Junia, outstanding among the apostles

Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kin and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles. For a thousand years no commentator doubted Junia was a woman. Then, quietly, translators turned her into a man named Junias — a name that does not appear in any Greek inscription of the period.

Romans 16:7 greets a husband-and-wife apostolic pair. Iounian in the accusative could theoretically point to either the female Junia or a hypothetical male Junias; every church father without exception read her as a woman. John Chrysostom wrote: "how great the wisdom of this woman must have been, that she was even counted worthy of the title of apostle." The shift to "Junias" began in medieval Latin manuscripts and spread through twentieth-century English translations, only to be reversed by the NA28 Greek text and most modern critical editions. The simpler reading of episēmoi en tois apostolois ("outstanding among the apostles") is also the older one. Junia was an apostle.