Everyone is Wrong About 2 John!

Stumbling across a passage on 2 John 1 that I thought, wow, you know, no one’s really, you know, taken this seriously. And I actually didn’t take it seriously at the start where he said that, among other things, that 2 John was written to a woman by name Eclecte. I thought it was just him, just some wild musings, you know, turned to my scriptures and Bible and thought, what’s he seeing here? And the more I began looking at it and work with Greek papyri, I’m like, no, he’s actually— there’s a name here.

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are peachy. Things are peachy. Today we are going— you know, I have talked before on this show about going with you to the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and hearing talks that like are these long papers that these people are giving that hinge on one letter being not quite the thing, or one or two, this minor thing that could— we’re gonna dive into one of those things, uh, and I’m actually genuinely excited about it because it’s one of the more interesting ones that I’ve, uh, been made aware of. Do you want to introduce our guest?

Absolutely. Today, uh, we are honored to have here with us, uh, Lincoln Blumell. Who is a professor in religious education at Brigham Young University and an old friend of mine. And we are here to talk about a book that Lincoln recently published called Lady Eclecte: The Lost Woman of the New Testament. Thank you so much for being here, Lincoln. I know it took us a bit to get all of our ducks in a row, but we appreciate your patience with us.

It’s great to be on here, and I’m excited to talk about the book.

Me too. I remember you— I think it was like 2 years ago at SBL, you were like, hey, I’m working on this book. And I think at the time, I can’t remember if you had found a publisher or if you were still, um, if you were still working on, uh, getting a publisher. But you mentioned, yeah, I think that we might have identified, uh, someone in 2 John, the— that the letter was written to an actual person who’s named in the text and it has been misunderstood for so long. And I was like, wow, that would be a really cool story. And now the book is out. It’s been out for a little bit. But I wanted to start, ‘cause you start off in the book talking about Clement of Alexandria, who, you know, we’ve all talked enough about Clement of Alexandria.

Oh yeah, I talk about him constantly. I’m always on Clement of Alexandria. You can’t shut me up about him.

Would you mind just explaining who Clement of Alexandria is and what that has to do with what we’re going to be looking at at the beginning of 2 John today?

Yeah, you bet. So Clement is a church figure, you know, writing in the late 2nd, early 3rd century, writes various works. Some of them have survived, you know, of course some haven’t. And I got interested in his work when I was working in Egypt, editing some papyri and inscriptions. And when you’re working on these things, you kind of go into Greek databases and you start finding parallels and stuff. And that kind of led me to reading some of his works that I wasn’t as familiar with and stumbling across a passage on 2 John 1 that I thought, wow, you know, no one’s really, you know, taking this seriously. And I actually didn’t take it seriously at the start where he said that, among other things, that 2 John was written to a woman by name Eclecte. And I thought this was just him, just some wild musings, you know, turned to my scriptures and Bible and thought, what’s he seeing here? And the more I began looking at it and working with Greek papyri, I’m like, no, he’s actually— there’s a name here.

So that kind of started off.

So let’s, let’s back up a bit. Well, I don’t know, one of the things that I like about your approach to this? Because, you know, a lot of the, like, the SBL talks that I mentioned that I’ve been to, you know, these people are people who are there, the perspective that they’re coming from is, is the perspective of someone who studies, you know, either ancient Greek or the Latin or not Latin, probably, but Hebrew or whatever. And your, your expertise— You mentioned papyri. That is your expertise. Like, you came at it from the perspective largely of a person who studies papyruses, if I can pluralize it that way.

No, you cannot say papyruses.

I can do what I want, man.

Papyri. Yeah, yeah. Papyrologist. Yes. Work with papyri. That did really factor in. And this is interesting because, of course, in 2 John 12 , it actually is pretty clear the letter was originally written on a papyrus. You know, it mentions paper now. It’s an idiomatic translation. But I’ve worked a lot with ancient letters on papyri. And, you know, they’re short, they’re to the point. And 2 and 3 John always struck me, even before this discovery, as always having a lot of— they read a lot like the ancient letters I was dealing with in translating, editing. And so when this kind of all came together, didn’t surprise me that this letter would begin just the same as 3 John. And there’s actually a name hidden right at the start that got lost because of two duplicated letters got dropped out.

Let’s— I guess we shouldn’t bury the lead. Let’s, let’s get to what the, what the crux of the argument is. And then we can sort of get to why we think it is what it— what we— why, why you’re, you’re saying it is what you’re saying it is. I’ve got— I was saying just before we started recording, I have different tabs pulled up of different translations of 2 John. 2 John is just literally one chapter. It’s just a short, single epistle, a letter. And it starts out the first two verses are just sort of the, the dear so-and-so part of the letter. And it’s generally translated— I mean, King James has it, the elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth for the truth’s sake, which dwelleth in us and shall be with us forever, which is a really long-winded opening to a letter.

But this ’to the elect lady’ bit is a— it’s a little weird no matter what. But it doesn’t comport— the sort of, until your book, the received understanding of it for the last 150 years or so has been that the elect lady is what, another church? Is that right? Talk about that.

