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 Junia. 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.”

Review of Eldon Epp “Junia”

I have recently come across a rather “robust” review of Eldon J. Epp’s book Junia Among the Apostles in Touchstone Magazine by John Hunwicke in Oxford. Some valid points are made by Hunwicke such as how Rom 16:7 gets routinely used as a bit of an egalitarian battering ram and the genuine grammatical ambiguity of Rom 16:7 itself. Still, I think that IOUNIAN was a woman and she was regarded as an apostle (Chrysostom’s comments still echo in my mind on that one), though I’d probably see “apostle” in the lesser sense of messenger (Phil 2:25; 2 Cor 8:23). What is more, I don’t think the Belleville writes with the same rhetorical force as Epp and I don’t think she has this big “socio-cultural agenda” that Hunwicke imputes to so many. If Hunwicke wants to take on so many who go for the alternative reading from his own, he should also have included Richard Bauckham’s discussion in Gospel Women.