Julia Is in the Bible — Greeted by Name in Romans 16

Julia is in the Bible. She is greeted by name in the last chapter of Romans, and that is the whole of what we know about her.

Which turns out to be worth an article, because of the company she is listed in.

What does the name Julia mean?

It is the feminine of Julius, the Roman family name of the gens Julia — the clan of Julius Caesar. Like most Roman names it says which household a person belonged to rather than what they were like.

In the first century it was an extremely common name, particularly among women connected in some way to the imperial household, including freed slaves who took the family name on manumission. That last detail matters for who this Julia probably was.

Is Julia in the Bible?

Yes. Romans 16:15:

Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas and all the Lord’s people who are with them.

That is her entire appearance. One name in a list of greetings at the end of a letter.

The chapter she is in

Romans 16 is a list, and it is one of the most quietly remarkable passages in the New Testament.

Paul greets twenty-six people by name in a church he has never visited. He knows who they are. He knows which of them worked hard, which were in prison with him, which house a congregation meets in, whose mother had been like a mother to him.

And the names themselves tell a story to anyone who reads Roman inscriptions. A great many of them are the names of slaves and freed slaves — Philologus, Nereus, Olympas, and very likely Julia. Several appear in the same verse as couples or households.

This is the church at the centre of the empire: mostly poor, substantially enslaved or formerly enslaved, meeting in somebody’s rooms, and known individually by a man writing from hundreds of miles away.

Why the list is in the Bible

It would have been easy to leave out. A modern editor would cut it.

But it is there, and it does something no doctrine can do on its own: it proves the thing the letter has been arguing. Fifteen chapters about Jew and Gentile, slave and free, law and grace — and then a list of actual people, Greek names beside Latin ones, women named alongside men, a household here and a household there.

The argument ends in a list of names because that is what the argument was for.

For anyone who feels like a name in a list

Most of us are. We will not be quoted. Whatever we are doing this week will not be written down.

Julia was greeted once, in a sentence with four other people in it, and we have been reading her name for two thousand years. She did not know that would happen. She was simply there, in that church, doing whatever she did — and Paul, who had never met her, knew she existed and wanted her greeted.

Scripture keeps lists. That is the encouragement, and it is not a small one.

A blessing for Julia

May we be known by name where it counts.

May we greet people individually rather than generally, as Paul took the trouble to do.

And may we be content to be one clause in somebody else’s letter, since that is where most of the faithful have always been.

Related reading

• Caroline Is Not in the Bible — but Junia Is
• Julian Is Not in the Bible — but Julius Is, in Acts 27
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names