Yeah. So if you go back, certainly in scholarship, the dominant way to read this and the way that I read it was that, you know, initially was it’s just, it’s a metaphor for a church. This elect lady is a congregation. And people would say, well, you have this word lady in Greek, kuria, it’s a feminine, say, well, it’s kind of like standing in for ekklesia, right? The word church. In fact, it’s interesting. And I mentioned this in the book that, in some later manuscripts they even gloss the word “kuria” and they’ll actually put in the margin, read it as “church.” And so take it as just a reference to a church. But, you know, as you begin reading this letter, you know, it’s very short, you know, a total of 13 verses. You know, it strikes me as incredibly strange that such a short letter would have this overarching metaphor, especially when we have another letter written by the elder that is very straightforward, right? Mentions Gaius. It’s personal, dealing with issues. And you know what this opening, right, to an elect lady or the elect lady is, as I began, you know, working on this, is that, you know, when you read the Greek New Testament, of course, Greek today has accents, it’s capitalized, you have word spacing, you know, all these interpretive features are not there in the original text.

It’s just undifferentiated text written scriptio continua altogether. And so—

But just pause real quick. This is something that a lot of our many of our listeners are familiar with. But when you say the scriptio continua, okay, you just explain what’s going on here.

Oh, so, and doing my job over here. I love it. You bet.

You bet. I’d be happy to. So when people write, when I write, when I read papyri, you know, from the Roman period or even earlier periods, there’s no word breaks. So words are put together. And so they call this in Latin scriptio continua, just continuous text. So imagine reading, you know, a book in English today where there’s no word space, everything’s put together and you need to figure where a word ends and begins. And so it’s torture.

It sounds like torture. I don’t know how. And it’s all uppercase, right? There are cases in these languages, but like, but in this case, it is all the same. It’s all one case and it’s just no spaces. This is something I don’t know. Dan had made me aware that this is what happened, but I didn’t know, do they, like, when they do a line break, do they sometimes do that in the middle of a word? Or do they usually end a line with a word and then go to the next line?

You know, when I read papyri and inscriptions, they’ll just break it in a word. Now, typically, they’ll try to break it on a syllable.

Oh, wow.

And so there are some predictable rules about when they break. But yeah, that’s just common, it will break. And the text, you know, is just undifferentiated. You know, you just have, you know, there’s occasionally some things they’ll do at the end of a line. They might add an extra stroke to make a letter a bit longer. And but it’s very disorienting when I know— trying to know—.

Papyri, accents or breathing marks or anything like that, are there very few?

Those are, you know, maybe in literary manuscripts later on, you’ll get a little bit of that. But generally, it’s just, you know, just imagine type— imagine just typing all caps in a paragraph and just going and don’t stop spaces without spaces and write a paragraph.

It’s so funny to me, the thought that the space was at one point a mind-bending, uh, innovation, you know what I mean? Like, that’s so crazy.

Yeah, so the, the, there were probably people who are like, accents, that’s the coolest thing since spaces, um, right, that we’re adding to our text. Sorry, we, we interrupted, uh, the flow there. So what were you getting to?

Well, you know, so you have this, you know, text, you know, it’s undifferentiated. So you’re working your way through this, and, you know, I’ve read a lot of letters. So my dissertation was on ancient letters from Egypt, Christian letters, and I’ve, you know, translated letters. I’ve been in Egypt, pulled them out of the ground and published them. And one of the things, you know, kind of moving from Clement, that helped, I think, really crack this problem was letters in the Roman period are very predictable when you get to an introduction. It’s very standard. And so I can edit a papyrus that is full of lacunae and holes, or it might be effaced. And if I hit like a formula, like maybe the beginning of an epistolary prescript, I can predict where things are, where if I can just pick up a few letters here and there, I can reconstruct the whole part because it’s very formulaic, the way to do this in the Roman period. Now, they’ll do this in a later period, like in the Byzantine, as you’re getting into like the 3rd, 4th, 5th, but the order changes. There is a definite order of how you begin a letter in the Roman period in the papyri.

So not unlike, if I understand you correctly, it would be sort of the equivalence to if we found a piece of paper now and it’s a letter and it’s all torn up and whatever, and at the end of it, it says the end of the letter, and then it says S-I-N, and then it’s torn off, and then a name. We can guess that that’s sincerely. You know what I mean? Is that basically the kind of thing you’re talking about?

Yeah, there’s formulaic parts of letters, and they tend to be, at least in the Roman period, in the introduction, the prescript, and then in the valediction. You’ll find they’re pretty standard with what they do. And so, when you think of this, and to get into 2 John, in a Roman letter, it always begins with the name or title of the sender, and that’s always the first word or two of the letter. You’ll have the name of the person. And so if you come to 2 or 3 John, you have the elder, and that’s pretty standard. That will change in later periods, but the Roman period is what you get. And then what you get is always the very word after the name or title of the sender is the name of the addressee. And it’s just like clockwork. Now, this is what you have in 3 John 1 . So if you go to the Greek, right, you have, you know, the definite article, the, then elder, and the third word is Gaius. And so it’s written to Gaius. And Gaius, for those not in Greek, you have a dative case that just kind of tells you it’s going to something.

So it’s in that case. And so this is what you get. And that’s pretty standard. And so it’s, you know, the name of the sender directly to— it’s called an A to B greeting. It will reverse in the Byzantine period, but we don’t need to worry about that here. I go into that in the book. So when you read 2 John, what you have now, this is what’s strange. It begins with the name of the sender, the elder, but then what it says is the third word is not a name, it’s now an adjective, right? “Eklekte.” So you have “eklekte,” which is an adjective, and I’ll talk a bit more about that. And then the next word is “kuria,” or lady. So this is the translation, right? “The elder to an elect lady,” or some will say “the elect lady.” But this doesn’t work very well in Roman period letters. In fact, adjectives in epistolary greetings always follow a name.

