Kaimi wanted the rest of the story.
Phebe is mentioned twice in the New Testament. The second time isn’t in the text proper but rather in the colophon to the letter to the Romans, which is printed as part of Romans 16:27 in our bibles:
Written to the Romans from Corinthus, and sent by Phebe servant of the church at Cenchrea.
So apparently Phebe is the person who physically transported the letter from Paul to the Romans. Note that she is described as the servant (in Greek, diakonos) in this verse. The same is the case in the other reference to Phebe, which is in Romans 16:1:
I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.
This verse implies that Phebe was not known to the Romans, so Paul is providing a sort of note of introduction to establish her legitimacy and/or credentials. And, of course, the word diakonos is used again. The KJV translates this word as ‘servant.’ Is that what it really meant? That’s a tough question to answer and I am not sure myself. Let me sketch out the data points.
The standard New Testament lexicon defines diakonos thus:
a. servant of someone
c. deacon as an official of the church
It also takes the position that the usage in Romans 16:1 fits under 2b. The tricky thing here is that the meaning isn’t static but rather changed under the influence of Christianity: a word that generally used to mean ‘servant’ gets morphed by Christian thought to mean ‘leader.’ (Not a bad idea, that.) Of course, we can’t timestamp the change, so it is difficult to determine in any given instance what the word would have meant to the person using it.
Further complication: Is a ‘deaconess’ different from a deacon who happens to be female? In other words, would the section in an ancient General Handbook of Instructions have listed different duties for deacons and deaconesses, or would the list have been the same regardless of gender? We don’t know. We do know that later in Christian tradition, the office of deaconess was different from that of deacon, but we can’t determine if that is a later innovation and, if so, when it happened.
To sum, I don’t think we can conclusively say what role Phebe had in the Church. We could make a good case for translating diakonos as either servant, deacon, or deaconess. And then we’d need to decide what exactly it meant to be a deacon or deaconess. So I think the feminists and traditionalists have to end this one with a draw.
There’s one piece of the puzzle that I haven’t mentioned: diakonos is used in the previous chapter:
Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister [diakonos] of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers.
So whatever else we think the word means, it seems noteworthy to me that Paul, just a few verses previously, applies the same term to Jesus. (The only other usage in Romans is 13:4–this appears to fit the lexicon’s 1b meaning.) It seems to me that it is very hard to make the case that the word should be translated as “minister” when it applies to Jesus but “servant” when it applies to Phebe. Either word would be appropriate for both, but the KJV hides something important by translating them differently. (Other uses of the word can be found here–just click on the name of the book in the right column.) I do think that the KJV translators are guilty of gender bias in their choice of how to translate this word–they only translate the word as ‘servant’ if it (1) applies to a woman or (2) is used more than once in the same verse (the other of the two occurences in the verse is translated as ‘minister’).
This issue is a big deal to some feminist interpreters; I think the irresolvability makes it less interesting than it might otherwise be, but it is interesting as a reminder that we can’t always completely pin down the meaning of words in the NT.