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PAUL
PRAISES A WOMAN APOSTLE
By Rena Pederson
Like many women, I was surprised when I first
heard Junia’s story. I was speaking to a book club about women
in the Bible when an audience member raised her hand and
suggested that “Junia” was a little-known apostle who ought to
be included.
Junia? I had never heard of her before. But the woman in the
audience insisted that Paul praised Junia in the book of Romans
and that years later translators changed it to a man’s name
because they didn’t believe a woman could be an apostle.
I was stunned. I had spent a lifetime of Sundays in church,
paying attention most of the time, yet I had never heard a word
about someone named Junia. As a newspaper reporter and a Christian, I was intrigued—and
that was the beginning of my “missing person’s search” for
Junia. It took me through dozens of Bible translations, to
theology schools across the country, and around the world to the
catacombs in Rome.
The minute I got home, I rushed to my bookshelves and looked up
Junia’s name in the Bibles I had on hand. There it was, in
Romans 16:7—“Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives, who
have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the
apostles and they were in Christ before I was.”
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I was stunned. I had spent a lifetime of Sundays in church,
yet I had never heard a word
about someone named Junia. |
But about half the Bibles had what looked like a man’s name –
Junias – instead of the female name. Commentaries were equally
split, but the newer commentaries acknowledged that Junia was
probably the wife of Andronicus, both of whom were prominent
among the apostles. Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible went on to
say that Junia is the “only woman called ‘apostle’ in the New
Testament; she may have had a charge of some sort and may have
been among the restricted leadership of the church.” That is,
she was not an Apostle with a capital “A,” like the twelve
disciples, but she was a leading messenger, an apostle with a
little “a.”
Some commentaries even acknowledged that Junia’s name had been
changed later by church leaders who were uncomfortable with the
idea of a woman being an apostle.
So the woman in the audience had been right. That surprise led me
to seek out top New Testament scholars around the world—and
the vast majority agreed that Junia was indeed a historical
figure who played a valuable role in the early church. This
affirmation led me to write my book,
The Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth about Junia.
The Invisible Woman
Since its publication last year, Junia’s story has given me a
deeper appreciation of the difficulties women face gaining
recognition in the world of religion. The problem of “the
invisible woman” in American culture had been on my mind for
some time. It seemed as if every time I gave a book talk, a
woman from the audience would come up afterward and shyly say,
by way of introduction, “You don’t know me. I’m nobody.”
The truth is that, despite having more freedom in today’s
liberated world, many women still feel like nobodies,
insignificant in our culture, unworthy of regard. The way women
are treated by the church has repercussions on how women are
treated by society and how women perceive themselves. They need
reassurance that the stories of women count.
After The Lost Apostle was published, women ministers often
came in twos and threes to my book signings and said
encouragingly, “I’m so glad you wrote this.” One of these
ministers, Rev. Nancy Kellond, told me that when she first felt
a calling to the ministry two decades ago, she had a hard time
picturing herself as a female church leader because she had
never seen one in the pulpit. In her first three postings, she
broke ground as the first woman minister. She is now the first
female pastor in a Methodist Church that is 168 years old,
baptizing the babies, comforting the sick,
and sharing communion and
God’s word with dignity and sensibility and grace.
Other women are still facing rejection by church leaders. About
the same time my book was published, seminary professor Sheri
Klouda and Sunday School teacher Mary Lambert made headlines
when they were dismissed by church leaders in different parts of
the country. Their only mistake was that they were women.
|
The way women
are treated by the church has repercussions on how
women are treated by society and how women perceive
themselves. |
Dr. Klouda was banned in January 2007 from
teaching her seminary class at a Texas seminary simply because
of her gender. Although she had been teaching there for two
years with very good reviews, the administration decided to
discontinue her teaching before she could finish her tenure
track, basing their decision on their interpretation of the
controversial passage
attributed to Paul in the first epistle to Timothy: “I do not
permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must
be silent.”
After considerable soul-searching, Dr. Klouda filed a federal
lawsuit against the school, saying that she lost her
tenure-track position because of her sex. The incident was
especially ironic because Dr. Klouda was booted from her
teaching position the same semester that Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust
was named the first woman president of Harvard University. It
was a reminder that women can teach and lead today in some of
the finest universities in America, while some theological
schools continue to reject women’s gift of leadership.
Mary Lambert was abruptly dismissed as a Sunday School teacher
in Watertown, N.Y., even though she had been teaching church
classes there for 54 years. Her minister, like the head of
Professor Klouda’s seminary, interpreted the same verse from
Paul as a universal description of what women supposedly can and
cannot do.
But the Watertown minister ignored the fact that Mrs. Lambert, a
member of the church board, chaired the same pulpit committee
that had chosen him as the new minister! She had, in effect,
exercised authority that granted him a position. In another
ironic twist, the Watertown congregation is affiliated with the
American Baptist Churches (ABC), which supports the ordination
of women, but the ABC also supports the autonomy of individual
churches, which allowed this decision to be made.
In another example that was almost laughable, two Catholic women
in Southern California were forbidden to serve in any ministry
until they repented of wearing buttons that read “Equal Rites –
Ordain Women,” which they wore while serving the Eucharist.
On What Basis?
The banning of women preachers and teachers, and the relegation
of women to secondary roles as ministers are reminders of why
we need to shine a brighter spotlight on stories of early church
women like Junia. There needs to be an honest debate about the role of women in
the denominations that continue to discriminate against women
despite biblical moorings such as Junia’s testimony in Romans
16:7. (The Southern Baptist
Convention, the largest Protestant
denomination at 16 million, does not approve of the ordination
of women, along with the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church,
the Orthodox Church, and the conservative branch of the
Presbyterian Church.) Even women in Protestant denominations
that do ordain women encounter a stained glass ceiling. More
than half the graduates from their seminaries are women, but
only 3 percent of those women are assigned to churches larger
than 350 members. Most are assigned to assistant pastor
positions and few become leaders of large congregations.
One of the great ironies is that women are being fired or held
back based on words believed to be addressed by Paul to Timothy—and yet Timothy himself was instructed by women! Paul’s other
references to women include praise for Lois and Eunice,
Timothy’s mother and grandmother, for shaping Timothy’s strong
faith through their teaching and example.
As Christians for Biblical Equality often reminds us, there were
many other early Christian women besides Lois and Eunice who
spread the gospel—women like Priscilla and Phoebe. And Junia.
|
One of the great ironies is that
women are being fired based on words addressed by
Paul to Timothy—and yet Timothy himself was
instructed by women! |
Yet misguided notions that women should
not be
church leaders still prevail. A girl can grow up to be almost anything today—the commander of a NASA space station like Eileen Collins, or
Secretary of State like Condoleezza Rice, or a Fortune 500 CEO
like Anne Mulcahy of Xerox—but not a minister or even a
teacher in some of the larger Christian denominations.
The unhappy result is that women view themselves as being less
worthy. The power of suggestion is remarkable. A recent study by
researchers at British Columbia University showed that when
women are told that females are bad at math, they perform worse
on math tests than women who are told that
this is a false stereotype
they can overcome. Even a neutral reminder of their gender was
enough to cause the women to score worse on the tests. When I
read about the study, I wondered how much more corrosive to
women’s self-confidence is the continued misconception that
women can serve God only in supportive, secondary roles?
Junia’s story is more proof that women in the early church did
teach and lead—and were praised by Paul for doing so. Her
story is not some kind of “magic bullet” to resolve all
differences about women’s roles in the church, but it is
certainly one more good reason to challenge the status quo. |
Rena Pederson
