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.”

Sexist Hand Behind P46?

After a never ceasing flow of blogposts by Peter Head on Papyrus 46, I finally get the chance!

On his blog, Paul and co-workers, Richard Fellows offers an explanation of how the curious text of P46 in Rom 16:15 arose.

Whereas most MSS read "Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister" in Rom 16:5, P46 has Paul greet "Philologus and Bereus (Βηρέα) and Aoulia (Ἀουλίαν) and his sister" – the latter two names being nonsensical.

Fellows builds on James Royse's excellent proposal, Scribal Habits (2008), 333-334, that the exemplar of P46 had the reverse order of Nereus and Julia in its text, with an interlinear correction written out with the Greek numerals β (2) and α (1) above the names to indicate the correct order. “However, our scribe [of P46] misinterpreted the letters as being intended to replace the letters of over which they were written, and thus created βηρεα αουλιαν” (334).

However, Fellows points out that Royse's explanation does not account for the addition of ΚΑΙ between the two names in P46. Royse simply thinks the scribe of P46 added it in the process, "as part of his change here," and he considers it to be a separate reading. He thinks this is easier than to assume that the ΚΑΙ was in the Vorlage.

Fellows instead proposes that the exemplar had the normal order, but then a "sexist corrector" came along and added the Greek numerals β (2) and α (1) to have the male name Nereus written before the female Julia, but this would create another problem, "... Nereus, Julia and his sister", so the corrector also added a ΚΑΙ between the name so that "his sister" would refer back to Philologus: "Greet Philologus and Nereus and Julia and the sister of him." The scribe then, did not only reverse the names and add a KAI, but inserted the letters β and α.

The problem with Fellows' explanation is of course the question why the scribe would execute the correction and reverse the order, but at the same time misunderstand the very instruction and insert the letters β and α into the names. Fellows suggests that the corrector gave two distinct indications that the names should be reversed, "above the line and perhaps also in the margin", and the scribe of P46 apparently misunderstood the one above the line.


I think Fellows rightly points out the problem with the extra KAI, but then his explanation becomes too complicated since he has to assume that the corrector used two ways of indicating that the text should be corrected.


This is my alternative explanation:

In the first stage, a scribe reversed the order of the names (for sexist reasons?) but then had to supply the ΚΑΙ to have the reference "his sister" point back to Philologus.

In the second stage, a corrector added the numerals above the names to have them reversed to the normal order (á la Royse), and perhaps also marked the KAI for deletion with underdots (but he could have simply left the KAI because at this stage it has little affect on the meaning). This second stage reflects the Vorlage of P46.

In the third stage, the scribe of P46 completely misunderstood the numerals and copied Bereus (Βηρέα) and Aoulia (Ἀουλίαν) and so retained the order as well as the KAI which was already there. Thus, the scribe did not follow any instructions to correct the text in the variation-unit.

The fact that P46 has Ιουλιαν in Rom 16:7 does not speak in favor of any of these explanations, but it does strengthen the assumption that at some point Ιουλιαν was in Rom 16:15 as well.

Isn't this the simplest explanation? Perhaps it is time for another poll :-).