Phoebe (Greek Phoibē, 'bright') was a Christian woman of Cenchreae — the eastern port of Corinth on the Saronic Gulf, the harbour serving the Corinthian Christian community on its Athens side. Paul, writing the Epistle to the Romans from Corinth around AD 56–57, includes at the very opening of the letter's closing greetings (Romans 16:1–2) what is universally regarded by exegetes as his official commendation of Phoebe to the Roman Christian community as the bearer of the letter itself.
Paul's commendation uses two distinctive Greek terms: he calls Phoebe a diakonos (deacon — Romans 16:1) of the Cenchreae Christian community — the first time this title is applied to a specific named individual woman in the New Testament — and a prostatis (Romans 16:2 — literally 'standing-before,' a Greek term for a benefactor-patron of significant social standing). The combination strongly suggests that Phoebe was a substantial property-owning Greek-Christian woman who exercised formal ministerial leadership at the Cenchreae church and who personally transported the Pauline Epistle to the Romans across the Mediterranean to Rome.
If Phoebe is the carrier of Romans, then she is also — by the universal scholarly convention of letter-bearer-as-reader — the first Christian to publicly read the Epistle to the Romans aloud to the assembled Roman Christian community in Rome around AD 57. The historical implications of this fact are now widely-discussed in 21st-century New Testament scholarship.