Tag Archives: junia

Apostolic

15 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Early Church

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In Acts 1:24 when a successor to Judas is being mooted, Peter talks about those who accompanied Jesus during his earthly ministry. We know that included among those were many women from what Luke tells us, and that some of these women actually provided the funds to enable Jesus and his followers to live while ministering. That tells us something about the relationship and the role played by women. In that sense they fulfilled one of the requirements to be an Apostle – that is they had been part of the ministry. But they did not, and could not, fulfil the requirement to be a replacement for Judas. The “twelve” represented the twelve tribes of Israel, and only men were allowed to do that, indeed, only Jewish men were allowed to do that. While, in the early Church, the requirement to be Jewish would be gradually abandoned, the requirement to be male was not.

Did that mean that women were not “Apostles” or does it mean that there is more than one sense in which that word could be defined? If we take Luke’s stricter sense, that is being eligible to succeed Judas, the answer is clear enough. But that is not the only sense in which the word is used, not least by the man who often gets a bad rap from feminists, Paul. In his first letter to the Corinthians, in which he claims the title for himself, he defines the role as one who spreads the Gospel of Christ, and we know from Luke, and from Paul himself that women did this. Indeed, rather more than that in some cases, as we know that the very first witness of the risen Lord was one of the women Luke mentions as helping support Jesus and his ministry. It is often asssumed that the seventy two who get sent out were all men, but there is no actual warant for that except the (male) assumption that they must have been men. Yes, the Greek word leads us to that conclusion, but the Greek language has an adrocentric bias, and there is no reason not to read “men” as in some English phrases where “men includes women.”

Paul clearly regards being an Apostle as important, he stresses it often enough for us to be clear that it cannot be read loosely. It involves encountering the risen Christ and receiving the commission to spread the gospel, with all the sufferings that involved. It was certified, so to speak, by signs and mighty works. Junia, as an Apostle, must be said to fit this description, and given what Luke and Paul says about the role women play in the early church, the only occasion for surprise is that this has been ignored and, yes, suppressed for so long.

That last may seem harsh, but how else to characterise an historic position which, when the name was “Junias” and therefore male, accepted that “he” was an apostle, but when it was established that the name was female, argued that she was just “known to the Apostles”? There is, for those who want the detail, an extensive discussion of this in Epps’ book on Junia cited by C451, and also in Richard Bauckham’s excellent and scholarly (i.e. too deep for me in many parts) “Gospel Women” (2002) which goes into an extensive discussion of the koine Greek by experts in the use of the language.

In short, with Junia we are back to church tradition – ironically. It is later commentators, not the Church Fathers usually cited by those defending tradition, on which those defending “Junias” rest; they might ask whether there is any other case in which they’d prefer a twenth century source to a Church Father, and if not, why they feel the need to do so here. Chrysostom wrote:

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 worthy of the title of apostle.

There is, of course, a possible reason why some modern fathers prefer, for once, to ignore the Church Fathers, and that seems to be to do with the arguments for the ordination of women. For me, and for many others, that argument does not depend upon Junia, but on what one means by “tradition” and whether one thinks of it as static or whether one believes that the Holy Spirit is at work still guiding the Church. If the former is the case, then there’s no argument, although one might well ask how and why the requirement for the twelve to be Jewish was dropped, but the requirement to be men was retained; tradition either develops or it doesn’t. But these are arguments to which I shall hope to return.

In the meantime, we might consider imitating Chrysostom and marvelling at what Junia must have done to have been considered an apostle – and ponder in humility how it could be that she has been almost forgotten and often denied.

Gospel Women

08 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by in Bible, Early Church, Faith

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women-empty-tomb

It’s a long time since I wrote here, but Chalcedon’s typically kind republication of my little piece on the women at the tomb, and Audre’s lovely piece on the woman at the well prompts a few thoughts to share.

