Massive debates have erupted over whether Paul calls Junia an apostle alongside her (presumed) husband Andronicus (Rom 16:7). There are three main interpretive issues: (1) whether Junia (or Junias) is even a woman, (2) whether he or she is “outstanding among the apostles” (and therefore an apostle) or “outstanding to the apostle” (and therefore highly esteemed by the apostles, but not one of them), and (3) if Junia is an apostle, what kind of apostle? The word can refer the original 12, a broader group of church leaders including Paul, or simply a messenger or emissary sent out by a church.
Since it’s virtually settled that Junia (not Junias) was a woman, in this paper I will focus on issues (2) and (3). I will first interact with the important articles by Burer and Wallace (2001) and Burer (2015), which argue that Junia was highly esteemed to not among the apostles (and therefore not an apostle). I will then interogate recent evaluations of Burer’s 2015 article by Yii-Jan Lin (2020), who disagrees with Burer, and Esther Ng (2020), who cautiously agrees with Burer. In the end, I will argue that Wallace and Burer have misinterpreted several parallel constructions to Rom 16:7. The weight of the grammatical evidence, as noted by Lin (2020), therefore suggest that Paul does identify Junia as an apostle.
I will then briefly survey the third issue: what kind of apostle was Junia? I will argue that there’s little evidence that Junia was an emissary sent out by a local church, and she was obviously not part of the original 12. I will cautiously suggest, in light of the often-neglected scholarly attention to her and Andronicus’s imprisonment (though see Gupta 2020, 2023), that Junia and Andronicus were considered apostolic leaders in the early church.