Just as important as Luther, though, is the history of official Greek New Testaments. It’s important to recognize that the Greek New Testaments that Christians have used and pastors have studied and students are told to master are composite texts. They are not the “original” New Testament. They are “composite” texts, in which one word was taken from one manuscript and another word from another manuscript to compile what the best of scholarship thinks was the original text or, better yet, as close to the original text as we can now get.
Don’t get me wrong—we are reasonably confident that we have the original words in about 98 percent of the New Testament (and none of the rest matters to our faith). But here is how it works: Scholars examine ancient manuscripts and translations and liturgical texts and quotations from the Bible in ancient sermons and books and scrolls and papyri and then say, “This is what we think is most likely the earliest text we can reconstruct from all this evidence.” Then they publish a “Greek New Testament,” and these composite texts are what people use to translate the New Testament today.
And in Greek New Testament composite texts—now hear this—from Erasmus in the Reformation era to the famous German scholar Erwin Nestle’s edition of the Greek New Testament in 1927, Junia was a woman. Apart from one lesser known publication of the Greek New Testament, which had Junias in a footnote but not in the text, no Greek New Testament had anything but Junia, a woman’s name, until Nestle’s edition in 1927.
Then it happened. In 1927, in the thirteenth edition of his composite Greek New Testament, Eberhard Nestle silenced Junia and gave birth to a new Christian man named Junias.12 How did Nestle do this? In 1927, Nestle put Junias in the text with a hat tip in the footnotes to other Greek New Testaments that had the female Junia. That is, Junia was but a footnote for Nestle. (And who reads footnotes?) We need to remind ourselves of this: Pastors and students study these composite Greek New Testaments, and translators rely on these composite Greek New Testaments, and by and large they don’t worry about the footnotes. They trust the editors to get the text right.
In changing her name and creating a new male name, Nestle buried Junia alive.
When Kurt Aland, the twentieth century’s most famous New Testament textual scholar, became the new editor of that famous Greek New Testament established by Nestle, he carried on Nestle’s text—until 1979, when Junia died in her footnote tomb. “Died?” you ask. Yes. In the 1979 edition of Aland’s text, Junia was simply erased from the footnote. And so she ceased to exist. In 1979!
The United Bible Society’s edition of the New Testament, one that many seminary students learned to use instead of Nestle-Aland, grades its decisions. The UBS New Testament rated the male Junias reading with an “A,” and that meant “virtually certain.” So from 1927 until the 1990s we had the two principal Greek (composite) texts, Nestle-Aland and UBS, which all pastors, students, and translators use, providing us with a man named Junias.
Let me be clear once more: The editors of Greek New Testaments killed Junia. They killed her by silencing her into nonexistence. They murdered that innocent woman by erasing her from the footnotes.
And Junia is far from alone in suffering from that silence.
Junia Is Not Alone in Her Silence
How many sermons about the women of the Bible did you hear when you were being nurtured into the faith? How many sermons about Miriam or Deborah or Huldah? Or Ruth or Esther? How many sermons about Mary or Priscilla or Phoebe or Junia? Or Philip’s daughters?
This struck me hard after class one day when a woman approached me and said, “I’m so pissed.” She had been reared in a good church and was very serious about her faith—indeed, she graduated from a seminary. She explained, “I grew up in the church, and I have never ever heard of Phoebe or Priscilla or Junia. And my church ordains women.”
Junia is not alone in her enforced silence. She’s not alone, because the silencers and erasers are still at work, and sometimes it takes extra energy to get a silenced voice back into performance shape.
Consider a few of those who have been silenced with Junia.
One certain woman played a significant role in the reforms in Geneva. As a devoted young Roman Catholic woman, she entered in 1521 into an Augustinian convent, where she quickly became a leader. Three years later, she converted to Luther’s gospel and left the convent. By 1526, she had stirred her hometown church in Strasbourg enough that she was chased from her home and church.
Two years later, she married a former priest, and before long, she and her husband followed William Farel to Valais, where they became—in the words of no less than the Lutheran Reformer Martin Bucer—“the first French married couple to accept a pastoral assignment for the Reformed church.” When Simon, her husband, died, her status in society as a widow with five children was jeopardized—until she married Antoine (Froment). They all moved to Geneva in 1535, where they entered into Calvin’s complex world of the Reformation woman.
While the priesthood of believers seemingly promised a restoration of the Juniases of this world, and while equality in Christ did the same, the Reformation’s evident emphasis on sola scriptura curtailed liberation for women. Most notably, both the silence of women passages as well as subordination of women to men played their part in Calvin’s Geneva. The situation for women was complex, and Kirsi Stjerna argues that subordination was dialectically related to an egalitarian spirit, so that early on, even Calvin supported some women preaching. But Calvin’s support didn’t last long.
