any ancient document. The 1998 corrected printing of the twenty-seventh edition restored the feminine, acknowledging what the manuscripts had always said.
[See THE ESTABLISHMENT]
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THE NAME THAT NEVER EXISTED
The masculine Ἰουνιᾶς has never been found in any Greek or Roman document from antiquity. Not once.
The feminine Junia is common and it is everywhere: attested in Ephesus, Didyma, Lydia, Troas, Bithynia and Rome in the first century, and running to hundreds of instances across the Latin record. Rena Pederson's database searches return that abundance on one side and nothing on the other. Gordon Fee makes the same finding for Roman literature: there is no reference in it to a Latin name Junias.
Two defenses have been offered. The contraction theory holds that Junias is a shortened form of Junianus, and it fails on the mechanics of Greek contraction, which drops the ending rather than replacing it with a different one, so that Junianus would yield Junian and not Junias. The Hebrew theory, argued by Al Wolters in 2008, holds that Ἰουνιᾶς represents the Hebrew name Yeḥunni; it requires a translation pattern with no parallel examples, and it requires assuming that Paul greeted a Hebrew-named man with a name identical to the commonest Latin woman's name in the empire.
Both defenses share one shape: invent what does not exist in order to explain away what does. The name Junias was created to solve a theological problem, and the problem was a female apostle.
[See AUTHENTEIN · TESHUQAH]
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THE ACCENT
The Greek manuscripts present ΙΟΥΝΙΑΝ, in capitals, without accents, because ancient manuscripts did not use them. That string can bear two accentuations. Ἰουνίαν, with the acute, is the accusative of the feminine Ἰουνία. Ἰουνιᾶν, with the circumflex, would be the accusative of a hypothetical masculine Ἰουνιᾶς. The whole of the case turns on which mark belongs there.
Accents were not added to Greek manuscripts until the ninth century, so the question is what the people who actually knew Greek understood the name to be. The accented manuscripts answer it: where the accent appears, it is the feminine acute, and the masculine circumflex enters not through the manuscript tradition but through the printed editions that come after Giles of Rome. Every church father who commented on the verse read a woman. The Latin Vulgate translated a woman. Every ancient version treated the name as the common Roman woman's name it was.
Which locates the corruption precisely. It is not that the ancient evidence is ambiguous and the moderns resolved it. It is that the ancient evidence is unanimous and the moderns overrode it.
[See MEASUREMENT CUT · KEPHALĒ]
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THE SECOND ERASURE
When the feminine name became undeniable, a second line of defense opened on her office.
The Greek is ἐπίσημοι ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις. The inclusive reading is prominent among the apostles, which makes them apostles and distinguished ones. The exclusive reading is well known to the apostles, which makes them not apostles at all but merely known to some. The English versions split on exactly this line: the ESV prints well known to the apostles, the NRSV prints prominent among the apostles.
The grammar does not split evenly. J. B. Lightfoot held that the natural rendering makes them apostles. Aida Besançon Spencer notes that the preposition ἐν carries the sense of within. F. F. Bruce read them as notable members of the apostolic circle. And Chrysostom, a native Greek speaker hostile to women in leadership, marvelled at her distinction among the apostles rather than reaching for the exclusive reading, which he would have seized had it been available to him. The Burer and Wallace study of 2001 that supports the exclusive reading has been challenged for circular method, for setting the patristic testimony aside, and for special pleading around its grammatical parallels.
When changing her name failed, the operation changed what apostle means when the word is applied to her.
[See EZER K'NEGDO · PHOEBE]
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WHAT APOSTLE MEANT
The last retreat is that apostle had a broader sense: messenger, missionary, sent one. That is true, and Paul does use ἀπόστολος in at least two senses, the Twelve who were disciples of Jesus and the commissioned missionaries and founders of assemblies.
The retreat proves too much. Paul calls himself an apostle in the second sense. Barnabas is called apostle in Acts 14:14. Silvanus and Timothy are included in the apostles of Christ at 1 Thessalonians 2:6. Epaphroditus is ἀπόστολος at Philippians 2:25. If Junia is an apostle in the sense Barnabas and Timothy and Silvanus are apostles, then she held a teaching and founding office, and the position that minimizes her has to minimize theirs in the same motion.
