From Timothy again. Is there, this might be a different Timothy. And thank you for all the Timothy's or the Timothy that's given all these. Is there information about any female apostles or leaders apart from the deaconesses in the early church or how they viewed examples like Junia or Phoebe? Okay, so just as far, it will start with Phoebe.
Paul in Romans 16, when he's giving his greetings to different people, he mentions Phoebe, who he said was a servant in the church at Cenchrea, which was the port city of Corinth. Nobody knows for sure. That word there, servant could mean deaconess and an official office in the church, or it could mean servant, just somebody who serves. And you don't know. I mean, there just isn't an answer to it. Now, in the early Christian writings, I'm not sure if there's anything in the second century about deaconesses.
There may have been deaconesses. I don't know. Now, when we get to the 200s, in the early third century, there's a work called The Didascalia, and it's sort of a church order that describes how different things should be done in the church. It's very useful looking at not that we have to obey everything it says, but it gives us some insight into what church life was like in the early 200s, how they did certain things.
Anyway, it talks about the Office of Deaconess and it says," And when she who is being baptized has come up from the water, let the deaconess receive her and teach and instruct her how the seal of baptism ought to be kept unbroken in purity and holiness. And you have need of the ministry of a deaconess for many other things.
For a deaconess is required to go into the houses of pagans where there are believing women, and to visit those who are sick, and to minister to them and their needs, and to bathe those who are recovering from sickness. So we have a description of the Office of Deaconess. It was not somebody who taught in the church.
And even there, the instruction it's talking about is not the formal instruction that Christians would have been given before baptism in the early 200s, but more just talking to a female convert just on keeping pure, maybe going into details that would be indelicate for a brother to go into or something like that. It mentions there. And just in anything that would require modesty or whether it would be a little awkward, like I said, going into the home if it was an unbelieving husband.
Nowadays, that might not seem very scandalous, but in ancient society, that could have seemed very strange for a man to be calling on somebody's wife when the husband wasn't home. It would depend on the situation. So a deaconess was used there. Now, those same ministries would have been carried on by sisters in churches that did not have deaconesses. They maybe didn't have that title, but you would have still had people carrying on a lot of the same functions. Phoebe may have been a deaconess.
John Chrysostom, who we have his sermons from the late 300s, he assumed that she was a deaconess, but he lived in the east where many of the churches did have deaconesses.
Other people interpreted what Paul says there as not an office, just that she was somebody who served and particularly served in, say, hospitality, that maybe Paul stayed, she may have had a place where he could stay when he was there, or she brought him food, ministered to his physical needs in that way, in addition to helping him in evangelizing women. And so Origen would have been one who understood that as, yeah, it's not talking about an official office. Okay, now the question of Junia.
There we know absolutely nothing, and there's very, very little said about this person in the early Christian writings because we know nothing. All we have is, again, Paul's greeting in Romans 16, where he mentions Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, who are of note among the apostles. Now, the first thing we don't know is if this is even a woman, because the Greek there could be translated Junias, which would be a man's name, or it could be Junia, just in the accents there or the declension, you don't know.
So, yeah, we don't even know if this is a woman or not. Origen assumed it was a man. Chrysostom thought that it was Junia, a woman. So, like I say, you have the two opinions there, but Junia or Junias is just not talked about very much in the early Christian writings because they don't know anything more than what was there. There was no tradition handed down about this person. Now, I mentioned Chrysostom thought that this was a woman, but if I'm taking I mean, this was in one of his sermons.
He spends, I don't know, a few sentences on it. I take him to be saying that he understands Paul is saying this is sort of an honorary title because she was somebody who worked along with the apostles in evangelism. And so he gives her that title sort of as an honorary thing as one of the apostles, one of the ones who were sent out. Not that she would have held an official office of apostle. But yeah, that's just his thought there. Like I say, Origen understood that this was a brother, not a sister.
If it is talking about a sister, yeah, we don't know in what sense Paul is using that. Then the other thing that complicates the whole matter more, just as in English, what Paul says there among note or noteworthy among the apostles could mean that the apostles thought that this person was noteworthy, or it could mean this person was among the apostles and was noteworthy, was an apostle who was noteworthy. The English could mean either one of those and the Greek could mean either one of those.
So we don't even know if this person is being called an apostle or is being said that this person had a good reputation from the apostles. So yeah, to build from that would be just building on sand. We don't know anything about this. We know everything else the Bible teaches about the leaders of the church. And so I would personally think it's very unlikely that he's talking about a woman referring to her as an apostle.
But yeah, I've shared what testimony we have from the early church, and that's just my thought on it.
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