Sandy,
Thanks for a great post on Romans 16 and it certinly gives much pause for thought on women in church based service.  Keep in mind that I’m not an egalitarian, but I have a few quibbles with your handling of Rom. 16.7:

1.There are over 200 inscriptions of Junia and in every single one it is feminine and in every single manuscript of Romans (except two) it is feminine as well. This is hardly ambiguous, it is overwhelming.

2. “Outstanding ... apostles” is certainly ambiguous in the Greek, but in most translations Andronicus and Junia are regarded as apostles. Chrysostom has an excellent comment about how great she must have been to have been counted worthy of the designation apostle. See also Linda Belleville’s article on this against Dan Wallace.

3. Apostle here could mean apostle in the sense of a delegate of a church, much like Epaphroditus from Philippi, but usually the name of the sending church is also given or some kind of qualifier (e.g. your apostle). I surmize that A & J were either the founders of the first Jewish Christian ekklesia in Rome, or else they were among the extended witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection.

An excellent read on this verse is the book by Eldon J. Epp.

My comments are motivated by the fact that I cannot believe the violence done to the text by the ESV translators. Junia is no longer a women and no longer an apostle. This is the clearest case of agenda-driven textual tinkering that I’ve ever seen.

Sandy, I think you are splitting hairs in your interpretation here!

Michael,

Thanks for your comments. I tried to respond several days ago, but somehow my remarks got lost when posting and foolishly I had not saved them on my own machine, so I lost my work, and did not have time to re-create it at the time.

Now I try again…

In regards to the three uncertainties on Junia in Romans 16:7:

(i) I agree that the name itself is almost certainly feminine - as I said in my original post. I understand the form of the word in the Greek is grammatically ambiguous, but the historical evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of it being a feminine name.

(ii) On whether “outstanding/prominent among the apostles” is inclusive (an outstanding example of an apostle) or exclusive (prominent in the estimation of the apostles)… I live in Wollongong and there is no theological library available locally. So I have not been able to consult Epp or Belleville. However I have worked through the detail of Suzanne McCarthy’s long series of posts in response to the original article by Dan Wallace and Michael Burer on this matter. I am just a parish minister, struggling to maintain my Greek, not an academic with special Greek expertise. However, it seems, she raises some reasonable objections to Wallace and Burer’s case that the phrase should be translated “well known to the apostles” (as per ESV & NET). On other matters, I think she overstated her case (e.g. in her initial dismissiveness of their use of Pss. Sol. 2:6 - which she first said was totally mistaken but now agrees is admissible evidence to be debated). In her last reply to Michael Burer - she has a useful set of links to materials on this debate. At the end of the comments section, she agrees that “I prefer a translation that is ambiguous if consensus cannot be attained” such as the KJV’s “of note among the apostles”. So she agrees that there is no complete knock-down argument in favour of the inclusive view, although possibly the evidence is a stronger in that direction. It will be interesting to see if Burer and Wallace produce anything more on the matter.

(iii) On whether the “apostles” word has a ‘capital A’ authoritative apostle sense (i.e. The Twelve and Paul), or a ‘smaller a’ apostle as missionary/messenger sense, this is certainly an open question. I am quite comfortable with your suggestions Michael.

I think my overall point remains. We are given too little information in this verse to justify overturning the teaching of the NT on gender matters elsewhere. If Junia is among the apostles - which is not 100% certain, although perhaps on balance more likely - we don’t know what sort of apostle (big A or little a) and how her partnership with Andronicus (probably her husband) affected the expression of the ministry, nor what duties were entailed in it.

Lastly, I am quite happy to reject the ESV translation at this point. You may recall that I used the HSCB in my original post. It may interest to know that I was a strong critic of the ESV (for not living up to its own translation philosophy - e.g. too many archaisms, not translating terms consistently where linguistically possible). I think it may have been this criticism of the ESV that was one factor that led to Tony’s invitation for me to become more involved with Matthias Media. Clearly we share much in common in our views and approach, but Matthias Media does not just want ‘yes men’!

Ros, Thanks for clarifying. The reason I went to some lengths to outline what we can and can’t say about Junia is because others have so insistently made inflated claims from Romans 16:7, beyond what the evidence can sustain

For example, James Dunn in his Romans 9-16 commentary on p895 in my edition

We may firmly conclude, however, that one of the foundation apostles of Christianity was a woman and wife.

By this he means Andronicus and Junia “belonged most probably to the closed group of apostles appointed directly by the risen Christ in a limited period following his resurrection” (also p895). For this he rests on the comment about “apostles” in 1 Cor 15:7. But no comment is made about the nature of this group of apostles in that text, let alone that they were appointed directly by the risen Jesus, although this may be implied by Paul’s comments about himself in vv8-9. Nor do we know for sure that Junia is that sort of apostle!

So Dunn moves from what he says is a probable conclusion (which is not so clear as he suggests) to a firm conclusion that they were foundation apostles.

This sort of firm statement beyond the evidence encourages some egalitarians to then claim that clearly there should be no restrictions on women in ministry from Rom 16:7.

But at the very least there is some doubt about what sort of apostle Junia might have been and what her duties were. It’s totally unspecified. It would be honest to acknowledge this.

G’day Suzanne.

Thanks for appearing here. Just to clarify I was not trying to suggest you had “shifted position”, and I certainly did not use that term. What I was alerting people to was the fact that you agreed that an ambiguous translation, such as KJV “of note among the apostles” was a good idea where there was no consensus.

I think it fair to note that I probably understated how very strong you think the evidence for the inclusive translation “prominent among the apostles” is. Sorry for that.

When I looked at your posts on Junia, it seemed you did not especially look at the third issue - the semantic range of “apostle” and how it might be functioning in Rom 16:7. Did I miss something? I’d be interested to read it if so.

For others reading this discussion, it’s worth pointing out that I would not agree with Suzanne’s contention about Dr Kostenberger alleged “equivocation”.

But I think it better to point people to the discussion I am involved in about Kostenberger’s interview on Justin Taylor’s blog here.