Suppressing the Female Apostle?

It’s probably fair to say that Junia has never been more popular. At least four books have been written about her in the last 20 years and she remains—I can’t help it—well known among those debating the role of women in the church.

The Junia Project website, for example, says, “Though widely accepted as a woman apostle throughout early Church history, in later translations an ‘s’ was added to the end of her name, making it into a masculine form, Junias. What was the reasoning behind this – was it a scribe’s mistake? Or could it have been something more political, like an attempt to deny that women could be apostles? We don’t know.”

In a recent blog post, Scot McKnight went further, claiming that Ἰουνιαν in Rom 16.7 was recovered as a female name only in the last quarter of the 20th century. He wrote:

Just in case you think an interpretation of Scripture can [sic] be wrong early and stay wrong for centuries, think about Romans 16:7 and the story of Junia. She was a woman whose name was changed to Junias because, so it was believed, the person was an apostle and an apostle can’t be a woman. So some males changed the woman into a man and, presto, we got a man named Junias. The problem is that there is no evidence for a male name “Junias” in the 1st Century. The deed was done, and that’s not our point: Junia remained Junias until, truth be told, the last quarter of the 20th Century when scholars realized the truth, admitted the mistaken history of interpretation, and acted on their convictions to restore the woman.

Knocking off non-existent males is no moral problem, and raising a woman from the dead is a good thing. Junia is now inscribed in the best translations.

After some back and forth with Scot, it turns out his first sentence got garbled by his editors and he’s now fixed it. (Yes, some blogs have editors.) (Update 12/4/19: I misunderstood Scot. He meant his InterVarsity editors and not his blog editors, which he does not have. It turns out that his paragraph on his blog was lifted from his foreword to Lucy Peppiatt’s book, which unknown to me, was already in press.)

The issue at hand, as you may know, is the accenting. If you provide the name with a circumflex (Ἰουνιᾶν) as in NA27 then the name is said to be the masculine Junias; apply an acute (Ἰουνιάν), however, as in NA28, and it’s the feminine Junias. And, presto, we have what looks like a patriarchal conspiracy on our hands. Or do we?

Yes, it’s true that Luther is the first major translator to use the masculine and it is true that some influential scholars in the 20th century also argued for a masculine and that the Nestle 13 through the NA27 printed the masculine. All this is well documented in Epp’s book. For Epp, cultural bias is the culprit. It was the “sociocultural environment, one imbued with a view of a limited role for women in the church” that “could influence some editors of the Greek New Testament in the mid-1990s” (p. 57). McKnight sees this as part of a much larger conspiracy by those he elsewhere calls “the silencers and erasers.”

I don’t doubt that this played a role for some. But how significant was this motive and how widespread? To the first question we might point out just how unique a woman apostle is in the New Testament. If Junia is one, she is the only one ever mentioned. The fact that she is said to be “outstanding” only makes it more surprising that she is never mentioned elsewhere, a point John Hunwicke makes in his lively review of Epp (discussed on the blog here). Was this a factor for some who thought she must be a man? It’s at least possible. (As for the perpetuation of the masculine form in the 20th century, I am reminded of Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.) Even granting gender bias, how common is the masculine form? The answer is not common at all when we consider the Greek tradition.

She is actually “Julia” in our earliest copy of Rom 16.7 (P46; so too in 6, 606, 1718, 2685, etc.; cf. Rom 16.15) and “Junia” in witnesses with accents (B2 D2 L Ψ 33 81 etc.). NA28 gives no witnesses with the masculine and this probably explains why the editors rightly fixed the accent. Nestle 13 set the accent wrong in the Nestle tradition. I checked my first edition and there is “Junia” where she had long been. Printed Greek New Testaments have pretty much all had the feminine until Eberhard Nestle took over his father’s edition. This includes Erasmus, Stephanus, Bezae, Elzevir, Mill, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort. Today she is again “Junia” in SBLGNT, NA28, RP2005, and THGNT.

Not surprisingly, then, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Matthew, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, Bishops’, and the KJV all have “Junia” and this seems to change only with the RV and RSV which have “Junias.” Others like the NASB, NIV1984, and NEB also have the masculine though with a note in the NEB. By the NRSV, we’re back to “Junia.” Translations like the NIV2011, ESV, and CSB have followed suit.

To be honest, I would be surprised if most English Bible readers today know that the name “Junia” is feminine and “Junias” is masculine. I didn’t until learning about the issue by way of Greek. As for the origin of the the male form, Epp points to Aedigius of Rome in the 13th century as the first. The next is Jacques LeFèvre d’Étaples in 1512 who seems to have influenced Luther. But as we’ve just seen, none of these authors, not even Luther, had any influence on this point in major Greek editions leading into the 20th century. They certainly had no influence on the Greek manuscripts where there remains no known example of the masculine form.

Whether or not a woman could be an apostle was clearly decided by Christians for centuries on grounds other than accenting. Chrystostom, for example, had no problem celebrating Junia the woman apostle and yet he did not allow for public women teachers (Homily on Romans 31; NPNF 11:554; it’s worth noting that Epp brings consistency to Paul’s view of women by rejecting 1 Cor 14.34–35 and 1 Timothy as Pauline.) Like Chrysostom, many other Christian writers knew Junia as the woman she was. The question was what kind of apostle she was and whether or not that made a difference to matters of ordination. That’s certainly the issue today (see David Shaw’s article here), but that’s not a topic for this blog.

The topic here is the temptation to overstate Junia’s demise. She was never changed into a man by any Greek scribe so far as we know. Even though some later interpreters did find a woman apostle unlikely or impossible, their influence seems to have been slight until the 20th century. It would be ironic if we erased Junia from the past in the very process of claiming to rescue her from it. Even a quick check of the relevant text-critical data shows that Junia has not been suppressed. But if she was, the 20th century is mainly to blame as the earlier examples remain outliers in their own time.

Updates

(5/2/18): Add another misreading of Epp’s work from Michael Peppard at Commonweal magazine who says

Why would so few of us know of a woman called “apostle” in first-century Rome? Junia was a victim of the Bible’s manuscript tradition, in which she was erased from existence by her transition to a man named “Junias.” ... Epp’s arguments require knowledge of ancient Greek, but in short, his book persuasively demonstrates that the best reading of the oldest manuscript tradition is the feminine name “Junia.” The masculine “Junias” was introduced at a later date by copyists, if not intentionally then perhaps unintentionally due to a subconscious bias that someone called “apostle” would also be a man. [Emphasis mine.]

7/23/18: Here’s another, from Kristen Padilla in her book Now That I’m Called (p. 98):

From the thirteenth century to the twentieth century, scholars and scribes regularly claimed Junia was a man because they could not accept the idea that a woman had been given the title of apostle. By simply changing an accent mark, they solved the problem, turning Junia (a woman’s name) into Junias (a man’s name). [emphasis mine]

12/4/19: Another, from Ally Kateusz in Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership (196 n. 3):

I follow Eldon Epp regarding that later scribes redacted the gender of Junia’s name, remaking it into the male gendered name, Junius, and thereby eliminating a female apostle; see Epp, Junia. [emphasis mine]

12/1/22: A bit of exaggeration from Scot McKnight (Reading Romans Backwards, 13):

... her name was changed in the course of church history to Junias becasue it was thought no woman could be an apostle, there was no such masculine name Junias, it took until the last quarter of the twentieth century for Junia to recover (fully) her female status in the church!