In Calvin’s Geneva our woman in question had caught only the egalitarian spirit and began a vigorous effort to convert nuns out of the convents into Calvin’s churches and into liberation. And into conflict. One of her biographers put it this way: “Forced as a woman to find non-institutional ways to promote reform through writing and public preaching in taverns and on street corners, she incurred the wrath of Calvin, who publicly discredited her by calling her a heretic.” Her tone was preachy, her mood was argumentative, her hermeneutic was clearly liberationist, and her biblical knowledge was vast. She used Scripture to pounce on the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and the Anabaptists. Even the Poor Clares went to war with her.
Which Scriptures did our unnamed woman use? Those about the women who were biblical friends of Junia and the priesthood of all believers and the Christology of Galatians 3:28. Her aim was to liberate women to use the gifts God had given to them. She wrote a history of the reforms in Geneva, a remarkable eyewitness and biased account. They tried to destroy all copies of her book. Her actions led to restrictions on printers in Geneva. They tried to silence her, and Farel denounced her husband Antoine for “complicity” and for his wife’s “domineering” behaviors. Calvin had already denounced her—but then, in a stroke of irony and worse, asked her to write the Preface to a sermon on female attire. (The irony only got more pronounced when she accepted the invitation.)
She disappeared from the scene; no one suspects foul play. More importantly, her memory all but disappeared, and most of what remained was distorted into calumny. “As a woman,” one of her biographers observes, “she was criticized for achievements and fortitude for which a man would have been praised.” Not until 2002 was her name added to the Wall of Reformers in Geneva.
Junia is not alone in her silence because most people don’t know this woman’s name. We know Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Bucer and Cranmer, but we don’t know this woman’s name. Why? Because of the silencers and erasers.
Or take another woman, and this time just a brief mention before I move on to a fuller example. She hoped her life would display the symmetry of holiness in a balanced influence of theology, revivalism, feminism, and humanitarianism. Her Luther-like life-changing experience of “entire sanctification” propelled her into a life of profound influence, and she was perhaps the most influential woman of the nineteenth century. It has been said that she led more than 17,000 Britons to Christ and thousands more in the United States. She traveled the country in a pa
ssionate fire for Christ; she wrote eighteen books, edited one of the most popular magazines of her day, wrote a 400-pager on women in ministry, and pushed against male chauvinism on the basis of the Bible and theology.
Again, Junia is not alone in her silence, because most of us don’t know this woman’s name. We know Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Sunday, but we don’t know this woman’s name. Why? Because of the silencers.
One more example. This woman was the first African-American woman to establish a four-year institution of higher learning and the first African-American woman to hold a high-level government directorship. She advised three American presidents and, between 1933 and 1945, according to one of her biographers, she was “arguably the most powerful African-American person in the United States.”
Her parents were slaves; her mother’s and father’s faith and piety were extraordinary. She grew up loved, and before she could read, she was given a little New Testament to hold in church in order to instill a sense of yearning for the book. But because she was black, education was not in the offing.
Still, the Presbyterian Board for Freedmen opened a school for children in Maysville, South Carolina. She attended that school, and it led to her being confirmed in the Presbyterian church. She was in school until she was about twelve, when she had to return to the cotton fields. Miracle of miracles, someone far off in Denver sensed a whisper from God to give money to a child with potential, and our unknown woman was selected to attend Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. Her response? “I pulled my cotton sack off, got down on my knees, clasped my hands, and turned my eyes upward and thanked God for the chance that had come.” Many neighbors saw her off to Scotia.
At Scotia, she entered a brick building for the first time, climbed into an upstairs the first time, and had teachers who were black and white for the first time. When she finished, she attended a school that later became Moody Bible Institute, where she experienced both a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit and a calling to be a missionary to Africa. But the Presbyterians turned her down because they had no place for an African-American female missionary.
So she went south and famously taught young African-Americans and at one point had over a thousand local children in her Sunday school program. This work expanded her horizons, and when she had the opportunity to go to Daytona Beach, Florida, to establish a college, she jumped on it. Her part began in 1904, and her school was called the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls. Her focus was evangelistic, educational, and social reform. When her school expanded into Bethune College, her curriculum was Bible, industry, and English. Today it is called Bethune-Cookman.
In 1936, she reflected on her life and her situation and on the way Christianity worked in the US:
The Negro must go to a separate church even though he claims to be of the same denomination as whites. He is not allowed to sing, in unison with the white man, the grand old hymns of Calvin, the Wesleys—the triumphant songs of Christ and eternal glory. When at last he is called to his final resting place on earth even his ashes are not allowed to mingle with those of his white brother, but are borne away to some remote place where the white man is not even reminded that this Negro ever lived. Judging from all that has preceded the Negro in death, it looks as if he has been prepared for a heaven, separate from the one to which the white man feels he alone is fit to inhabit.
