Two women stand at the edges of the earliest Christian record, each carrying a title the institution built on that record could never quite bring itself to honor in full. One is named by Paul in his own hand, greeted as his blood kinswoman, acknowledged as prominent among the apostles, and then quietly turned into a man by a thirteenth-century theologian whose redefinition held for seven centuries. The other is placed by all four Gospels at the center of the resurrection story, given by Hippolytus of Rome[1] in the third century the title apostola apostolorum, apostle to the apostles, and then remade by a pope’s homily[2] in 590 CE from the first witness of the risen Christ into a repentant prostitute, an identity the Catholic Church did not formally correct until 1969.[3] The two mechanisms work differently, but they take aim at exactly the same thing in each woman.

What Paul Says About Junia

Romans 16:7 is one verse that holds more historical information than most readers ever stop to draw out of it. Paul greets Andronicus and Junia as his kinsmen, his syngeneis, his blood relatives. He calls them his fellow prisoners. He notes they were in Christ before him. And he describes them as episēmoi en tois apostolois, prominent among the apostles, using the Greek preposition en, among, which most naturally places them inside the apostolic circle rather than merely admired by it from the outside.[4]

The name Iounian in the Greek accusative is the standard Latin female name Junia, attested more than 250 times in Greek and Latin inscriptions from Rome alone, with no epigraphic record anywhere in the ancient world of a corresponding male name Junias.[5] Every commentator on Romans 16:7 from Origen of Alexandria in the second century through John Chrysostom in the fourth, through Jerome, Hatto of Vercelli, Theophylact, and Peter Abelard, read the name as female.[6] Chrysostom[7] wrote without hesitation:

 “Indeed, how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle.”

No commentator took the name as masculine until Aegidius of Rome, also known as Giles of Rome, writing sometime between 1245 and 1316, referred to the pair as “those honorable men.”[8] He offered no explanation for the change. He simply assumed it, and the assumption needed no defense because by the thirteenth century a female apostle had become institutionally unthinkable.

Martin Luther’s German New Testament of 1522, following the commentary of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, added a masculine article to the name, and through Luther’s outsized influence the masculine reading spread across Protestant exegesis for the next four centuries. The name in the Greek text never changed. What changed was the gender readers assigned to it, readers who brought to the page a prior conviction the text itself never supported.[9]

What the Gospels Say About Magdalene

Mary Magdalene appears in all four Gospels as a witness to the crucifixion and in all four as a witness to the empty tomb or the risen Jesus. In John 20:1–18, she stands alone at the tomb, the first to encounter the risen Christ, the first to recognize him, and the first to be commissioned: “Go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). This commission, carrying the resurrection announcement to the male disciples, is the apostolic act in its most foundational form. It is exactly what Paul means when he describes his own commission in Galatians 1:15–16, that God was pleased to reveal his Son to him so that he might announce him. Magdalene’s encounter in John 20 follows the identical structure, a direct encounter with the risen Christ, then a commission to go and announce. By Paul’s own definition, apostleship is exactly what she holds.

Hippolytus of Rome recognized this in the third century and named it outright, calling her the apostle to the apostles. Augustine repeated the title in the fourth century. Bernard of Clairvaux used it in the twelfth. The title was never suppressed by outright denial. What got suppressed was its institutional consequence. She was called apostle to the apostles in devotional writing while being kept out of the formal apostolic succession that the title, taken seriously, would logically require. The honor was granted and drained of its structural weight in the same motion, a more sophisticated form of suppression than a flat denial would have been.

Then in 590 CE, Pope Gregory I delivered his Homily 33 on the Gospels, in which he identified Mary Magdalene with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7:36–50 who wept at Jesus’s feet, and with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus. Gregory had no textual basis for either identification. The three women are distinct figures in the Gospel texts, with nothing to suggest they are one person. But the composite Gregory built, Magdalene as the repentant prostitute whose many sins were forgiven, shaped Western Christian imagination for close to fourteen hundred years, turning the first resurrection witness into a figure defined mainly by her sinful past rather than by her apostolic commission. The Catholic Church formally withdrew the identification in 1969. The Vatican raised her feast day in 2016 to the rank given the feasts of the apostles, with a decree from the Congregation for Divine Worship citing her role as apostola apostolorum outright as the reason. That decree comes about as close as an institution gets to admitting that something was taken from her, and is now being returned, in part and very late.

Paul’s Silence on Magdalene

Here is the tension that neither suppression fully accounts for, and it runs through Paul’s own letters in a way that resists easy explanation.

In 1 Corinthians 15:5–8, Paul gives the earliest surviving list of resurrection appearances. He lists Cephas, the Twelve, five hundred people at once, James, all the apostles, and finally himself. No women appear anywhere in it. Magdalene, who in the Gospel tradition is the primary resurrection witness, the one to whom Jesus appears first, is missing from Paul’s list entirely. The usual explanation points to women’s testimony carrying no legal weight in a first-century Jewish or Roman setting, and to Paul constructing an argument built to persuade a skeptical audience. That explanation holds up as far as it goes. But Paul’s list is a theological argument inside a pastoral letter, not a legal deposition, and the same Paul who leaves Magdalene out of his resurrection list acknowledges, in his own hand, in Romans 16:7, that a woman named Junia holds apostolic standing. His silence on women in the 1 Corinthians 15 list is not a blanket refusal to imagine women in apostolic roles. He knows Junia is an apostle. He says nothing about Magdalene, not even as a resurrection witness. The gap is real, and the letters never close it.

The Parallel Suppressions

Lay the two cases side by side and the structural likeness becomes hard to look past.

