Reassessing Junia: A Review of Eldon Epp's Junia: The First Woman Apostle

Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.

Often my friends tease me about my academic work, usually making the argument that scholars tend to think too much about minor details. I would agree that scholars as a whole regularly make "mountains out of molehills." (Indeed, anyone who has written a doctoral dissertation recognizes this as a professional necessity!) There are many times, however, when extreme depth of investigation is important and even vital for proper interpretation and appropriate application of the biblical text. My response to this critique changes the metaphor slightly in order to drive this point home: Instead of a molehill, think of an anthill. It is not very big, but ignore it and you can be in a world of hurt if you misstep. (With fire ants, common in the region of Texas where I live, a misstep can even be dangerous.) Certain issues or texts that on first blush may appear to be quite ancillary or tangential become very important upon closer investigation and have an impact far beyond that which one might initially suppose. Such is the case with Rom 16:7.

To begin, allow me to cite this verse in two different English versions: (1) "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my compatriots and my fellow prisoners. They are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ before me" (NET Bible). (2) "Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners; they are men of note among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me" (RSV). A quick comparison reveals two of the "anthills" under the surface of this verse: the gender of the name vIounian (the spelling given in both NA27 and UBS4, the current standard critical editions of the Greek New Testament); and the relationship of the two named individuals to the larger group called "apostles." A review of technical literature on this verse reveals two more issues: the identification of this person vis-à-vis Andronicus, the other person mentioned in the verse, and the identity and function of the larger group. These interpretive issues could very well remain esoteric and out of sight except for the way this passage has been used in discussions of the role of women in the church. Many scholars have argued that the best interpretation of this verse is that Junia was a woman and that she was considered to be an esteemed apostle, and that this interpretation provides support for the egalitarian viewpoint and a justification for leadership roles for women in the ministry of the church. Understandably, then, this verse has received a great deal of attention in scholarly literature.

Because of the multiple issues which come into play in determining the proper interpretation of Rom 16:7, it is rare to find works which are exhaustive and discuss all of the issues at length. The majority of the scholarly work has been done on the gender of the name in the biblical text, usually with the attendant assumption that the named individuals in the text are counted among the apostolic group. Next in line for attention would be the nature of the apostolic ministry referred to by the term "apostle." My own contribution in an article coauthored with Daniel B. Wallace ("Was Junia Really an Apostle? A Re-Examination of Rom 16.7," New Testament Studies 47 [2001]: 76-91) addressed the question of whether the named individuals were to be considered as part of the apostolic group; our conclusion was that the most likely meaning of the construction evpi,shmoj + (evn) + dative was "well-known to," not "outstanding among." When investigating this issue, then, one must recognize that there are multiple issues at play and a fair handling will take as many of these issues into consideration as possible.

This broad contribution is what Eldon Jay Epp attempts in his work Junia: The First Woman Apostle. For many years Epp has been one of America's premier New Testament textual critics. His writings have guided a host of students, the present author included, as they have learned the discipline, and he continues to add to our knowledge of the field. In 2002 he contributed a chapter discussing Rom 16:7 in the light of textual criticism to a Festschrift for Joël Delobel ("Text-Critical, Exegetical, and Socio-Cultural Factors Affecting the Junia/ Junias Variation in Romans 16,7," in New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis: Festschrift J. Delobel [ed. A. Denaux; Bibliotheca Epheneridum Theologicarum Lavaniensium 161; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 2002], 227-91), and this scholarly work has been revised into the present work under consideration. In this present work Epp discusses the interpretation of Rom 16:7 in light of textual criticism, specifically how textual criticism often acts as a window to social and cultural issues at play in and around a text.

