The Bible on your shelf doesn't actually exist. No exact original of it is to be found in Greek, Syriac, or any other ancient language. It is, instead, the product of hundreds of compiled parchments and papyri, containing big blocks of text or little bits of it, some ancient, some more recent, some ancient but recently discovered. Along the way they got copied into uncials and minuscules, dubbed with names to inspire novels (Codex Sinaiticus; Philoxeniana), and now are signified in the clearinghouse Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece as

or .

Junia: The First Woman Apostle by Eldon Jay Epp Fortress, 2005 138 pp. $16, paper

It would seem to be a straightforward work of science to sort, date, and judge each of the texts, and in many ways it is. There are rules for comparing scraps of majuscules and scraped palimpsests. The scriptural scholars of bygone eras help contemporary ones through their own questions scrawled in the margins of their Bibles. And it's not too hard to recognize and correct the ever-so-slightly incorrect transcriptions of some sleepy monk in a tomb-cold scriptorium. But the letter is not copied alone; so is the spirit and the meaning. Text critics are inevitably exegetes, and aspiring exegetes must also be text critics. This is Eldon Jay Epp's basic principle for biblical studies.

Which brings us to Romans 16:7, embedded in the oft-overlooked collection of greetings to various Christian luminaries at Rome. Here Paul hails his "relatives who were in prison" with him, "prominent among the apostles" and "in Christ before" he was. This impressive pair is Andronicus and his coworker. The latter is sometimes called Junia—thus the KJV, every other English translation up till the 1830s, and nowadays the NRSV. The lion's share of recent English Bibles, though, give the name Junias, with the –s on the end. The RSV specifies Andronicus and Junias as "my kinsmen" and "men of note among the apostles"; the Good News generously adds a footnote after Junias suggesting the name "June"; the NIV—most widely read of all contemporary versions—offers no footnoted alternative to Junias at all. The matter at stake in the choice of names is the simple question asked of everyone upon entry into this world: Is it a boy or a girl?

Until about a hundred years ago, the consensus was universal. Junia was a woman. Every church father, without exception, thought so. Even John Chrysostom, not exactly famous for positive thoughts about the female sex, commented, "How great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle." However, in a curious twist of fate, the church a millennium and a half later concluded not that her wisdom was so great, but that, if she was indeed worthy of the title of apostle, then she wasn't a she at all. The very liberal vanguard that exalted the historical-critical study of the Bible found the leadership of a woman unthinkable, and so made Junia into Junias, a man—even though there is not a single record of the name Junias anywhere in ancient Rome.

The switcheroo from female to male was possible, in the first place, because the apostle's name appears only once, in the accusative form "Junian." (Exegetes need to be not only text critics, but first-rate grammarians as well.) The suffix –n is found on both masculine and feminine nouns. The one textual clue to help choose between them, in this case, is an accent mark. A

with a circumflex accent mark could come from masculine Junias, while a with an acute accent mark would derive from feminine Junia. But there are no accent marks in the oldest extant scriptural texts. There are no punctuation marks or spaces between words, either; such niceties are later developments. It is of no small significance, though, that as soon as scribes do start inserting accent marks in their fresh copies, they always choose the acute and never the circumflex. The only variant that they display is to the name Julia. Even this mistake is telling: Julia is another woman's name (in fact, the most popular Roman name for women), and probably first appeared when one of those notoriously sleepy scribes skipped ahead to Romans 16:15 and borrowed the name from there. The grammatical and even accidental choices of the medieval copyists reveal the whole interpretive tradition behind them.