Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 7. Social Worlds of the Text
Romans 16:7 — what happened to Junia
In short
- 1.**Junia** is a well-attested Roman woman's name; **Junias**, the masculine form, is attested nowhere in antiquity.
- 2.Greek manuscripts were unaccented; the masculine reading is an editorial accent, not a manuscript variant in the earliest sense.
- 3.Church Fathers including **John Chrysostom** read her as a woman and praised her apostleship.
- 4.Modern critical editions and translations have restored 'Junia'.
The claim being examined
Paul greets 'Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen… prominent among the apostles' — Junias being read as a man.
The Islamic position
The name in the earliest text is the common woman's name **Junia**; she was turned into a man by later editors uncomfortable with a female apostle.
Analysis
Ehrman uses Junia to show that the text was shaped not only by copying but by editorial decisions about accentuation, punctuation and word division — all absent from the earliest manuscripts written in *scriptio continua*. The case is now the mainstream scholarly position, which makes it a strong and safe example: you are reporting a correction that Christian scholarship has itself made.
From the Bible
Romans 16:7
Greek: Iounian… episemoi en tois apostolois
Greet Andronicus and Junia… they are prominent among the apostles.
Read it in their BibleSources
Bart D. Ehrman · John Chrysostom · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 7, pp. 186-189
The spoken script for this entry is inside the app.
Members get the word-for-word delivery guide — how to open, what to say, the likely replies and how to close warmly — plus notes, a dawah journal and the study assistant.
Open the app