Wednesday, August 17, Romans 16:1-16

Today we begin the list of personal greetings. Notice how many of the names are women, and the importance of their roles in the early church. Prisca is mentioned in Acts, Corinthians and 2 Timothy – we might call her Priscilla. Junia is another name masculinized by scribes in variant manuscripts – we’d call her Julia. These are households of faith, not yet institutions.

The names convey not only gender balance, but ethnic diversity, if we have eyes to see the Greek, Latin, and other cultural markers. Rome was a multicultural metropolis, centre of a global or at least international empire. This list implicitly claims that Paul’s Gentiles are a varied group, not all Palestinian diaspora. Could we list as balanced and varied a list of church friends in communities in today’s imperial ‘world-class’ cities?