Even the disciple Peter described Paul’s writing as “hard things to understand,”[i] and the Epistle to the Romans certainly fits his description. After an arduous journey through the first 15 chapters, the final chapter can feel inconsequential. In keeping with ancient Graeco-Roman tradition, Paul ends his letter with greetings to various individuals in the Roman church. In essence, it is a list of names. Some of which we recognize, many we do not, a few with details, many cryptic, but a list of names, nonetheless. In comparison with the preceding chapters, Romans 16 can seem unworthy of the same study.
However, it is the foundation of not only this book but any Christian community working out their faith, their beliefs, and their conflicts. Romans 16 iterates that this is real letter written to the beloved Church filled with living people possessing names, dinner tables, morning breath, family histories, rivalries, kinships. This is not a book meant for our intellect. It is a book first meant for our lives and our communities.
Whether or not you understand the hard things written, read Romans 16 and remember that this letter was written because God loves his people. See Priscilla and Aquila, instrumental in the discipling of the early church. Phoebe, a deacon as well as a benefactor to Paul and many others. Rufus’ mother who also mothered Paul. The names who only appear here but meant something to Paul and to their community. Wherever we land in history, the church has shepherds and teachers, mothers and orphans, the often named and the rarely named. Whatever there is to learn and understand in Paul’s letter to the Romans, we ought to begin and end remembering that we are here because we are loved, gathered, and kept by God. God’s church received Paul’s letter then just as we receive it now.
However, a part of this book not received. Specifically, she is not remembered, not because Paul did not give us her name nor because we have forgotten, but because it has been deliberately erased.
Her name is Junia.
In Romans 16:7 Paul asks, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”[ii] Because a woman is named an apostle, biblical scholars, theologians, church leaders have attempted to erase her name and identity from as early as the 14th century.
The deliberate erasure of the Apostle Junia is egregious, not only because it is based upon poor translation and exegetical claims, but because Junia’s life, work, and legacy are erased with her. Not only is she an outstanding, well-known apostle, she shared in suffering with Andronicus and Paul. When she is erased her existence in a community – the conversations, the tears, the laughs, the sacrifices, the grief, the joy, and the persecutions of her life and those with her are gone are gone as well. She, among infinite others, is our spiritual ancestor a part of our cloud of witnesses.[iii] To do away with any one of them is no small deed.
Junia is erased by those who assume a woman cannot be an apostle. If men can be apostles then she must not have been a woman, or she must not have been an apostle.
This is a woman who went beyond where others said she could go so either her name was taken, or her vocation was. Her name and apostleship could have represented the unhindered possibility of God’s calling and gifting, but instead her silencing has long represented how the church handles an unhindered woman.
I am writing to argue for Junia. I am also writing to declare that who has God created and called no pastor or theologian, no a scholar or a layperson, may discard.
To understand the arguments for or against the Apostle Junia, we must begin with the question of how your Bible came to sit on your shelf. We begin at the beginning – with the process of textual criticism and the lineage of New Testament translations
Textual criticism is the study of copies of an original text (also called an autograph) to determine the original wording when the original text is unknown. In other words, textual criticism is the reversal of history. It is the art and science of gathering and studying available manuscripts in order to produce a replica as close to the original as possible.
In short, while today’s Christian Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, the “original texts” do not exist. The New Testament is derived from hundreds of Greek manuscripts preserved, discovered, and studied for centuries. A Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, would become the ancient Bible until the 16th century, when Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament.[iv] Centuries of scholars followed Erasmus, studying and releasing their own editions of the Greek New Testament as more manuscripts were discovered.
While more manuscripts aided scholars in producing more accurate Greek New Testaments, the discoveries also created complexities. Certain categories of manuscripts, such as discovery locations or scribal lineages seemed to be more reliable than others. There were also many variants among the manuscripts. Some were as simple as sentence word order or a minor word omitted, but in some the variant may be a significant word that could affect the meaning of the text or even entire sections included in some manuscripts but not others. By the 19th century, scholars organized the manuscripts into groups and established formal principles of textual criticism they and subsequent scholars could follow.[v] As with any field of academia, there is ever more to be learned and scholars build upon the work of those who have come before.
