From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 30 1995 - 08:23:59 EST
Larry Swain, whose persistent rephrasing of critical challenges to views I
have sometimes expressed has been such a boon to my thinking that I miss
his presence on b-greek for some time now, has sent me a note on the
recurrence of the Junia/Junias problem on the ELENCHUS list. It has exposed
another level of my ignorance and occasions a general question that does
have a bearing on this one.
First the citation (I won't name the original sender):
>Is there any evidence whether the person Paul refers to in the accusative
>*IOUNIAN in Romans 16:7 was a man or a woman? Aland's NT edition prints
>*IOUNIA=N (with circumflex on the alpha), thereby implying he was a man
>named *IOUNIA=S (cf. *BARNABA=S). Of course, reading *IOUNI/AN (with acute
>on the second iota) would be possible in principle (and in this case she
>could, though need not, be a woman). - I was surprised by the statement
>that the Apostle is a woman named Junia and that the passage has been
>misread in the past.
My comment on the basic question:
Yes, the form IOUNIAS with circumflex on the "A" is a theoretically
masculine form, but the problem is that it's a Latin name, and the Greek
masculine equivalent of the Latin name would surely be IOUNIOS. I really
think the proof must go the other way around: it needs to be shown why the
form is NOT feminine, which is what it appears to be.
My query:
Do we really have any EARLY evidence for accentuation of such names in the
Greek MSS? I just don't know enough, but my impression is that the accents
are not present at all in the older uncial MSS and that their appearance in
the cursive MSS is not necessarily a reliable indication. So is there any
significant evidence that the accent on IOUNIAN actually WAS a circumflex
on the A? In other words, is that supposedly masculine ending on the name
really ancient or might it well be a product of copyists who make the
assumption that it was a masculine name?
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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