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Bible Dictionaries
Junias Junia
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (Romans 16:7)
A person saluted by St. Paul and coupled with Andronicus. As the name occurs in the accusative (Ἰουνίαν), it may be Junias, a masculine name contracted from Junianus, or Junia, a common feminine name; in either case a Latin name. If the name is that of a woman, she was the sister, or more likely the wife, of Andronicus. Other couples saluted in Romans 16 are Aquila and Prisca (Romans 16:3, the order, however, being ‘Prisca and Aquila’), Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister (Romans 16:15). Andronicus and Junia(s) are described as ‘kinsmen’ of the Apostle, as his ‘fellow-prisoners,’ as ‘of note among the apostles,’ and as having become Christians before St. Paul (see Andronicus). It is surely not at all impossible that St. Paul should include a woman among the apostles in the wider sense of accredited missionaries or messengers, a position to which their seniority in the faith may have called this pair. So Chrysostom understood the words (Hom. in S. Pauli Ep. ad Rom.).
T. B. Allworthy.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Junias Junia'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/j/junias-junia.html. 1906-1918.