We just don’t begin letters where an adjective fronts like a name, or you don’t do this in the Roman period. And again, what’s great on this is the control is 3 John. 3 John begins with a name. And so what you’ve had historically is in Greek Bibles, they articulate this word “eklekte” as an adjective, right? So it’s lowercase and you accent it a certain way. And then they say, well, the kuria that follows is like a noun. So you have “elect lady.” Now, going back to Clement, Clement said that, you know, it’s written to a lady called “Eklekte.” I began thinking about this, and the order would make sense if that third word were a proper name. And so, one of the things that is part of my work in this book is, is this Eklekte? If we get rid of all the modern stuff and just had this letter string Eklekte there, could that be a proper name? And in fact, the name does exist. I spend an entire chapter giving examples both in Greek and in Latin.

And what’s interesting is this name actually is mostly attested in the Roman period as a female name.

Yeah, not only that, but it’s more attested, as you point out, than a lot of other female names that are uncontested in the New Testament.

Yeah, you know, of the, you know, I think there’s around 33 or 34, you know, different women’s names that appear in the New Testament. And, you know, some are really, really, you know, popular names, like, for example, like Mary, that will come to appear all over the place in part due to the rise of Christianity. It was a very popular name. Names like Claudia, of course, of course, or Julia are just incredibly popular. But most women’s names that appear in the New Testament, if you get rid of Christians talking about them or commenting on them, when you look in inscriptions or papyri, they have less than 200 attestations, but they’re there. For example, the name Lois doesn’t appear anywhere else, which is really strange. This is a letter from the pastorals. It is a unisex name. There’s a masculine form that does appear. And so this name Eklekte, it would be in ancient Greek, it would be undifferentiated from an adjective. And so because there’s no, you know, not capitalizing or accents, things like that. And so when I read a papyrus, when I come across these things, it’s first and foremost context that tells you how do you read this.

So, you know, take the name Stephen, right? Stephanos. It means crown, but it’s a proper name. So when you read this, you know, context will tell you, well, this is now a name, or it’s now, right, a crown. And so when you first look at this based on letters, this should be a name, right? And again, you have Gaius. And so that’s kind of the first part of that. The name does exist, and it appears more than almost a quarter of the women’s names that appear in the New Testament. Now, what’s interesting is the— and I bring this up in the book, but we can make a stronger case— is, you know, our grammar for 2 John 1 , when you look at the papyri, it doesn’t actually work. You know, even, you know, when you look at some of the commentators and some of the really good, like Raymond Brown writes, I think, a really good commentary. There’s others, you know, over the years that even point, hint, you know, they say something’s up with this grammar. In fact, when you look at one of the best, you know, commentaries that I think is really remarkable is by Westcott.

Who, back at the end of the 19th century, who does— they kind of do the new text of the New Testament. He does a commentary on the Johannine Epistles, and he points out saying there’s problems here, but he says, nonetheless, here’s what we have. And you know what he did, which is interesting, is when they published their new edition of the Greek New Testament in 1881, and they print the Received Reading, right? You know, “eklekte kuria,” like it’s an adjective followed by the noun “kuria.” But they point out saying the grammar doesn’t work. And they said the grammar will work if we capitalize both those words and we make it a double name to a woman, Eklekte Kuria, like Kuria, you know, Kuria is a woman’s name. But they say this doesn’t really make sense, you know, having a double name here. But the grammar would then work. But it’s interesting, actually, they give us an alternate reading, and it shows me that they’re onto something. They’re like, something’s up here. And so what you have then is you have this Kuria that follows.

And what’s interesting is they always appear after the name. There’s not a single case where they appear before them. They always come after the name. And so it’s, you know, “To, you know, so-and-so, my lord,” or my master. And same with lady.

Well, now in 3 John 1 , it’s Gaio to agapeto. So you have the adjective following after, and it’s usually in English translation as the well-beloved Gaius or something like that. But you also have the article there, which is why some people would say, well, the name thing doesn’t work. But there’s an interesting thing here if you’re talking about scriptio continua that you talk about in some detail in the book. Can you talk a little bit about the relevance of an adjective? And for those of you who are wondering— or not the adjective, the article— the article is what becomes the in English, but you have those in front of names as well as nouns and adjectives and things like that in Greek. What does that tell us?

And everybody that’s like me and didn’t pay attention during—.

Go slow—.

During grammar class, put on your seatbelts.

This is because we’re getting deep grammar here.

This is where we get to argue over two letters that make the argument. Because, you know, if I just capitalize Eklekte and you have kuria, there’s still a grammatical problem. Okay. The grammar doesn’t work. In fact, I’d say just like the grammar doesn’t work as it’s currently articulated. Raymond Brown pointed this out, saying you really need a definite article before it, and he said, “Well, it’s because it’s not ’the lady,’ it’s ‘a lady.’” And he’s trying to make this point before ‘Eklekte’ that it’s a circular letter written to all these churches, which doesn’t work well. It’s really special pleading. But what it comes down to is, so between this word ‘Eklekte,’ which can be a name, and ‘kuria,’ is you need a definite article. So it’s always, right, ’to Eklekte the lady.’ right? Or like Gaius the Beloved. This is standard Greek. This is what good Greek is. You don’t have this. Now, the definite article in this case would be a tau eta, or think of like, you know, a th, right, that you have between the two. And so, as Dan pointed out, right, when you go and read 3 John 1 , you have the name, a definite article, and an adjective.

