It is also of note that Junia possesses a Latin name which could have stemmed from servile origins. This could mean that she was a freed slave who adopted the name of her patron. Alternatively as previously mentioned, Junia could have belonged to a family of Hellenized Jews. According to Harry Leon, it was common place during this period for Greek-speaking Jewish families to give their daughters Latin names and their sons Greek names, hence the Greek name of Andronicus.
Further, 75% of the 517 names found in the six Jewish catacombs of ancient Rome are Greek names. Junia was also a popular name for nobility.

Junia's relationship with Andronicus is somewhat ambiguous. While it is generally supposed that they were husband and wife, they could have been siblings or simply a team of evangelists. What is important is that Junia is referred to in her own right, not as an attachment to someone else. This means that she earned her title and position on her own merit, rather than accepting it as a natural derivation from her husband's status.

A popular work exploring Junia has been published by journalist Rena Pederson. This book has been reviewed in the Toronto Star

Toronto Star

The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...

.

Paul's "enthusiastic acclamation" of Junia prompted Chrysostom

John Chrysostom

John Chrysostom , Archbishop of Constantinople, was an important Early Church Father. He is known for his eloquence in preaching and public speaking, his denunciation of abuse of authority by both ecclesiastical and political leaders, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and his ascetic...

, prominent Church Father, to marvel at her apparent devotion such that "...she would be even counted worthy of the appellation of apostle.” Some scholars see as proof that Paul the Apostle, whose name is ascribed to fourteen epistles

Authorship of the Pauline epistles

The Pauline epistles are the fourteen books in the New Testament traditionally attributed to Paul the Apostle, although many dispute the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews as being a Pauline epistle....

 in the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

, encouraged female leaders in the Church.

The opposing interpretation of this verse disavows either Junia's apostleship, her female gender, or both. Complementarians believe that the Bible limits or prohibits women's leadership roles in the church, and requires male leadership/female submission in marriage.

Junia's gender

That she was a woman is seldom contested today among Christian theologians. Considering the cultural climate of a time when women were treated as minor children with no legal or property rights, U.S. journalist Rena Pederson thinks it understandable that Junia's role was ignored or even hidden for centuries since medieval scholars changed her name to Junias to make it masculine. She opines that the growing acknowledgment of Junia's female apostleship will establish an important precedent for women preaching and teaching. "And since Paul often has been viewed as someone who wanted to keep women quiet, his praise for Junia seems to show that he was much more broadminded in practice," Pederson adds.

Stephen Finlan notes that Junia is recognized as “the only female apostle named in the NT.” He writes that Junia is clearly a female name that was changed to the male "Junias" in the Latin translations of the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

. In Paul's identification of her as a relative, as being "in Christ" before him and "prominent among the apostles," Finlan finds it significant that Paul greeted her as an "apostle" in a straightforward, matter-of-fact way as if there is nothing unusual in a female apostle. In the Corinthian and Roman letters, Paul addressed a number of women as "leaders," but Junia is the only female apostle named in the New Testament.

The problem of translating the name arises because, when the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 was composed, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 was normally written without accents, although these already had been invented. If written with an acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

 on the penultimate syllable , the name is "Junia" (a woman's name); if with a circumflex

Circumflex

The circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...

 accent on the final syllable , it is "Junias" (a man's). No conclusion can be drawn from the masculine gender of the associated words in the same verse, since they apply also to the male Andronicus. Accordingly, even if Junia(s) is a woman, the rules of Greek grammar put those words in the masculine form. The overwhelming choice of the male form, , when in the 9th century accents were added in manuscripts, may have been influenced by the grammatical gender of these words, but it has also been attributed to a supposed bias on the part of scribes against the idea of a female apostle.

Epp in his book Junia: The First Woman Apostle gives a textual critical evaluation of the history of Junia in the Greek text and also the search in non-Biblical Greek literature for "Junias"─the alleged masculine form of the name which has not been found in writings from New Testament times and only rarely thereafter. He points out that the earliest copies of the Greek texts for are majuscules (capital letters). There are no accent marks in them. The importance of this is that the gender of the name depends on the accentuation. Hence, the earliest texts are inconclusive and we are very dependent on Patristic interpretation for the gender of Junia. When the minuscules (using lower case Greek letters) appeared, Junia was accented with a character which indicates the feminine form of the name. The feminine form of the name appeared in Erasmus' critical Greek text in 1516 and continuously thereafter in all other critical Greek texts, with the exception of Alford's 1858 edition, until 1928 when Nestle inexplicably (read: he didn't explain it in the apparatus) went to the masculine form. This remained the case until the 1998, when the edition just as inexplicably went back the other way and the masculine was dropped as even an alternative (not in the apparatus). Hence, the textual weight seemed to be for the feminine name Junia, which text critic Eldon Epp in 2005 believed most scholars accept. However, the masculine form is preferred in the UBS New Testament, 4th edition, which matches the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text (the latest editions of each text).

