here is a look at different veiws:
Junia's gender
That she was a woman is seldom contested today among Christian theologians.[11] 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.”[13] He writes that Junia is clearly a female name that was changed to the male "Junias" in the Latin translations of the New 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.[13]
The problem of translating the name arises because, when the New Testament was composed, Greek was normally written without accents, although these already had been invented. If written with an acute accent on the penultimate syllable (Ἰουνίαν), the name is "Junia" (a woman's name); if with a circumflex accent on the final syllable (Ἰουνιᾶν), 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, (Ἰουνιᾶν), 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.[14]
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.[15] He points out that the earliest copies of the Greek texts for
Romans 16:7 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.[15] 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 manuscripts and in Ethiopic manuscripts. Three Greek uncial manuscripts have the inverse substitution, ("Junia(s)" in place of "Julia") in
Romans 16:15. 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,[
Luke 8:3] suggesting that Junia could be the Latin form of the Hebrew Joanna. Thus, it is feasible that Junia is ‘Joanna.’[16]
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.[14] While this is a possibility, historical studies on the name "Junia" as a contracted form of "Junianas" has shown there are over 250 citations of the name Junia in antiquity all of which have been found to refer to women, with not one single case proven to be the abbreviated form of Junianus to Junia.[17] Meanwhile the name Junia is attested multiple times on inscriptions, tombstones and records; most notably, General Brutus’ half sister, Junia.[18]
Among the early Church Fathers, the United Bible Societies The Greek New Testament only cites Jerome as having read the name "Julia" in
Romans 16:7 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!"[19] 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,"[14] 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
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Linear Mode
