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

Sources

More in 7. Social Worlds of the Text

• 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 — the silencing of women
• Scribes writing under pressure: Jews, pagans and apologetics