And when you see it, when you read these letters in Greek where you have kuria appear in papyri. There’s a definite article, there’s a name, a definite article, a two-letter definite article, and then the name. And of course, it’s all put together here. Well, I began thinking about this, and I mentioned in the first chapter, what I did is I began kind of trying to think, what is Clement seeing? How can I solve this issue? I put all the letters together undifferentiated in script, you can do it in caps, and I began looking at it, saying, what’s he seeing? And all of a sudden, the tau eta that ends Eklekte could actually be the definite article that goes with kuria. Now you have the word Eklek, which doesn’t have a proper ending, right? You need that ending there. But I began thinking, wait a second, I’m on to something here. Something is going on here because you need the definite article.

So what you’re saying— sorry, if I can just make sure that I’m following— what you would have if you had the article would be Eklekte ends in a tau eta, and then you would have another tau eta, and then you would have the word kuria.

And so it would be, yeah, you’d have the tau eta, tau eta, and then that. But none of the manuscripts that we have seen have that extra tau eta, right?

Actually, manuscripts do have it. Some do. And people haven’t noticed it. Oh, they’re later manuscripts. They actually have that reading. Wow.

Okay. They are later. So I can get into the manuscript part of that here in a second.

I think I just admitted that I haven’t read the entire book. I didn’t get to that part.

It was, it was a little bit, a little over halfway through and got the manuscript evidence.

See, that was the juiciest part.

Look, I was trying, but as Dan said earlier, maybe before we started recording. It’s a thick book. It’s like, it’s dense, and I like it. But it’s like, but like, you know, I’m, I have to reread a few things to make sure I’m picking up what you’re putting down. So I am not a scholar.

That is, that is what we get to is, so, in short, where we stand is that the missing element happens to exactly match the last two letters of the word Eklekte. Yeah. In other— and that’s going to bring up text-critical arguments, a little more Latin. And I have some questions about this, but continue what you were saying, please.

Yeah. So when I saw this, the Eklekte Kuria, I began thinking more about this. And, you know, I came across a letter. I started, you know, thinking about how do you— right? Like, because, you know, you have in papyri, like, for example, foreign names, like Semitic names. They don’t decline them in Greek. Like, you’ll typically have an -os ending, but they just leave them in, like, you know, like, you know, Abraham instead of, you know, Abrahamos. I thought, well, is this a foreign name? But now, you know, elect, they’ve clearly— it’s clearly Greek, right? Eklekte. But where it all kind of came together is I was looking at this one papyrus letter. I was thinking, well, how do you solve this? Because this te now, is it the end of the name? Does it go with now the te kuria, which you expect? As I was just going through a letter. It was a letter between two women. And what you do when you edit a text is, you know, when I edit Greek texts, you know, you’re always correcting stuff. You know, when people, you know, imagine writing without spell checker, you know, anciently, and you’re doing this, and so people are misspelling words, they have phonetic spellings, they’re dropping off stuff. And I was coming across this one letter, and the definite article between the name and the adjective was dropped out.

And what you do is, in Greek, when you edit a text, you put it in, like, we call them caret brackets. They look like this. You put them in there, and it means the editor’s restoring what should be there. It’s very clear what they were saying. It was to so-and-so the dearest. And you had to have the definite article, even if it was clear, and so you add this in, saying, “I’m amending it, it’s not there, but it was obviously intended.” And so this is what you do. And all of a sudden it came to me and said, “Wait a second. What happened was you have these two ’te,’ you know, ’te te,’ this goes together.

At some point, the second one got dropped." And so it shortened from “eklekte te kuria” to “eklektekuria.” And this is a pretty common thing that happens in the transcription of texts where you have letters on the end of two words in a row that are very similar. The copyist is like, “Okay, I got that word,” goes over to their text that they’re transcribing, and then they’re like, “Okay, the word I just copied ended in this,” and they come back to the manuscript and accidentally skip over what they needed to copy because they’re looking for those last two letters. So that would be haplography as a result of homoeoteleuton or something like that. And so this is the argument that you decide makes the most sense of what’s going on here in the manuscript, correct?

Yeah. You know, that was the first break. So I thought, okay, the grammar now makes sense. And what’s nice about this is the collocation mirrors what you have now in 3 John 1 . And I make a point that when you read letters, you know, written by the same individual to, you know, different people, they tend to be pretty consistent. Across the board. They might change titles, but the collocation’s there. And now you have the same collocation, right? You have the name, you have a definite article, and you have a modifier. This is substantive, or you have in 3 John 1 an adjective. And the Greek makes sense. As it currently reads, it doesn’t really work. And so, that was the first part, saying, “Oh my goodness, this actually works.” And just to go back before I go on here, this is common in the papyri. You know, I edit text all the time where I’m adding stuff. And this very error, you know, I cite multiple letters where this very error, this article is dropped out because the name ends with the same letter, you know, that the article ends with. This is not uncommon. You know, I’ve edited texts where, you know, articles, things like this, they just, they need to be there, but people drop them out.

And so it’s very minor and it’s very common for this to happen.

I mean, I’m on social media. I see stuff like this. All the time, and we’re not even, you know, pushing all of our words together. But I see people dropping S’s and dropping the’s and dropping stuff literally every day.

I don’t know if you watch Bad Bunny, but like 60% of the letters from the Spanish were dropped in his singing. Well, I had a question for you. So we have a way that this could have happened. We have a text-critical argument that has some— there’s some meat on that bone, because this is something we can demonstrate happens a lot in these kinds of letters. What would it have taken for the grammatical problems, if it were a reference to the elect lady as a metaphor referring to a church, what kind of scribal error would have to be involved for that to have been a grammatically correct original autograph in this verse?

