Was Junia an Apostle?

A recent feminist article brings up information to the public that most within New Testament scholarship are already aware of, namely, that Paul mentions a Junia as someone who is "well known among the apostles" in Romans 16:7. Of course, this is riddled with misinformation for feminist propagandistic purposes in order to somehow show that the early church had women in authoritative positions (against the clear teaching of Paul elsewhere).

But let's examine this claim.

First, it is important to note that the difference of the name Junia/Junias of being male or female is based on the placement of the accent in Greek. The earliest texts, and likely the originals, did not contain accents and so we are left to context or guessing at which it may be. The argument that it could be a husband and wife missionary team is valid, but there are groups mentioned together in Romans who are all female or all male and thus this interpretation is not definitely supported. Both would be either well known by the apostles or missionaries, since it is plural, i.e., "they are well known among the apostles."

Second to this, the Greek reads εἰσιν ἐπίσημοι ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις, which can either mean that they were well known among the apostles in terms of their being apostles or well known by the apostles. 

Third, and what is most important to note here, is that either way the word ἀπόστολος just means "one who is sent." By whom he or she is sent and for what purpose is contextually determined. Paul and Barnabas are called apostles of the church of Antioch because they were sent out by the church. But this does not make Barnabas one of the twelve. In fact, it is important to understand that Luke's argument in Acts is that Paul is the twelfth apostle and Matthias is not because Matthias is chosen and sent out by the apostles, but an apostle of Christ must be sent out by Christ. It would seem obvious but if one is a messenger of someone else that means that said someone else actually sent them. Only the twelve are actually commissioned by Christ as His representatives/emissaries/messengers from whom all other messengers get their marching orders (whatever they may be). Hence, Christ sends Paul in the Book of Acts, not Matthias, making him the last of Christ's apostles. This is why context is important that the twelve are named Christ's apostles in distinction from those who may be sent by others and for varying purposes.

What this means is that even if Junia is female, and even if she is called an apostle with her husband Andronicus, this does not mean she has any authority at all. They are not apostles of Christ. They may be a missionary couple, where she is a helper to her husband in missionary work. They may simply be messengers who carry messages back and forth from churches along with financial aid. Who knows? The text does not tell us, and thus, we are left to speculate. However, if speculation is authoritative over explicit and clear teaching where women are prohibited from taking upon any authority in the church over men then someone skipped hermeneutics class when they taught hermeneutics that day.

Lin makes the following two arguments.

If this seems like a strange debate for academics to be having, then your instincts aren’t wrong. Lin told me “I doubt there would be arguments about what this phrase means if Junia was understood to be male. But since it's virtually impossible for Junia to be male, some interpreters have then focused on the Greek of the phrase ‘esteemed among/by the apostles’ to argue that she was not an apostle.”
When scholars (who are all, you won’t be surprised to learn, male) try to make this argument they appeal to the use of this language and grammatical form elsewhere in ancient Greek. There are two problems with these arguments, Lin told me. In the first place, the ancient examples cited by other scholars do not definitively prove anything and, thus, cannot be used to “exclude Junia from apostolicity.”  The second problem is that grammar is ambiguous while logic is not. Lin used famous athletes as an example of how this ambiguity works: “[The statement that]‘Michael Jordan is esteemed by basketball players’ does not necessarily exclude or include Jordan from the category ‘basketball player’ - the grammar tells us nothing here, and we can only deduce that Jordan IS a basketball player because we already know who Jordan is.”

The first argument is just an ad hominem. Apparently, someone skipped logical fallacies on the day they taught logic at school as well. As though male scholars point out different possibilities of interpretation based on their gender. Did the facts of the text's ambiguity change because of the gender of the one studying them? As I argued above, scholars would still bring these facts out and debate them if they are real scholars, male or female, because they are relevant to the correct interpretation of the text. As the Fathers who are cited in the article indicate, there is no threat to male-only authority in identifying Junia as a female who is an apostle because she isn't one of the twelve and doesn't have any authority over men anyway. So scholars are free from the need to make it one way or another, even if they are male scholars.

Second, her argument from logic is actually illogical. To say that someone is esteemed by a group does not mean that they are a part of that group. If an employee is well known by the board of a company it does not mean that he is a part of the board. If someone is well known by the police it does not mean that he or she is part of the police force. Her analogy only works with Michael Jordan because we already know that he is a basketball player, but what if a cheerleader was well known to all of the basketball players? Does that mean she is one? So the grammatical question is important on the one hand for identifying whether Junias is merely known by the apostles or a missionary herself, but the ambiguity does not lend itself to any definitive interpretation.

What does box in the possibilities is the biblical view of gender roles and therefore what would have been considered an acceptable role of Junias (if female) by Paul. This is simply a matter of good exegesis. One does not interpret what is clearly stated by an ambiguous scenario that may possibly be true absent of any other indicators to the contrary. If the Bible prohibits homosexuality as being godlessness and I then interpret the relationship between David and Jonathan, both who are accepted as godly men in the narrative, as a homosexual one, then I have ignored the limitations of the possibilities that the author's beliefs provide in order to expand possibilities that would run contrary to them. This means I am ignoring a key component of context. If Ezekiel's view of the world does not allow for aliens, but it does allow for angels/supernatural beings, then interpreting the creatures in his visions as aliens is fallacious nonsense. Likewise, if I try and interpret an ambiguous statement like Andronicus and Junia being noted among the apostles as something that contradicts biblical gender roles that the very apostle writing about Junia affirms in his writings then my interpretation is built on a faulty methodology and lacks the context that would bring me to the right conclusions.

So, no, Junia is not an apostle of Christ. She may be a she or she may be a he. She may be in some sort of missionary ministry with her husband or she may just be known as a godly woman with her husband by the apostles of Christ, but if she was exercising authority or teaching over men she would not be commended by the apostle, as his own teaching suggests.

The same goes for Phoebe in the now popular idea that those who delivered letters sometimes read them and even more rarely explained them. So Phoebe, it is argued, may have read the letter (which is not a problem for any position on gender roles of which I am aware) but maybe if our speculation and imagination can stretch from what sometimes occurred to what definitely occurred then she also explained the text of Romans, exegeting it for congregations like an elder would. Except Paul doesn't allow such things as he states so that is not a possibility. This is why a denial that Paul wrote the excerpt in 1 Corinthians and the first letter to Timothy is so popular. Feminists desire to remove that context in order to expand their possibilities, but for those who believe the text is inspired and inerrant, whether from Paul's hand or from the Pauline school that recorded his teachings, it remains as a vital part of the context that eliminates the interpretive possibility that such is the case.

The complementarian view is built on the rock of clear explicit teaching and the feminist/egalitarian view stands on eisegetical sand.