Too much of the commentary on women in the Gospel has been skewed by an almost feverish (often androcentric, but not wholly) desire to explain away what it means to call someone like “Junia” an “Apostle.” It was almost amusing to see the extent to which some of the comments on C’s essay on Junia went to deny the obvious literal reading, which is that a woman called Junia was “prominent among the Apostles”. If I just list the Church Fathers who all acknowledged the fact that “Junia” was a woman and an Apostle, it comes to the sort of list that, if I was using it to illustrate that (as they are) the consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus in a way not to be defined), traditionalists would be quick to say ‘there, look at that witness from the Church’; odd how it doesn’t work in Junia’s case. C quotes Ambosiaster (I’m not, by the way criticising him for not including all the others, just doing it myself), to which can be added Origen, Jerome, Chyrsostom, Theodoret and John of Damascus. Of course, you can (as others have in other cases) argue that they all got it wrong, and that it wasn’t until the twelfth century that it got put right; but I sort of feel that in any case other than one concerning women, traditionalists would be the first to say how jolly unlikely that one was! I especially love the example of A.C. Headlam in the late nineteenth century who wrote wrote that the fact the name was borne by an Apostle was decisive: ‘In that case it is hardly likely that the name is femine.’ Not one, then, to let the fact there is no known example of the name ‘Junias’ known in antiquity, get in the way of a conclusion he’d already drawn!

I wonder whether some of this isn’t the fault of women ourselves? How so? We’ve usually gone down this route to argue the case for women’s ordination. In my church that’s a done deal and in our special Anglican way we’ve managed to rub along, on the whole, nicely, so for me that’s a done deal, and those who don’t want it, fine, not my church, not my issue. I say this not to say it doesn’t matter, it does, but to wonder how it looks if we set it aside and ask what role women played in the early church?

How likely, for example, is it that in Jewish and Roman society a mission largely carried on by men would have done what we know it did, which was to bring in many women? It’s always interested me, because I’m as guilty of it as anyone, when the argument is used that the fact that the testimony of women is used by the Gospel writers is a decisive argument in favour of it being true that the tomb was empty, because the testimony of women was not acceptable in Jewish law. Pardon my laughter. No doubt it wasn’t, but the idea that women would ever have gone, ‘oh, you know, it was only a woman who saw that Jesus rise from the dead, so it must be true,’ is to ignore that, to women hearing the story, there would be no such impediment. Apart from anything else, the testimony was not actually being used in courts of law, so I’ve never been clear this mattered as much as we sometimes think. Why then was it used, because it’s right to say it would cause doubt in some quarters.

It’s certainly true that the ancient world shared the view still common in some parts of the modern world that women are a bit gullible in religious matters and prone to hysterical superstitious fantasy (guilty as charged m’lud!) Origen records the awful Celsus, that pagan hater of Christianity, as commenting thus about Mary Magdelen: ‘after death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment … but who saw this? A hysterical female as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery?” But it’s unlikely women shared that view of each other, and it may well be that those women we see in Luke who travelled about with Jesus along with the twelve, played a role in evengelising their own sex.

One reason for emphasising the testimony of women may well have been that those women Luke mentioned remained prominent in the early church. Richard Bauckham has written interestingly about how “Junia” and the “Joanna” mentioned by Luke may well be the same woman, and we know from Paul that women played a prominent part in the early mission of the church. What would be more likely then than mentioning the women because they were well-known in church circles? Mary of Clopas may well have been the mother of Symeon, who succeeded James as head of the church in Jerusalem, if so, mentioning her would have been a powerful testimony in the early church. As Bauckham puts it: ‘they surely continued to be active traditioners whose recognised eyewitness testimony coud act as a touchstone to guarantee the traditions as others relayed them and to protect the traditions from inauthentic developments.’ Which nicely links up with C’s essay on women as protectors of tradition, on which note, I’ll stop wittering and hope that, like me, you’re all managing to survive this ghastly plague. Prayers for you all, anyway.