So to have like the shorter reading? Or you mean—

Well, if we’re going to— because it doesn’t— either reading requires we fiddle with the text a little bit. And we’ve figured out a way to account for how the “Eklekte as a name” reading could be what was in the autograph. What kind of process, what kind of problems would have to have happened to get from an autograph that was using “elect lady” as a metaphor to what we have in the manuscripts today?

To what we have in the manuscripts today. You know, in the manuscripts, you know, this is interesting. You know, of course, our earliest manuscripts of, you know, 2 John are in, you know, Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, right? These two major, you know, Bibles from the 4th century. And both of them have the shorter reading, right? This have eklekte kuria. In both those. And what’s interesting is you start looking, you know, you have also Alexandrinus. But what’s interesting there, and I point this out, that in fact there, you know, the letter starts the outside part of a page and that the corner’s torn off. So you actually don’t know what the reading is there. So actually you have the two, but you don’t have Alexandrinus. Then you have— there’s a sheet of papyrus, well, actually parchment. It’s 0232 in the numbering scheme they have for this. It’s P. Antinoopolis 12. And what’s interesting with this, you have the beginning of 2 John, but actually begins with “Kuria.” You’re missing the first line before it got lost, which is kind of like, oh my goodness, it’d be nice to have a little bit more.

Yeah. And then you have another manuscript, Galatians 048 , where it’s a palimpsested text from the 5th century.

But the first palimpsest is where the text has been overwritten by another, where they scrape the ink off, they usually rotate the text, and then they write the new text on top. So we restore the text that was underneath.

So you can’t tell— the first verse of 2 John doesn’t become legible till halfway through. So you can’t say what the reading was. And then you have a papyrus, P. Bodmer 17, where you have like a fragment about this big from 2 John 1 with like 6 letters. And so you can’t make any definitive argument. And so, you know, what’s interesting is when you look at the manuscript evidence, you know, for the first, you know, 8, 9 centuries, you only have Vaticanus and Sinaiticus for this. And so they have shorter, but all the other ones are not diagnostic in solving this, this problem. And then you’re now into, you know, minuscules, which are, you know, a different Greek script. This is where you have a more cursive script and you get lots and lots of minuscules. And what’s interesting is once you invite the minuscule evidence, this longer reading ‘Eklekte te kuria’ is attested in a couple of pretty important minuscules. It first appears in one, it’s called GA, which stands for Gregory-Aland. It’s this numbering system they use. It’s 1243. It’s from St. Catherine’s, dates to the 11th century, but a very important text.

They say it preserved a lot of earlier readings. So you have this longer reading and then you have it in a series of manuscripts that are all related to that text, which is actually quite significant. Up. And you mentioned textual criticism because, as you know, you know, often you have these families of manuscripts and they might, you know, copy things because it is possible, right, that somebody, maybe somebody could say, hey, you know, this is actually an error where somebody has copied an extra T, right? They Eklekte, threw an extra T and it was a one-off. But when you actually see a family repeating this again and again and again over 5, 6 manuscripts, you’re like, no, that is being deliberately copied. So, it’s strength, and we’re actually dealing with the real variant reading here, which is interesting. All the manuscripts have it, are actually related to this.

Is it your idea that when Clement in the late 2nd century talked about a lady named Eclecte as being the recipient of this letter. Do you think that Clement was looking at a manuscript that had the “te” in it?

Yeah, you know, I would take it. It’s very clear. Now, we only have Clement in Latin, right? So he’s translated. His text, this comes from, you know, where he preserves commentaries. Early Christians mention it. Eusebius talks about it. We only have a couple of later fragments via Cassiodorus from like the 6th century. And we have his outlines on a couple of letters like 1 and 2 John. When he reads it, it’s clear that he’s reading this as a proper name, right? The Latin is unmistakable there. He’s reading as a woman by name, Eclecte. And so, and what’s interesting for me is in that first chapter of the book, I go through kind of Christians, what are Christians saying about 2 John 1 ? And there’s not a whole lot when you actually start breaking this down, at least with the addressee. Christians are very concerned about who’s the elder, and so there’s discussions. Is this the Apostle John? Is this some other John? You get discussion, but you get Clement who will talk about this. He’s in fact our first commentator, and so our very first witness to this is Clement.

He says, oh, it’s written to a woman by name Eclecte. You know, Jerome talks a little bit about it, so it’s not altogether clear. He’ll mention this, and then once you hit the 6th, 7th century, you then have some writers, like, and some catenae that talk about, well, it could be a woman. And now when you read it here, it could be a woman, meaning it could be an elect lady, that kind of woman, not necessarily a name, or it’s the church. And then you kind of notice how, no, it’s got to be the church. It seems to me that in the 6th, 7th, 8th century, you kind of see this going on, but you have very few quotes. And so for me, this evidence of Clement is reading it as a woman’s name, which to read it this way is proper Greek. You’d have eklekte te kuria.

Right.

Now, one of the things, principles of textual criticism, what you’re trying to do is weigh the evidence between a couple of different manuscripts to decide which one is earlier, which one is later. And when we talk about Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which are full of all kinds of readings that are rejected as secondary for New Testament as well as for the Septuagint, and you compare those to manuscripts that are coming from the 11th or later, the two things that are going to come up are going to be lectio difficilior, lectio brevior. And for the uninitiated, these are text critical principles, not hard and fast rules, but kind of trends. And I actually had a question about a comment you make about lectio brevior being questioned in more contemporary scholarship. But the idea is that when we look at the ways that texts are transcribed and how they change over time as being passed along, that the shorter reading tends to be the earlier one, and then the more difficult reading tends to be the earlier one, because changes are more commonly adding things to the text rather than taking things away from the text.