The textual criticism is a science – it builds upon the study and objective findings of previous scholars. It makes arguments for which manuscript group is the most reliable and which manuscript variant within that group is the closest to the original text.
Textual criticism is also an art – the scholar also relies upon their knowledge of cultural and literary context, as well as consider the potential theological implications or doctrinal statement any of the variant reading might be making. The result is most often a subjective claim that cannot be made in full confidence.
Let’s use Mark 1:1 as an example of this process.
Mark 1:1 could either read “The beginning of Good News, Jesus Christ” or the weightier identification “The beginning of Good News, Jesus Christ, Son of God.”
We can consider that it is possible that a scribe added the clarifier “Son of God,” which would make the simpler reading the more reliable one. However, we can also consider that arguing for Jesus’ divinity is a central theme in Mark’s gospel, therefore it is also possible that Mark would establish his argument from his very first line, “Jesus Christ, Son of God.” While this is a simplified, and I do mean simplified, summary both objective and subjective approaches are used to build an argument for which reading is the closest to the original text. In almost all situations, the conclusion is an educated guess rather than a fully confident assertion.
Once this process is repeated hundreds of times, along a Greek New Testament the Greek scholar believes is the closest to the original text is at last written from the Greek manuscripts available. Once it is published it can be used for the translation from Greek into English or any other contemporary language. A translator must now use an excellent knowledge of both the original language and the contemporary language as well as their own exegetical work along the way to write a Bible translation that best communicates the meaning of the Greek text in a way that is readable for the reader while true to the Greek text.[vi]
While translation is a lengthy and complex process, any translator and theologian are like every other reader of Scripture in one significant way. Any of us, no matter who we are or where we go, arrive with our story. We carry the lens of our personal experiences and history as well as our local and national history and culture. We cannot be rid of the worldview that is our own. What we can do is fill our lives with diverse voices, stories, people because with community comes openness comes empathy and, most importantly, the revelation of individual and systemic prejudice.
The translator of your Bible was not immune to the lens of their experiences and wider culture nor are their free from their publisher’s culture and choices. These along with doctrinal and theological stances will inevitably influence what ends up on your shelf.
While I am not necessarily suggesting any reader of the translated Scripture cannot trust their Bible, I am explaining that it is important you know who translated your text. I am saying that, while there is nothing inherently wrong with having a lens through which you or anyone else read Scripture, it is the height of arrogance to believe you or anyone else can strip themselves down to an unbiased point of view. I am asserting that knowledge, education, is power and those who have it may use it to advance their own ideologies, whether they are self-aware or not.
For example, we can consider how the English Standard Translation is vulnerable to misusing such power. Both the ESV translation committee and Review Scholars are exclusively male.[vii] The ESV translation sitting on your shelf changes the Greek gender inclusive words, people, siblings, children to exclusively male, men, brothers, sons. While this is not the place I will engage the host of arguments against gender inclusive language, are we to believe the 100% male oversight along with the ESV’s unapologetically complementarian stance has nothing to do with the deliberate exclusion of women’s presence in the ancient church community?[viii]
Certainly not.
Body of Christ ought to be the place in our world integrates embraces racial, ethnic, and gendered differences not because the Good News erases our identities but because it embraces them.[ix]
Instead, it is the prejudice, indeed outright misogyny, of ancient academia and church hierarchy that began the erasure of Junia persisting into modernity. Power easily and often translates to manipulating others into further disenfranchisement. I defy her erasure in the way that I defy the Church’s erasure and mistreatment of any marginalized group or person.
In “The Erasure of Junia, a Woman Apostle: Part Two” we will discuss how church leaders and academics bypassed established research and text critical principles to remove Junia from Scripture, why it is important she is named and remembered the mechanics of how Junia disappeared from our Bibles, and how she is reclaimed.
[i] I Peter 3:16.
[ii] All Scripture quoted from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise indicated.
[iii] See Hebrews 12:11.
[iv] Eldon Jay Epp, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism: Volume 2, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV 2020), 35.
[v] Ibid, 63.
[vi] Most translations are written by committees hired by a publisher.
[vii]https://www.esv.org/translation/oversight-committee/https://www.esv.org/translation/review-scholars/
[viii]https://cbmw.org/2007/10/08/literary-esv-is-unapologetically-complementarian/
[ix] Galatians 3:28.