Two Greek manuscripts have "Julia" (clearly a woman's name) instead of "Junia(s)" in this verse. One is papyrus P46 of about the year 200. The other is the 13th-century minuscule manuscript catalogued as "6". "Julia" is also the reading in some Latin manuscripts, in one tradition of Coptic

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

 manuscripts and in Ethiopic manuscripts. Three Greek uncial manuscripts have the inverse substitution, ("Junia(s)" in place of "Julia") in . This raises the question whether the proximity of the two names, "Junia(s)" and "Julia", on the same page is the reason why, in both cases, a few scribes replaced one name with the other. There are also tentative connections between Junia and Joanna, suggesting that Junia could be the Latin form of the Hebrew Joanna. Thus, it is feasible that Junia is ‘Joanna.’

Only one record of the male name "Junias" has been discovered in extra-biblical Greek literature, which names him as the bishop of Apameia of Syria. Three clear occurrences of "Junia" have been found. While earlier searches for "Junias" in Latin also yielded no evidence, it is reported that "Junias" has been found as a Latin nickname or diminutive for the name "Junianas", which was not uncommon both in Greek and Latin.

Among the early Church Fathers, the United Bible Societies The Greek New Testament only cites Jerome

Jerome

Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...

 as having read the name "Julia" in and Chrysostom as having understood the name as the feminine "Junia". Chrysostom wrote: "O how great is the devotion of this woman that she should be counted worthy of the appellation of apostle!" Although among the Fathers, "an almost universal sense that this was a woman’s name surfaces—at least through the twelfth century, ... this must be couched tentatively because although at least seventeen fathers discuss the issue (see Fitzmyer’s commentary on Romans for the data), the majority of these are Latin fathers," and "Junia", but not "Junias", was a common enough name in Latin. It has even been claimed that the first known mention of Junia as a male is by Aegidus of Rome (1245–1316), though this ignores the evidence of the Greek manuscripts about how the name was actually interpreted at least from the 9th century onward.

The Coptic Synaxarium reading for the twenty-third of Bashans identifies Junia the apostle as being a man of the tribe of Judah.

Epiphanius (315 - 403 AD), in Index of Disciples says, "Junias, of whom Paul makes mention, became Bishop of Apameia of Syria." In Greek, the phrase "of whom" is a masculine relative pronoun (hou) and shows that Epiphanius considered Junias to be a man. And in a Latin quotation from Origen (died AD 252), in the earliest extant commentary on Romans, says that Paul refers to "Andronicus and Junias and Herodian, all of whom he calls relatives and fellow captives" (Origen's Commentary on Romans, preserved in a Latin translation by Rufinus, ca. 345-ca. 410 AD, in J.P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 14, col. 1289). The name Junias here is a Latin masculine singular nominative, implying that Origen, who was one of the ancient world's most proficient scholars, thought Junias was a man.

Orthodox traditional views

Orthodox traditions say Junia and Andronicus of Pannonia

Andronicus of Pannonia

Andronicus of Pannonia was a 1st century Christian mentioned by the Apostle Paul: According to that verse, Andronicus was a kinsman of Paul and a fellow prisoner at some time, particularly well-known among the apostles, and had become a follower of Jesus Christ before Paul's Damascus road conversion...

 traveled extensively and preached the Gospel to pagans, many of whom were converted to Christianity. Many of the pagan temples were closed, and in their place Christian churches were built. Junia and Andronicus are believed to have suffered martyrdom for Christ.

See also

• Deborah
  Deborah
  Deborah was a prophetess of Yahweh the God of the Israelites, the fourth Judge of pre-monarchic Israel, counselor, warrior, and the wife of Lapidoth according to the Book of Judges chapters 4 and 5....
  
  
• Feminist theology
  Feminist theology
  Feminist theology is a movement found in several religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and New Thought, to reconsider the traditions, practices, scriptures, and theologies of those religions from a feminist perspective...
  
  
• Lydia of Thyatira
  Lydia of Thyatira
  Lydia of Thyatira is a character in the New Testament. She is regarded as the first recorded convert to Christianity in Europe.-Name:The name, "Lydia", meaning "the Lydian woman", by which she was known indicates that she was from Lydia in Asia Minor. Though she is commonly known as “St...
  
  
• Phoebe
  Phoebe (Christian woman)
  Phoebe was a Christian woman mentioned by the Apostle Paul in Romans 16:1.Some have interpreted the Greek "diakonos" to relate Phoebe as a deacon, the most literal interpretation of the word is as a servant which is what all deacons...
  
  

Other references

• Giesler, Michael E. Junia (The Fictional Life and Death of an Early Christian.) Scepter Publishers, 2002. ISBN 978-1594170782
• Pederson, Rena. The Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth about Junia. Wiley Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0470184622
• Riss, Kathryn J. "The Apostle Junia." Women in Church History: Women's Ministries in the Early Church. Web: 7 Jan 2010. The Apostle Junia