The text is divided into two parts: "Contemporary Textual Criticism" and "Junia/Junias in Rom 16:7." The first part sets the stage by discussing the role of textual criticism in exegesis (chapter 1) and, then, a particular textual problem related to Rom 16:7 by virtue of the fact that it impinges upon gender issues (chapter 2). The first chapter is largely a useful discussion of all the various ways textual criticism can affect exegesis. Epp in essence argues for a mature understanding of the method of textual criticism and appropriate caution concerning the certainty of results. The difficulty of this chapter is two-fold: Epp shows a tendency to elevate social-cultural issues to primacy of place in consideration of variant readings, and he weds this to a troubling agnosticism toward the success of the entire enterprise. Epp draws a sound conclusion about the practice of textual criticism which takes into account the broad environment which produces variant readings: "Rather, the immediate and larger context of the writing itself and of the historical-theological setting from which it arose and in which it later functioned may all be relevant factors in deciding between/among variant readings" (9). This focus upon the setting in which variants arose is nothing new, as textual critics have always considered the factors which gave rise to variant readings, whether they were historical, cultural, or theological. Epp unfortunately weds this emphasis to the aforementioned agnosticism of many textual critics, specifically that of David C. Parker, whose work The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997) he refers to with approbation. As a result Epp advocates a method that gives socio-cultural factors primacy of place over traditional canons of criticism in the determination of the text, as evidenced by his conclusion to the chapter under the heading "A Loss of Innocence."

The second chapter in part one continues to set the stage for the discussion of Rom 16:7 by demonstrating the role of gender issues in another well-known textual problem, that of 1 Cor 14:34-35 as a possible interpolation. The introduction to the chapter is more important for my evaluation, rather than the particular problem, because of the way Epp uses it to create a new criterion for evaluation. He writes,

Because of this kind of text-critical situation, exegetes now are able to view and to interpret—through the several differing and competing variants—the ways in which one issue of special concern to women was being debated and was exerting pressure in the early centuries of Christianity. This result may not be as "clean" or as satisfying as seizing upon a singe variant as "original," but it is both more realistic and more practical, that is, more likely consonant with the real-life situations of the early Christian community and therefore more easily applicable to present-day Christianity, in which varying approaches to divorce and remarriage have surfaced and been applied across the array of our Christian communities (14-15).

In essence this is very similar to the argument currently made by many scholars concerning orthodoxy and heresy in the early church: If one can demonstrate that a variety of interpretations and viewpoints existed in the early church and that no one view had primacy, then the claim to a single orthodoxy vanishes. Compare this to the closing statement of the chapter, and my concern hopefully will become clearer:

I turn now to a crucial passage that has been the focus of discussion and controversy, especially in the last decade or two, and one that reveals—perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not—a pervasive sociocultural bias that has operated in New Testament textual criticism and exegesis for an entire century of what we might have regarded as the period of our most modern, liberal, and detached scholarly inquiry (20).

In my opinion Epp is loosing the traditional moorings of the text critical discipline, grounded primarily in the history of the transmission of the text as scholars could best understand and reconstruct it, and replacing it with something more tenuous—namely, the resonance of socio-cultural issues between our present day and the ancient Christian world. It is certainly fair to agree with Epp when he states that the discipline of textual criticism has been stagnant for over a century and needs to move beyond the impasse created by Westcott and Hort when they overthrew the Textus Receptus. But the presence of an impasse in reaching a clear determination of the original text does not vacate the truth that an original at one time existed and that the variants which presently exist in our manuscript evidence are evidence of a transmission from that original. The method Epp advances is, in my opinion, close to throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The second part of the book deals directly with the issue of Junia in Rom 16:7 and can essentially be divided into two parts: Chapters 3-10 deal with the name itself, and chapter 11 deals with the relationship of Junia to the apostolic group. (The final unnumbered chapter serves as a conclusion to the entire book.) Topics covered in the first part include the name itself as it existed in Greek and Latin, the name in ancient commentary on the text, the name in past and present editions of the Greek New Testament, the name in standard reference works, and the name in English translations. Despite the fact that some of the arguments and data presented in this second section are quite detailed, the essential argument can be summarized easily: There is little to no evidence that the name vIounian in current editions of the Greek New Testament should be understood to refer to a man; the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the named person is a woman. The name vIounian can potentially be accented two ways: vIouni,an with an acute accent on the penult, which is feminine (the assertion that this could be a masculine accentuation is largely unfounded), or vIounia/n with a circumflex accent on the ultima, which is masculine. The clear preponderance of the linguistic evidence is that the feminine form was widely attested, the masculine not at all. The most ancient commentators almost uniformly regard the name as feminine, and this could be considered the consensus up until the modern period. Various editions of the New Testament, reference works, and English translations all show movement from regarding the name as masculine to the current, more recent consensus that the name was feminine. In short, there is little to no evidence to support a masculine name here, either from the data itself or from the history of interpretation, and scholarship has practically reached a consensus that when Paul wrote vIounian he was referring to a woman.

