What Christians Owe to Unsung Leaders of the Early Church

What reason did they give for this change? "The answer," Brooten writes in Women in Scripture, a dictionary of women in the Bible, "is simple: A woman could not have been an apostle," and therefore, "the woman who is here called an apostle could not have been a woman." Further, she notes, while the female Latin name Junia has been found over 250 times in inscriptions from ancient Rome, "we do not have a single shred of evidence that the name Junias ever existed."

The implications for modern Christian women, says Brooten, are unmistakable. "If the first-century Junia could be an apostle, it is hard to see how her 20th-century counterpart should not be allowed to become even a priest."