And changes are— intentional changes are more commonly, even unintentional, are more commonly trying to fix problematic readings rather than create problematic readings. And so both of those principles could be, if somebody was trying to challenge you here, those are the two things they’re going to say. Okay, you are preferring the longer reading, you are preferring the easier reading. Now, what are you going— what do you say in response to that challenge?

Fair question. What I would say, and I bring this up, is I would cite the work of James Royse that I cite in the work. And so James Royse, just to give some background, wrote a huge volume with Brill, I don’t know, 15 years ago on scribal habits in New Testament papyri, where he goes through our earliest papyri manuscripts, like some really famous ones that have Gospels and stuff, and looks at, you know, how do scribes copy text? And he talks about this, you know, lectio brevior and says, in fact, what he found, in fact, he says one of the most important things he found in his study was, in fact, he says this, you know, kind of dictum isn’t actually reflected in the papyri. In fact, he said what he found was, in fact, he says, “It is lectio longior potior.” He says, in fact, it’s the longer reading.

And so, he actually put this forward. And so, in this case, what I’m saying here would dovetail exactly with his finding of New Testament manuscripts. In fact, he does argue, he doesn’t push it, but he says in fact textual critics, he said, ought to reconsider this lectio brevior principle that goes back to Griesbach, who said this. He said, yes, in bigger parts it could be the case, the smaller ones he found, he said it was distinct, that in fact scribes actually shortened in errors, they did not lengthen. And this is precisely the error that you would expect. And again, when I go back to papyri, this is just such a common error. You know, I have joked about this. Let’s say, you know, I bring up the book that if I were to find 2 John— if I just got back from Egypt last week, I was there working on a dig and working on stuff— if I would have found 2 John for the first time, and let’s say it starts off as it does in our Greek New Testament, right? Ho presbuteros eklekte kuria, right? Has the shorter reading. And I was editing it first time, had no tradition, and I get to that part.

How would I then transcribe that? I would transcribe that as eklekte and then put the brackets in te kuria because it makes no sense. And I would then put a footnote in there and just say, look, this like all these examples of stuff dropping out. It doesn’t make grammatical sense. We see this, it’s a name, and “kuria” always follows, right, with a definite article. And I would do that in like a papyrological edition, and it would be no more than a 2-sentence footnote, and no one would argue. Yeah, I think when you do it to the New Testament now, that 2-sentence footnote has to become a 300-page book, right, to do that. I’m dead serious. But really, when I present with papyrologists, everybody’s like, well, yeah, of course this is work because we see this all the time in papyri. If we’re to find them. But when you deal with the New Testament, people get, “Well, wait a second here. These two letters are, you know, how do you deal with this?” So, as I look at this, I understand that it has typically been a dictum in textual criticism. And yeah, I think there are things to this, but James Royse’s work is really interesting where he says, “I did the work, and in fact the very opposite was the case with papyri.” And these little things.

So, he’s the Galileo. He says, “Well, wait a minute. I dropped these two things” and they fall at the same rate. So that’s interesting. And real quick, Dan, the lectio difficilior is this, because it’s certainly possible that a scribe could be like, well, that doesn’t make any sense. We’re going to throw in a little tau eta here. And what do you say about somebody who brings up that objection?

Well, you know, what I would say here is, you know, grammatically, again, you know, the grammar doesn’t work, right? It doesn’t work in the first part, in the Roman period. However, the grammar will work in the Byzantine period when you change it, because the Byzantine period adjectives will front nouns, but that’s not until the 3rd and 4th century. And so I mentioned that in the book, but in fact, they’ll actually get— what you’ll find is the Roman period, A to B, and by the time you hit later 3rd, but really 4th, 5th, it goes basically, to be from A. But in that process, they’ll actually— will then adjectives confront names. And so I’m wondering if when this gets copied later on in this later period, if people are seeing this mistake and it’s not a problem because epistolary habits have changed over, you know, by the time you get 3rd, 4th, 5th century in the Byzantine period.

So it’s no longer the lectio difficilior by the time that these manuscripts are being copied.

I’m wondering if that’s the case, because in the papyri we see this change. And again, with all these letters now, we can see these trends. And really it’s the late 3rd century, this change goes on with epistolary prescripts. Very cool. Okay, Dan, sorry.

Well, so, you know, we’ve— I feel that we have— we’ve sort of covered the argument that you’re making, and I love it. I think it’s fascinating. I liked that you talked about how, you know, if this were just another papyrus, this wouldn’t be a controversial issue at all. This would just, you know, you would just put that te in there and the carets, and then you’re good. My question for you is, and because you said, you know, that in a biblical context, this becomes a very big deal.

You know, well, it would be significant because now we would have one letter in the New Testament that is addressed to a named woman, right? Otherwise, we have letters addressed to men or congregations, but we’d have one letter addressed to a named woman. So that would help us. And this I argue in the book is that kind of fill out roles of women in the New Testament, help enlarge that picture. And so that’s where I think it becomes very significant. Yeah. We now have somebody who was trusted by the elder to send a letter to and to give some instructions. And it would be expected then that she could play an important role in helping those being carried out. And I think the other thing is when you read the letter now, you know, again, it now works well like 3 John. It follows the exact collocation, what you’d expect, but it actually reads much better as trying to force this, you know, metaphorical church in here. You know, he’s actually writing to a woman. And when you get down to verse 10, it talks about a house.