Junia is named an apostle by Paul in the earliest surviving Christian documents. Her apostolic standing is acknowledged by every commentator for over a thousand years. Then a single theologian in the thirteenth century redefines her gender, and through the amplifying effect of Luther’s translation, the redefinition becomes standard. What gets targeted is the specific feature that makes her a problem, her female apostolic standing, and the mechanism doing the targeting works on the name itself.

Magdalene is given the title apostle to the apostles by Hippolytus in the third century, confirmed by Augustine, repeated by Bernard. Her primacy as resurrection witness cannot be argued away in any of the four Gospels. Then a single pope in the sixth century redefines her identity, folding her into a composite figure whose most memorable feature is sexual sin rather than apostolic commission. What gets targeted here is again the specific feature that makes her a problem, her primacy as the first witness and first commissioned announcer of the resurrection, and this time the mechanism works on the person herself.

Both suppressions run through substitution rather than removal. Junia’s female identity gets replaced with a male one, and Magdalene’s apostolic identity gets replaced with a penitential one. Neither woman disappears from the tradition. What disappears is the kind of figure each is allowed to be, so that her presence stays intact while its danger is drained out of it.

The Names and the Question They Leave Open

Mary is a Hebrew name, Miryam in its original form, one of the most common female names in first-century Jewish Palestine. Magdalene is a geographic identifier, of Magdala, a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Junia is a Latin name, standard in the Roman world and tied particularly to aristocratic and freedwoman families in the city of Rome. Pairing a Hebrew religious name with a Latin social name was common among diaspora Jews of the period. Josephus’s own family carried both Hebrew and Greek or Latin names side by side, and the women listed in Luke 8:1–3 as traveling with Jesus include Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, a figure whose social position places her directly inside the Herodian social world that Paul’s Romans 16 kinship network occupies.

Nothing about the naming conventions rules out a single woman being known in one setting as Mary of Magdala and in another as Junia. The social world fits together. A woman tied to the Herodian household network, present in the Jerusalem community before Paul’s conversion, prominent in the apostolic circle to a degree that made Paul acknowledge her as a blood kinswoman of apostolic standing, would have moved between the Hebrew religious world of the Jesus movement and the Latin social world of Rome with exactly the kind of double naming the period treated as ordinary.

What the texts give us are two women suppressed through mechanisms that target the same institutional nerve, both connected to the apostolic commission in its most foundational form, both present in the earliest period of the movement, and both missing from the places in the record where their presence would have carried the most weight. Magdalene is missing from Paul’s resurrection list despite being the primary resurrection witness in the Gospel tradition. Junia’s female identity is missing from the tradition for seven centuries despite standing in the Greek text from the beginning.

Whether they disappeared apart, each suppressed through her own mechanism by people acting in different centuries with no knowledge of the other case, or whether they are the same person suppressed twice, once in Paul’s silence and once in Gregory’s homily, is a question the texts raise without settling. The parallel is too structural to write off as coincidence and too underdetermined to count as proof. The argument developed in The Gospel as Mirror: Inversion, Substitution, Suppressed carries this question further than the primary texts alone allow, into territory where the suppressions start to look less like independent institutional decisions and more like the coordinated erasure of one inconvenient witness.

What the primary texts establish on their own, without that fuller argument, comes down to this: the two most prominent women in the earliest Jesus movement, the one the Gospels place at the center of the resurrection and the one Paul names as his blood kinswoman in the apostolic circle, both vanish from the institutional record through mechanisms that operate on the same nerve, at different moments in history, with the same result. The witness stays in the text. What her witness means keeps getting removed from her, quietly, and across centuries.

---

[1] Hippolytus, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in The Fathers of the Church, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016).

[2] Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), Homily 33.

[3] Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, General Roman Calendar (1969).

[4] The word syngenēs in Romans 16:7 carries a genealogical weight that opens a further question in the context of the broader argument developed in The Composite Paul: A Critical Inquiry. If the reconstruction of Acts’ Paul as a figure belonging to the Herodian aristocratic network is correct, then Paul’s description of Junia as his syngenēs, his blood relative, raises the possibility that Junia herself belonged to that same network. The name Junia was one of the most common female names in the Roman world, belonging to the gens Junia, a prominent patrician family with a long Republican history. As Bernadette Brooten demonstrated through her study of Roman inscriptions, (in Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, ed. Leonard Swidler and Arlene Swidler (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), 141–144.) over 250 examples survive from Rome alone, and the name carried no exclusive aristocratic marker; freedwomen and women of modest status bore it as readily as those of high birth. Sharing the name alone therefore tells us nothing about Junia’s family identity. The question that the Herodian reconstruction raises is different: not whether the name connects her to the gens Junia specifically, but whether a woman Paul calls his blood relative and places in the apostolic circle might herself have belonged to the aristocratic world his kinship network inhabited. There is no genealogical evidence linking her to Junia Claudilla, the first wife of the Emperor Caligula, or to the imperial household more broadly. The connection remains a structural possibility rather than a demonstrable claim: if Paul moved in Herodian circles, and Junia was his blood kin, her social world was likely adjacent to his, though precisely how adjacent the surviving evidence cannot say.

[5] Eldon Jay Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 23–29.

[6] Ibid. 18–35.

[7] John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans, Homily 31, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 11, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).

[8] Eldon Jay Epp, Junia, 30–31.

[9] Eldon Jay Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), especially pp. 23–35, where he traces the shift from the patristic feminine reading to Lefèvre d’Étaples, Luther, and the Protestant tradition.