Presenting her body: Junia’s meaning-making with Paul’s ‘body in Christ’ metaphor of Romans 12:4-5

In Romans 16:7 Paul greets Andronicus and Junia whom he describes as his ‘fellow-prisoners’, συναιχμαλώτοι. Imprisonment in the first-century Roman Empire was an experience of profound bodily risk and danger – for all people, but in specific ways for women. There were fears and vulnerabilities particularly experienced by women in first-century prisons. Paul’s greeting of Junia implies that she had been released from prison and was amongst those who heard Phoebe read Paul’s letter to the Romans – including the instruction to ‘present your bodies as a living sacrifice’ which precedes Paul’s language of many ‘body parts’ becoming ‘one body in Christ’. This paper presents one plausible, imaginative reconstruction of Junia as a former prisoner and empathetically listens from her perspective to Phoebe reading Romans 12:4-5, asking how Junia’s embodied experiences of imprisonment shaped her meaning-making with and response to Paul’s ‘body in Christ’ metaphors. This paper contends that Junia’s meaning-making was formed by the shame and trauma of her imprisonment: trauma which fractured her sense of identity and of her place within the ‘body’; and shame which further tightened the tensions around Paul’s language of belonging in 12:4-5. Such a reading from Junia’s perspective therefore illumines potential difficulties of the realities of belonging to the ‘body in Christ’ as Paul envisions it, sharply contextualising his ideal construction of relationships within the ‘body in Christ’ with Junia’s embodied experiences.