Chapter 11 discusses two related issues, that of the nature of what it means to be an apostle and the relationship of Junia to the larger apostolic group. Epp spends some space demonstrating that all of these issues—the gender of the name, the nature of "apostle," and the relationship of this person to the apostolic group—are intertwined in the history of interpretation and create something of a domino effect, depending upon the point of view of the interpreter. Then the majority of the chapter is spent in a refutation of the aforementioned article that I coauthored with Wallace, "Was Junia Really an Apostle?" Important to mention are two other critiques of our work, which Epp refers to often: Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 165-80; and Linda L. Belleville, " vIounian ... evpi,shmoi evn toi/j avposto,loij: A Re-Examination of Romans 16.7 in Light of Primary Source Materials," New Testament Studies 51, no. 2 (April 2005): 231-39. My schedule has not permitted me time to develop an in-depth response to any of these reviews. What I can say at this point is that I have not read anything in any of them that has dissuaded me from the viewpoint Wallace and I advanced in the original article. (In the next few years I hope to develop a suitable response to these critiques.)

There is much to commend about Epp's book: It is broad, thorough, and well documented with endnotes and bibliography (although I generally find footnotes more serviceable). He discusses issues of fine detail related to language and history as well as philosophical issues related to hermeneutics and the bias of the interpreter. It is a useful, sustained treatment that serves to advance the discussion surrounding Rom 16:7 in particular and gender issues in general. There are notable problems, however, with Epp's argument. As mentioned above, Epp appears to be replacing a traditional understanding of the goal of textual criticism as a discipline—that of recovering the wording of the original text—with that of using textual variations as a window into socio-cultural concerns that mirror those of our own day. What I infer from this is that Epp would then argue that our contemporary take on these same socio-cultural issues should be read back into our understanding of the text, a step I am not willing to prescribe as part of either text-critical, exegetical, or hermeneutical method. (I acknowledge that interpreters regularly do this because of our inherent presuppositions, but that in and of itself does not make it proper method.)

In addition, Epp at times is somewhat dismissive of other viewpoints and facets of the discussion; he seems eager to accept what appears to be a foregone conclusion (as an indication of this, see the dedication in the front matter). For example, in the concluding chapter Epp argues the case that his interpretation of Rom 16:7, plus the recognition that 1 Cor 14:34-35 is an interpolation, plus the recognition that 1 Tim 2:8-15 is deutero-Pauline (and simply finalizes the subordination of women which began in the other deutero-Pauline books of Ephesians and Colossians!) removes any Pauline restriction on women teaching in the church. What he fails to point out is that each of these premises is hotly debated within biblical scholarship and not necessarily widely accepted; for that reason, Epp will not be able to foreclose debate about the individual texts mentioned or the larger issue of gender roles in the church.

Finally, Epp implies throughout his text that he is taking the high road of a proper, enlightened, modern attitude toward an important contemporary issue, that of the role of gender in church life. My response is as old as it is predictable: The high road is not determined by our present sociocultural norms, nor is it necessarily pointed out by the history of interpretation. The high road is the road delineated by the proper understanding of Scripture, and in many respects Epp has advanced the argument but not proven the point nor even reflected the depth of contemporary discussion. I do recommend his text to those who wish to familiarize themselves with scholarship on Junia and Rom 16:7. It should be read only as representative of ongoing discussion—not as the final word.