The biblical women Junia and Phoebe.
Without home law in the Roman Catholic Church?
A contribution by Prof. Dr. Michael Theobald, Tübingen
(from the "Catholic Sunday Gazette" No. 13, 25 March 2012)
I translate it excerpts:
Were there female deacons and apostles in the early Church? This question at the beginning of the year to our readers. In letters to the editor, they eagerly discussed a controversial passage in the Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul referred to the "Servant Phoebe" and the Apostles Andronicus and Junias (Rom 16:1f.7). The fact that the "respected apostle" Junias, as exegetes know today, is based on a mistranslation and was actually a Junia is crucial for the role of women in the Church. The Tübingen New Testament era Michael Theobald explains the situation. (...)
The history of interpretation of Romans 16,7 shows how overwhelming tradition can weigh on Scripture. Until recently, it seemed clear that this is not about one man and a woman, but about two men, as the text of the 1979 initiating translation shows: "Greetings Andronicus and Junias, who belong to my people and were in prison with me; they are distinguished apostles and have already confessed to Christ before me" (Romans 16:7).
This translation is based on the United Bible Societies international and interdenominational Greek edition of the Greek New Testament (= GNT, 1st edition 1965), in whose editorial committee since the 2nd edition (1968) in the person of Carlo Martini, the former cardinal of Milan, also the Catholic side entered. In Rome, this edition is recognized as a basis for translation for the Catholic area, especially since the Neovulgata (1979), the official Latin translation of the Church, is also oriented towards it. The GNT , as well as the Novum Testamentum Graece of Nestle-Aland (= NA) – now read the ambiguous Greek word IOYNIAN in Rom 16,7 as Iounon = Junias, not (which would have been possible) as Ioun'an = Junia. In the meantime, both editions have been reversed for important reasons, as we shall see in a good time – first Nestle-Aland (in the 5th edition of the 27th edition) in 1998, followed by GNT – in order to give preference to the woman named Junia. (...)
Everything, as the attentive reader will have noticed, depends on an accent. It is important to note that Greek manuscripts in lowercase letters and accents (so-called minuscules) were only used in the 9th century. Until then, the Bible texts were written in capital letters, which in our case looked like: IOYNIAN. This form does not indicate whether the word is male or female, but the matter is clear:
A male name in the form of Junius is unknown to the whole of antiquity, which is why the way out, it is a short form of "Junianus", is not feasible.
For this, the woman's name was widely used; In Rome alone it can be found on more than 250 Greek and Latin inscriptions. So there is no doubt: the addressees of the letter knew that a married couple is meant here, namely Andronicus and Junia, as a few verses before also with Aquila and Priscilla (Romans 16:3f.). In general, couples played an important role in the mission of the early Church, just think of Peter and his wife whose names we unfortunately do not know (1Cor 9:5; cf. Mark 1:30).
Moreover, the Greek Fathers of the Church, for example Chrysostom, confirm the female understanding of the name, which was also common in the West until the 13th century. The Greek Orthodox Church still commits "the memory of the holy apostles Andronicus and Junia" every year on 17 May. But this is where the resistance to this reading ignites.
How is this to be possible that a woman and her husband also belonged to the circle of apostles? Dogmatists like to dismiss: "Apart from the hypothetical nature of this thesis," Cardinal Kasper said in 2011, "it is no more than that a woman was an emissary of the church, but not an apostle in the true sense of the word" (p. 535). I do not agree!
Here, too, the standard one-size-fits-all translation is misleading. Their improvement reads: "Andronicus and Junia [...]; they stand out among the apostles and have already confessed themselves to Christ before me". If Paul means "emissaries of the churches", he also says this: 2Cor 8,23; Phil 2.25.
On the other hand, does he mean the Easter- Witnesses, to whom the Risen One appeared in order to to authorize the proclamation of the Gospel, he speaks of "the Apostles" as a certain group of people, without any supplementation (cf. 1Cor 15:7.9; Gal 1,17.19; 1Cor 9,5, but also 1Cor 4,9; 12,28). This circle is meant here (cf. Gal 1:17: "the apostles before me"). With the "Twelve" – Jesus had in his lifetime in a prophetic symbol twelve men as representatives of the twelve-tribe of Israel he had chosen to gather (cf. Mark 3:16; John 6,70 etc.) – the Easter circle of "the Apostles" had nothing to do originally (cf. 1Cor 15:5.7).
This circle was larger than that of the "Twelve" and could also include women, as Romans 16:7 shows (cf. also Jn 20:18 the Easter witness Mary Magdalene as "apostola apostolorum"). Only afterwards were both circles merged into the "twelve apostles", as in Luke's
who therefore also has difficulties in the Acts of the Apostles in integrating "his" Paul. He prefers to speak of the (thirteenth) "witness".
Now the Apostolic Exhortation of Pope John Paul II,'s 1994 Apostolic Letter ,Ordinatio Sacerdotalis', which is the responsibility of Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, invokes the exclusion of women from the priesthood, above all on the fact that only men belong to the circle of "the Apostles", which is obviously not true. For the "twelve" are not identical with "the apostles". This means that we are faced with a fatal situation: A decision "so high-level in terms of the degree of authority, to which Walter Cardinal Kasper declares that "I can hardly imagine a change in the church's teaching", claims in the result "binding and final character" (Catholic Church, p. 339f.), is flawed in its reasoning.
This inner inconsistency, which also concerns other points, explains why the discussion about the ordination of women, even though Rome wanted to see it as definitively over, keeps flaring up again and again.
At present, no one knows how to deal with this serious mortgage from the point of view of many theologians (a quasi-infallible decision with erroneous justification) – unless one hides the aporia. (...)