And she is associated with this house. Now we know, you know, in the book I don’t say this is definitely a house church. You know, I think there’s a good direction, right? It doesn’t actually mention this, but we know early Christians typically met in homes. It seems to me that Eklekte plays a role, certainly I would say in gatekeeping, it seems, where he can write to her and say, if people come along carrying this certain doctrine, don’t let them in your house. Don’t welcome them. Yeah, and so that makes a lot more sense as opposed to this is some metaphor, because it’s actually very personal. And then you get down to the end of the letter, he says, you know, I want to write a lot more to you, and I will come and I’ll speak to you. The Greek literally is mouth to mouth or face to face. He says this, you know, we have the same thing in 3 John. That’s a lot more personal. In fact, you are a person, I will come and I will speak to you, I’ll give you more instruction. And so for me, when this woman emerges, in fact, our argument is she’s always been there, you now say, oh, this is a letter, not unlike 3 John. We have this woman who carries some authority with the elder.

He’s going to come. He will make a personal visit to her at some point. And so it actually changes the frame of how we read the letter. Now, it’s not a massive change of the letter. I think it sharpens it. But for me, it makes much more sense.

And this, and this would probably fit within the, the role of women within the first few centuries because you did have women who were, you know, they were ladies within the Greco-Roman society. They would use their houses to host congregational meetings and things like that. They would basically be in charge of the house church. And I think we’ve recently seen some evidence, kind of the conventional wisdom was that with the rise of imperial Christianity, the patriarchal framework becomes a lot more oppressive and it pushes things out. But I think we’ve seen some inscriptions or mosaics or things like that dating to as late as the 5th, maybe even the 6th century CE that are still referring to women who are running churches. So it certainly seems to me like it would fit within the kind of pattern of Christian worship in this time period. Have you gotten much feedback from colleagues who are in that particular area of early Christianity regarding the implications of this change?

Yeah. So, you know, the book came out in November. So, you know how reviews probably at least 6 months, you know, before you start getting that.

Yeah, the earliest.

Yeah. Or a year out. But, you know, when you look at this, you know, and I do mention the book in the last chapter, it’s kind of like, okay, what can we now say about, you know, Eklekte, this house, what’s going on? Provide a context. I’m not trying to solve all the answers because one of the things I found with letters on papyri is, you know, they can have about 5 or 6 interpretations, but at least saying, here’s the range of possibilities with this. And, you know, going to this point about women in house churches, in fact, we do have this in the New Testament. Think of Lydia, right? So you have, right, Paul at the home of Lydia, where her house is used as kind of a place where he can expand his mission.

It is a polite form of address. It appears quite commonly. In fact, the only time it appears in the New Testament is in verse 1 and verse 5. But outside, you know, that could be used as, you know, kind of like in a sense of a mistress. You know, later on, uh, you know, 4th, 5th century, it could be used for a deaconess. Uh, I don’t push that. I, you know, if it would need to have it, but I just kind of— I would fit her within this kind of framework that we already see a little bit. You know, you could add you know, Priscilla and Aquila, right? There’s a church there that she would be part of this network. And so, yeah, I’m curious to think what people say there. I don’t think it changed our picture. In fact, I think it just kind of complements what we already know based on some other references in the New Testament.

Yeah, I think it would surprise a lot of people, though, to know that, that there— I mean, I think it would— it just, it just broadens our idea of what the early church must have been like. To know that it wasn’t just men writing to men, men talking to men, men dealing only with men. I think it does change the perspective to hear, you know, when Dan, early on in our show, we did an episode where we talked about Junia and how that, you know, there’s this woman’s name that is often thought to be a man or is glossed over. And this could be a person that was very much in authority. And I think that there are good reasons, there are sort of obvious reasons why people wouldn’t want— people, men, certain men in authority wouldn’t want this to be a woman in authority, because it challenges a lot of commonly held ideas about who can and can’t run a church.

But I think it’s great. I think it’s clear that if this is, you know, if people start accepting your argument, which I think is a very strong argument, it really opens up the idea of what a woman’s role in the early church was.

You know, and I see this here, you know, with the letter, you know, kind of not trying to, you know, force too much in there that she’s clearly, you know, trusted by the elder. You know, I think that’s first of all that she can be expected to act as a gatekeeper, like, don’t greet these people, don’t let them in the house. Something else in those verses there, you know, kind of in, you know, 9 through, you know, 11, it gets a sense that people might come by and she would render hospitality. And so I think this kind of, you know, imagine this home is that it’s a place where people could pass through, right? People are probably aware of like there’s like a network of Christians and they can go and they can get hospitality here. And so it would be kind of like a node in a network where they can come through. And so there’s some connections there. Something else that I think is worth bringing up here too is that you do have, it talks, you know, I spend most of the book talking, right? The elder to the lady Eklekte. But the second part is, and her children, right? Because this is part of this. Now, it’s hard to say, how do we take this and her children? Is it literal?

I talk about that. You know, what’s interesting is you read 3 John, it’s pretty clear that he uses familial terms metaphorically. He talks about people being brothers and sisters, used the word children, where it’s very clear these aren’t like biological or literal. And so I think the best way to take this here, applying this from 3 John, would be the same. I don’t think it’s her literal children, but in fact, she has some authority among a group, just like the elder will refer to people as children. And so I see that going on there with, you know, the importance she’s playing in, you know, kind of acting as gatekeeper and probably some, you know, evangelizing work that’s going on here with the elder.

Are all the second person pronouns and verbs in the letter plural?

They go back and forth.

They go back and forth. Okay.

You actually have singular and plural. And so what I would say is when you’re plural, it’s kind of like, you know, talking, you know, to the group, and then singular is to her. And you do find this in papyri when you have letters written to, you know, multiple people. They will fluctuate between a singular and plural, typically who’s being addressed here, and then as a collective. Okay.

