Women’s Ordination in the Catholic Church

279
Origen develops the point: “How great the wisdom of this woman that she was even deemed worthy of the apostle’s title.”

The early church fathers universally understand Junia to be a woman. Joseph Fitzmyer lists sixteen Greek and Latin Christian writers of or around the first millennium who unambiguously accepted that Junia was a woman.

There is no direct evidence that “they have been with us the whole time” (Acts 1:21), but they must come close to it. The flow of the verses before and after this one in Romans 16, suggests they were husband and wife, but as we have seen in considering 1 Corinthians 9:5, Junia was not by that fact any less a missionary or any less an apostle. She too is to be numbered “among the apostles” (en tois apostolois).

Here Andronicus and Junia are given the highest Pauline appellation of “apostle” (1 Cor 12:28; Eph 4:11). More, they are “notable” or “illustrious” or “outstanding” among the apostles, and have been so even before Paul’s conversion to Christ.

Although Jesus certainly “called” some “disciples” to a more intimate association with him and equally certainly “sent” them to proclaim the kingdom of God, from the available evidence, one can reasonably infer that the appellation “apostle” was one given by the very early post-resurrection communities.

Finally, there are Andronicus and Junia, mentioned in Romans 16:7. There were even counterfeit “super-apostles” in Corinth, who made Paul’s life so difficult (2 Cor 11:13–15).

Many decisions about ministry and office in the early Church are similarly derived not from the ipsissima verba Jesu at a putatively reconstructed Last Supper but from developing, ecclesial practice animated by the presence and power of the resurrected Christ.

Paul, never one of the Twelve, sees himself as an apostle