There
seems to be a consensus that early scribes subtly altered the text of the New
Testament to diminish the authority of women in the church. Back in 1984 Ben
Witherington explored this phenomenon in the western text of Acts.
P46 is our earliest text of Paul’s letters and dates from around 200 CE and Edgar
Battad Ebojo has recently shown that P46
has some textual variants at 1 Cor 11:9; 1 Cor 16:19, Gal 3:28; and Eph 5:24
that subtly reduce the standing of women in the church.
Dominika A. Kurek-Chomycz did a helpful study of the anti-Priscan tendency in
the manuscripts. Surprisingly,
a comprehensive study of the phenomenon is lacking. In this blog post I will
not attempt such a huge task, but will focus on Prisca and Junia in P46.
Name
order reversals that demoted women
There
are just 11 occasions in the NT when a woman is listed along with one or more
men. On 4 of these occasions the woman is named last; “Aquila and Prisca” (1
Cor 16:19); “Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris” Acts (17:34);
“Andronicus and Junia” (Rom 16:7); Eubulus and Pudens and Linus and Claudia (2
Tim 4:21). There are 7 cases where the woman is named ahead of at least one
man:
1.
“Mary and Joseph” (Luke 2:16)
2.
“Prisca and Aquila” (Rom 16:3)
3.
“Prisca and Aquila” (2 Tim 4:19)
4.
“Priscilla and Aquila” (Acts 18:18)
5. “Priscilla and Aquila” (Acts 18:26)
6. “Philolous, Julia, Nereus and his
sister …” (Rom 16:15)
7.
“Philemon … Aphia … Archippus” (Philem
2)
The
Center for New Testament Restoration (https://greekcntr.org/manuscripts.htm)
collates all manuscripts dating to before about 400 CE. They show only four
cases of names being reversed in order:
1.
W – Codex Washingtonianus places
Elijah before Moses at Matt 17:4. There is a simple explanation: after writing
the phrase μιαν και, the scribe’s eye skipped to the second instance of the phrase
and therefore he wrote the second name first.
2.
The same text promotes Andrew ahead
of James and John at Mark 3:18, presumably to conform the text to that of Luke
and/or Matthew, or to place Andrew with his brother.
3. D – Bezae places Priscilla behind
Aquila at Acts 18:26, where Priscilla (according to the original text) takes
the lead in teaching Apollos, an educated man.
4. P46 reverses Julia and Nereus at Rom
16:15, as well as Patrobas and Hermas at Rom
16:14 (see below).
It
is surely no coincidence that 2 of these 4 reversals are among the 7 cases in
the NT where women precede men, and that these two cases occur in manuscripts
that are known for their misogyny. There are about one hundred opportunities
for name switches in the NT so it is clear that woman have been demoted by the
process disproportionately compared to men. I will discuss Julia in more detail
below.
Women becoming men
Nympha
In
the text of Vaticanus, among, others, Col 4:15 sends greetings to “Nympha and
the church in her house”. Νυμφαν και
την κατ οικον αυτης εκκλησιαν. Most other manuscripts, however, change αυτης
(her) to αυτων (their) or αυτου (his). It is very likely that the transmitters
of the texts were uncomfortable with the idea that a woman led a house church,
so they took Νυμφαν to be the accusative of the male name Νυμφᾶς
and altered the pronoun accordingly. Here is the text in Sinaiticus:
Prisca
The
Index apostolorum discipulorumque,
ascribed to Epiphanius, identifies both Junia and Prisca as men (Ἰουνίας
and Πρίσκας). Attempts to change the gender of Prisca
were doomed to failure since Acts 18:2 is very explicit that Priscilla was a
woman. However, P46, being a collection of Paul’s letters, contained no text of
Acts and we do not know whether Acts was known to those who transmitted this
text. At 1 Cor 16:19 P46 adds a sigma to the name Πρισκα making Πρισκας, which
is masculine in form.
Prisca
appears in Paul’s letters elsewhere only at Rom 16:3 and 2 Tim 4:19, but in
both places the name is in the accusative (Πρισκαν) so its gender is ambiguous.
The effect of the Πρισκας variant at 1 Cor 16:19 in P46 is therefore to make
Prisca a man not only there but also at Rom 16:3.
In
Romans Paul acclaims Prisca very highly and greets her ahead of her husband and
indeed before anyone else. This would have been uncomfortable for misogynist
transmitters of the text and they solved their problem in P46 by the simple
addition of a sigma to Prisca’s name at 1 Cor 16:19. They may have assumed that
Πρισκαν in Rom 16:3 must have been a man and, primed to read Πρισκας at 1 Cor
16:19, they may have been encouraged to do so by the sigma at the start of the
following word (συν).