She experienced the utter violation of dignity that white folks used against African-Americans, but that didn’t stop her. She reversed the thunder of racism by conquering her enemies with love, with industry, with strategy, and with an educational system designed for the “uplift” of women and African-Americans.
And we—and I say this bitterly—returned the favor by not even knowing who this woman is.
Junia is not alone in her silence. We know the stories of Martin Luther King Jr., but this woman is all but forgotten today. Why? Because of the silencers.
Remember, Junia was a woman, and she was an apostle. But since a woman couldn’t be an apostle, Junia became the male Junias. You don’t have to dig deep to know why this happened. Bernadette Brooten has put it memorably: “Because a woman could not have been an apostle, the woman who is here called an apostle could not have been a woman.”13 There was no evidence in ancient manuscripts that anyone understood Junia as a male, no evidence in translations she was a male, and there was no ancient evidence that Junias was a man’s name. But still the church got into a rut and rode it out until some courageous folks said, “Oh, yes, Junia was a woman and she was an apostle, and we’ve been wrong, and we’re going to do something about it.”
Eldon Epp sums this all up well:
What may be more difficult to understand now is that such a sociocultural environment, one imbued with a view of a limited role for women in the church, still could influence some editors of the Greek New Testament in the mid-1990s to the extent that they could impose the masculine form upon an unaccented name . . . when all the church writers of the first millennium of Christianity took the name as feminine . . . when . . . the name was a very common female name . . . and . . . that the alleged masculine forms are nowhere attested. 14
But there is some good news here. Like Aslan’s Stone Table that cracked with new life, Junia has been raised from the dead. She’s back in the text, in all the texts. As if to compensate for their past sins, the editors of those composite Greek New Testaments have killed off the nonexistent Junias.
In 1998 the Jubilee Edition of Nestle-Aland and the UBS printed the same text. Junia is there, and Junias has disappeared. Junias was erased the way Junia had been erased. Murdering nonexistent males is a Christian thing to do and can even be done by pacifists. Junia has come back to life, and she is now in the text. Junias has disappeared (except in some translations), and we have again an “A” rating.
How odd it was to have an “A” rating for someone who didn’t exist and who had a name that didn’t exist. And now, how odd it is to have an “A” rating for a woman who had been erased from the apparatus. Who says New Testament texts and translations are not political?
In Having a Voice, Junia Is Not Alone
Today, in being present in the text as a powerful woman with a mighty voice, Junia is not alone anymore. In a sense, she never was, because there have always been voices who affirmed Junia as woman and an apostle. It began in the fourth century with John Chrysostom, and it is regrettable—that’s too soft a word—that the church both ignored him and then let others have the louder voice. Chrysostom, probably in about 344 AD, said:
To be an apostle is something great. But to be outstanding among the apostles—just think what a wonderful song of praise that is! They were outstanding on the basis of their works and virtuous actions. Indeed, how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle.15
His words were echoed by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, and John of Damascus. Other than the original commendation by Paul himself in Romans 16:7, Chrysostom’s comment gave the church a statue-like memorial to Junia, and it was that memorial that gave an anchor to the contemporary feminine reading of Romans 16:7.
Junia, my friends, is not alone. Many women today are active in ministry and are continuing with confidence and power the storied history of women in the Bible and the silenced history of women in the church. They are not silenced as they once were, and so we look around and sing to the women among us who are embodying the gifts God has given to them.
Unlike Marie Dentière16 and Phoebe Palmer17 and Mary McLeod Bethune,18 whose stories I sketched above but who were silenced for too long, a woman I know named Alice can be known and broadcast even as she does her work today.
Alice was a student of mine at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School way back in the days when people were wearing leisure suits and not really even wondering what to do with women in the church. She landed on her feet in the middle of America, in Iowa, an heir to Calvin’s Reformed churches.
Some stereotypes about America’s heartland are true in Alice’s case, or were for a time. She had a Northwestern undergraduate degree with a master’s from Trinity in counseling and psychology, a Harvard husband, and a Campus Crusade set of beliefs that included some traditional views of marriage and women in ministry. Alice had three kids and was running a medical research business when she up and got the idea that she should run for the school board. She didn’t win, but the experience of speaking publicly energized her because people were moved by her words.
She got to thinking God might want to use her teaching gift in the church, and when her husband Chuck’s investment work flew away with the rest of the American economy, Alice decided to teach an adult church class on money. “People came,” she told me, “and the next time even more people came.” Then she realized she liked it, so she taught another subject. An elder, after observing and sitting in her class, said to her, “Alice, you’ve got the gift. And we’ve been praying for a woman teacher in our church.”
Because of the stereotypes at work in cases like these, she and her husband spent some time renegotiating their relationship. Chuck has an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary but isn’t called to be a teaching pastor; Alice doesn’t have the MDiv, but she has the gift. Chuck has become Alice’s biggest supporter.
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