And the very last verse, I know this is what usually comes up when people say, well, is this a person’s name or is this a metaphorical reference to a church? The commentaries always go, well, the last verse seals it, ‘cause the last verse says, “Your elect sister.” What’s the significance of the apparent adjectival use of elect, the very last word of the entire letter to how we understand the greeting.

Yeah, that’s a good question because historically, you know, you know, when people— what’s interesting is if you just to give some background on this. So, you know, no one’s ever posited this argument about the te, right? Eklekte te kyria. If you go back, there’s an edition of the New Testament called the Editio Regia. It was printed by the famous printer, you know, Robert Stephanus, right, who does all this work in the middle of the 16th century. And in his—.

Put the verses in the New Testament.

Does versification, does this, had some notes. In his third edition, published in 1550, he capitalizes Eklekte. And so for a time, that was thought— now it doesn’t solve the grammar problem, still doesn’t work, right? You have to have the te there. He just— but so people said, oh, this must be this woman, right? Eklekte, right? So it did for about 100 years. And people said, no, no, the grammar, you know, it kind of came and went. But from that, commentators later on, like Theodore Beza and others, you know, later on, I only go back 150 years, but some of these debates, of course, there’s some discussion earlier on said, well, it couldn’t be Eklekte because the end of the verse would mean then she has a sister with the same name. So start with Eklekte and end with Eklekte. The problem with that is they’re not paying attention to the Greek grammar. In the first verse, Eklekte is not preceded by a definite article. And perceptive commentators like Westcott and Raymond Brown saw a problem in this.

And my answer is exactly, there’s no definite article before it because it’s a proper name and you don’t need a definite article before a proper name. There’s a definite article before “eklektes” at the end because there it’s clearly functioning as an attributive adjective to sister. So, but going from this, people said either you take both as “Eklekte” or both as elect. And so you’ll find that in scholarship today, even saying that verse 13 governs how you read verse 1. The thing is, it’s the grammar. Even Bultmann, he in his commentary on 2 John says, well, it’s an adjective at the end, it’s got to be an adjective at the start.

Yeah, when the grammar is distinct and at the same time it could be a poetic way to sign this off. You’ve written a letter to a woman named Eklekte, and then you can just refer to her sister, her eklektes adelphes, toward the very end. So I think there’s an interesting observation to be made there.

Yeah, I think it’s a pun. And as you look at this, this is not unlike the name Peter, right? You have the pun, “Thou art Peter, upon this rock.” The name Onesimus, you have this. And this is interesting because you have these puns or plays in Greek, they tend to happen on what are called simple names, meaning names that are undifferentiated from a noun or adjective, which is what Eklekte would be. And so this, what you’re having here, he’s saying, look, there is a sister and she’s Eklekte. And so I see this as a play where it’s clearly a name and then you have an adjective at the end.

Or when Patrick Stewart comes in and says, from now on, all the toilets in the kingdom will be known as Johns. One final question I had. You mentioned verse 5. You have another, the kyria in verse 5, which is also anarthros, so lacking the article. This has got to be vocative. It’s been a while since I’ve been this deep in my Greek. Is that standard for the vocative to omit the definite article.

Yes, it is. And what’s interesting, and I know I point this out in the book when I look at the papyrus letters, is what you will often find. So some people have, you know, as you look at this, there’s a lot on this first verse. Some have said, you know, in fact, what it is, it’s to elect Kyria, right? That being a proper name. And so they take as a proper name, um, and they say then he’s addressing her by name in verse 5. Kyria, you know, we gotta, you know, love one another. That doesn’t— the argument doesn’t make any sense.

And so there are examples of that both with, you know, kyrios, where they’ll say, you know, so-and-so, my Lord, and they don’t use the name in the letter, it defaults to Lord. And so that is yet another kind of parallel you’ll find with this.

Very interesting. Yeah, I think the observation that if this were something that were pulled out of the sand tomorrow and we had no, you know, no Vorlage for this, we didn’t have 2,000 years of traditional interpretation of this, it would be a pretty open and shut case. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with the antithesis of the namesake of the show, I think, in large part, where people are putting the dogma over the data. I think you construct a very thorough, a very complete argument here. And unfortunately, with things like textual criticism, there’s always room to say, “Yeah, but…” But I think you make a very strong case here. Dan, any final thoughts?

Well, I mean, not really. Just thanks so much for joining us, Lincoln. The book is The Elect Lady. It’s from Fortress Press. And go out, yeah, look, we both got it. Go out and get you a copy. It’s a really compelling— oh yeah, we’ve all got it. Everybody.

Yeah, I brought it all here.

I hope you’ve got a copy of it. That would be disturbing if you didn’t have that. I don’t know. Anyway, yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. Lincoln Blumell, thank you so much for joining us.

It was a pleasure to be on here. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me.

And if you haven’t heard enough of Lincoln, we’re going to get down and dirty. We’re gonna get real informal over in, on, in our Patreon for those of you who are, who are patrons at the level where you get the after party, because Lincoln, you’re going to join us for the after party. If you want to hear that, if you want to be a part of keeping this show going, head on over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, sign up there and, and become one of our favorite listeners/viewers. If you can’t afford to do that, leave us a 5-star review somewhere. Like, comment, subscribe, do all the things. That’s always a great way to help us out, and we always appreciate that too. Thanks so much to our editor Roger Gowdy. Thanks to JJ for producing the show. And we will talk to you again next time.

Bye everybody.

Everyone is Wrong About 2 John!

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology