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Given how the last thread devolved into personal attacks on me by certain parties, I am starting a new thread on this in Celestial because I know this topic is of interest to several people here. (It was really rather off-topic from the last thread anyways.)

I've made three corrections/updates to my blog article on "The Apostle Junia," all of which were discussed or mentioned in the last thread. Going to use three separate posts for this.

Correction 1: Epiphanius of Salamis DID NOT say Junia was a man

Frequently the anti-Junia crowd cites a passage attributed to early church father Epiphanius (AD 310 – 403) wherein the author claims Junia was a man. It turns out that the scholarly consensus on the text in which this comes from --- Index discipulorum --- is that Epiphanius did not write it. It was not attributed to Epiphanius until the 9th century and is thought to date to c. 8th century.

This passage was first brought to bear on the Junia debate by John Piper and Wayne Grudem in a 1991 chapter for one of their books, and the database from which they conducted their search even says that the passage is considered pseudo-Epiphanius, yet they did not disclose this in their essay (!). Most commentators since then, both egalitarian and complementarian, have simply run with their assertion that the passage is from Epiphanius without questioning this. Most egalitarians simply responded by pointing out that this witness is problematic because it also says Prisca was a man, as did I.

I have updated my blog article to reflect that the passage is 8th/9th century pseudo-Epiphanius. This means that the anti-Junia crowd has not a single patristic commentator who said Junia was a man, not even this flawed testimony.

Correction 2: Ambrose never commented on Junia

In his book on Junia, Eldon Jay Epp presents lists of people from the patristic era and the middle ages who commented on Junia and said she was a woman. These lists were compiled by different scholars and are only listed by Epp. One scholar gave Ambrosiaster as a witness who had commented on Junia and another gave Ambrose.

It turns out that there is only Ambrosiaster; Ambrose never commented on Junia. The confusion stems from the fact that the Patrologia Latina, which was compiled in the 1800s (and is still used by scholars today because so many of these texts have never had a full English translation or a critical Latin edition), still lists Ambrose as the author of the commentary on Romans. We know now that it was written by "Ambrosiaster" or Pseudo-Ambrose.

This brings the number of patristic commentators & translators who said Junia was a woman down to six: (1) Origen via (2) Rufinus, (3) John Chrysostom, (4) Ambrosiaster, (5) Jerome, and (6) Theodoret of Cyrrhus. The total number of commentators from the patristic era and the middle ages who said Junia was a woman (and often, an apostle) is 22, down from 23.

I am in the process of compiling the six patristic authors who commented on Junia and doing my own translations from the Latin and Greek. While many articles footnote these sources, very few actually tell you what was said (outside of Chrysostom). I will run it as a blog post, either at Weighted Glory or a guest post elsewhere, when I am finished.

I would like to also do the middle ages commentators, and Ps.-Epiphanius will be included there if and when I get to it.

Correction 3: There was a response on the ἐπίσημοι ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις issue

I stated in the other thread that it had been 16 years and Dan Wallace had never responded to criticisms of his 2001 article. This is technically true, but his co-author, Michael Burer, finally published a response in 2015 (13 years after the first responses to his article appeared, 10 years since Linda Belleville's thorough critique). It appears to be an impressive article at first glance, but after examining his "new" evidence, I am underwhelmed. His attempts to dismiss the patristic testimonies are now even more problematic than they ever have been.

More on this when I have time (maybe later today, maybe tomorrow). This post will be edited.