Kurek-Chomycz
points out that the manuscripts are fairly evenly split over whether the name
should be Prisca or Priscilla at 1 Cor 16:19. This demands an explanation since
nowhere in Acts did the scribes change Priscilla to Prisca, and none of them
change Prisca to Priscilla at 2 Tim 4:19. Even at Rom 16:3, where we are given
a lot of information about Prisca, she is not changed to Priscilla until the
seventh century, as far as we know. Why then is the form of the name at 1 Cor
16:19 so disputed among the early manuscripts? Kurek-Chomycz struggles with
this question, but a possible answer can be offered. The Πρισκας textual
variant at 1 Cor 16:19 would not have lasted long when the communities started
to use Acts extensively, for it directly contradicts the clear statement of
Acts 18:2. Scribes would replace Πρισκας with Πρισκιλλα or Πρισκα to remove
that contradiction. I do not know whether the original text read Πρισκιλλα or
Πρισκα, and it matters little. My point is that if the Πρισκας textual variant
was widespread in the early decades of the church, it could have given rise to
the even split that we see between the Πρισκιλλα and Πρισκα forms of the name.
Is there a better explanation?
Another
male version of the name Prisca is found in Sinaiticus, which has Πρισκον instead
of Κρισπον at 1 Cor 1:14. Πρισκον is the accusative of the common male name
Πρισκος (Latin Priscus).
It is hard to know how to interpret this variant. A second hand has corrected
it by placing two letters above the line.
Junia
and Julia
If
the misogynists behind P46 were embarrassed by Prisca, were they also
embarrassed by Junia, who was prominent among the apostles and was in Christ
before Paul?
Whereas
most manuscripts read οι και προ εμου γεγοναν, P46 reads ος και προ εμου γεγονεν. Thus, while the original text
stated that Andronicus and Junia were in Christ before Paul, P46 says that only
Andronicus was in Christ before Paul. James Royse writes, “Perhaps we have here
a reluctance to include a woman among those who were “in Christ” before Paul.”
But there is more. P46 also changes Ιουνιαν to Ιουλιαν (Julia), and this is significant, as we will see, because this
manuscript also messes with Ιουλιαν at Rom 16:15.
P46
has the names Ιουλιαν and Νηρεα reversed. It has also replaced the first letter
of Ιουλιαν with an alpha and the first letter of Νηρεα with a beta. This
corruption of the two names has recently been convincingly explained by Royse.
“In the exemplar the names were marked for transposition by the use of the
letters A and B, as is known from other manuscripts.” The scribe then saw the
letters A and B written above the start of the two names and misunderstood the
intent of the corrector. He then replaced the initial letters of the two names
with the A and B (just as someone copying Sinaiticus would convert Πρισκον to
Κρισπον – see above). P46 also
reverses the names Patrobas and Hermas two lines above, and it seems to me that
we now have a likely explanation. The corrector who wrote the A and B, or
someone else, wrote “switch the names” in the margin. A scribe did not know
that this referred (only) to the names Julia and Nereus so he swapped Patrobas
and Hermas as well as (or instead of) Julia and Nereus. The exchange of the
names Patrobas and Hermas is likely collateral damage from an attempt (successful
or otherwise) to switch Julia and Nereus. I am undecided whether the corrector
who wrote the A and B was trying to move Julia behind Nereus or return her to
her original position. Nor do I know whether he placed the A over the name that
he wanted to come first or incorrectly over the other name (which could have
caused the scribe’s confusion). In any case, at some time someone made (or
intended to make) a manuscript that read Ιουλιαν και την αδελφην αυτου (Julias
and his sister). The pronoun αυτου is
gender specific and makes the claim that Ιουλιαν is the accusative of a man’s
name (presumably Julias). By simply transposing the names Julia and Nereus
someone has turned Julia into a man. This is important because it would have
cast doubt on the gender of Junia of 16:7 (who has been transformed into
Ιουλιαν by P46). Misogynists would have been able to say, “Andronicus’s partner
was probably a man because his name appears later in the text as a man’s name.
Even if it refers to a different person of the same name, it shows that it was
a man’s name in Paul’s day and in Paul’s accent/spelling.” In their
determination to cast Prisca and Junia as men, they were, it seems, undeterred
by the fact that the masculine names Priscas and Julias were rare or
unattested. In much the same way, some, to this day, see Junia(s) as a man,
undeterred by the fact that it is unattested as a male name.
Conclusion
P46
made subtle changes to the text to cast doubt on the gender of both Prisca and
Junia, who were the two women who most offended patriarchal assumptions. P46 could,
theoretically, have added the sigma to Prisca at 1 Cor 16:19 by accidental
dittography, but we should no longer give it the benefit of the doubt since the
exchange of the names Julia and Nereus can only have been an attempt at
deliberate deceit, because name switches did not happen without good reason.