[See PRISCILLA · WOMEN'S SPEAKING JUSTIFIED]
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THE IDENTIFICATION WITH JOANNA
Richard Bauckham has proposed that Junia is Joanna, who appears in Luke.
Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, traveled with Jesus during his ministry and provided for the company out of her own resources at Luke 8:1 to 3. She was among the women at the empty tomb who announced the resurrection to the apostles at Luke 24:10. Joanna is the Hebrew and Aramaic form and Junia is the Latinized form of the same name.
The identification is a proposal and not a finding, and the entry does not rest on it. But it is worth stating what follows if it holds. She walked with Jesus. She stood at the tomb. She announced the resurrection to the men. She saw the risen Christ, which is the qualification Paul sets for apostleship in his own case at 1 Corinthians 9:1. And she was in Christ before Paul because she had known Christ in the flesh. On that reading the first preacher of the resurrection and the apostle later erased are the same woman.
[See THE FAIR IMAGE · PARTIAL WITNESS]
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THE FIVE MOVES
The erasure runs the measurement cut through a manuscript, and it runs in five moves.
The anomaly. A female apostle stands in the text, and she is incoherent with the developing doctrine that women cannot hold authority over men.
The cut. Change her name. Set a circumflex where an acute belongs, and Ἰουνίαν becomes Ἰουνιᾶν.
The naturalization. Teach that Junias was always the name. Forget that the name never existed. Present the masculine reading as the traditional one, which inverts twelve centuries of the actual tradition.
The defense. When the name fails, change the meaning, so that outstanding among the apostles becomes well known to the apostles. She may exist as a woman on condition that she does not exist as an apostle.
The minimization. When both fail, deflate the office itself. Apostle meant nothing much. She was a messenger. The same word is left standing at full weight for Paul and Barnabas and Timothy.
The operation does not need to win at any single step, because it only needs to produce enough confusion that certainty becomes unavailable and readers say the evidence is ambiguous about a text that was not ambiguous for twelve hundred years.
[See SUBSUMPTION · ORIGIN CAPTURE]
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THE VIOLENCE CONFESSES ITSELF
Every defense exposes what it was raised to conceal.
If women obviously could not be apostles, there was no motive to change her name, and the change is therefore evidence that the text said what the doctrine could not hold. If the masculine reading were the apparent one, the unanimous feminine reading of Chrysostom and Origen and Jerome, native or fluent Greek speakers working from manuscripts far earlier than any that survive to us, would be inexplicable. If Junias existed as a name, it would be somewhere: the searches return hundreds of instances of the feminine and none of the masculine, and nothing is found because nothing was there. And if the exclusive reading were the natural one, Chrysostom would have taken it, because he wanted it.
The erasure defeats itself, and it does so in the only way a textual erasure can: the labor of removing her is the surviving proof that she was there.
[See THE NACHASH · THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE]
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THE RESTORATION
The critical text restored the feminine in 1998. The ESV of 2001 prints Junia while retaining well known to. The NIV of 2011 prints Junia, outstanding among the apostles. The scholarly consensus now recognizes her as a woman, and Scot McKnight has put the sequence plainly: Junia was a woman and she was an apostle, and since a woman could not be an apostle, Junia became the male Junias, on no manuscript evidence, no evidence from the translations, and no evidence that the name Junias existed at all.
The name is returning to the text. What does not return is the twelve centuries of women told they could not lead, could not teach and could not be called, while a female apostle stood in plain sight in Romans 16:7. The configuration that erased her has retreated and it has not surrendered: the ESV still prints well known to, and the commentaries still minimize.
[See MARGARET FELL · FREE EXERCISE]
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Junia is the measurement cut performed on a manuscript. The instrument asked who can be an apostle, encountered evidence it could not process, and rather than widen the instrument it altered the measurement. When the altered name failed it altered what the term measured. When that failed it declared the measurement uncertain, in a place where twelve hundred years had held it certain. At every stage the operation protected itself by hiding the record of its own working.
The original signal persists. ΙΟΥΝΙΑΝ remains in every manuscript. The testimony of the fathers remains. The absence of Junias from every ancient document remains, and an absence that complete is not silence but a witness.
Greet Andronicus and Junia.
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