Everyone is Wrong About 2 John!

We've talked a lot on this show about issues like scribal errors, where a scribe copying a text gets one little thing wrong, and changes the meaning of something forever. But how can we know when something like that has happened? Especially if it happened almost two thousand years ago, and we don't have any older source texts to compare it to? This episode of Data Over Dogma, we welcome Lincoln Blumell, a scholar who has made a fascinating argument about 2 John. A single short, confusing passage from the translated writings of a first century theologian launched Blumell on a wild hunt for a long-lost understanding of the Johannine epistle, and now we may all have a vibrant new take on the work! Blumell's book, Lady Eclecte: The Lost Woman of the New Testament takes the reader on a fascinating journey through just how this kind of scholarship is done. It explores the twists and turns that a scholar's mind takes when exploring a new idea that, if true, would overtune centuries of thinking. It follows his meticulous step-by-step process of analyzing grammar, looking at ancient papiri for similar constructions, and forming a theory that is not only plausible, but looks more and more like the best possible explanation for what we see in the text. Check out Blumell's work here https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9798889834243/Lady-Eclecte ---- For early access to an ad-free version of every episode of Data Over Dogma, exclusive content, and the opportunity to support our work, please consider becoming a monthly patron at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on the various social media places: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/data_over_dogma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have you ordered Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Bible Says So⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ yet??? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  Stumbling across a passage on 2 John 1, 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 Eclectic. I thought it was just him, just some wild musings, you know. Turned to my scriptures, Bible, thought, what's he seeing here? And the more I began looking at it, then working with Greek papyri, I'm like, no, he's actually, there's a name here.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  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?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  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. And I'm actually genuinely excited about it, because it's one of the more interesting ones that I've been made aware of. Do you want to introduce our guest?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Today, we are honored to have here with us Lincoln Blue Mel, 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.

• 3:32Speaker 01

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

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too. I remember you, I think it was like two 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, if you were still working on getting a publisher. But you mentioned, yeah, I think that we might have identified someone in 2 John, 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, 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, because you start off in the book, talking about Clement of Alexandria,

• 4:21Speaker 00

  who, you know, we've all, we've all talked enough about Clement of Alexandria.

• 4:25Speaker 01

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

• 4:32Speaker 00

  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?

• 4:43Speaker 04

  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 papyrian 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,

• 5:23Speaker 04

  where he said that, among other things, that 2 John was written to a woman by name Eclecte. And I thought this is 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, then working with Greek papyri, I'm like, no, he's actually, there's a name here.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  So that kind of started off.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  So let's, let's back up a bit. Well, I don't know, maybe, 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, they're, the perspective that they're coming from is, is the perspective of someone who studies. You know, either ancient, the Greek or the Latin or not Latin, probably, but Hebrew or whatever. And your, your expertise, you mentioned papyri, that, that is your expertise. Like you're, you came at it from the perspective largely of a, of a person who studies papyrus is, if I can.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you cannot say. I can do what I want, man.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Papyri, yeah. Yeah. Paparologist. Um, work with papyri. That, that did really factor in. And this is interesting because of course, in, you know, two John 12, it actually is pretty clear that the letter was originally written on a papyrus. Um, you know, it mentions paper. Now it's an idiomatic, uh, uh, translation, but I, I've worked a lot with ancient letters on papyri and, you know, they're short, they're to the point. And two and three John always struck me even before this discovery is always having a lot of, um, uh, they read a lot like the ancient letters I was dealing with, uh, in translating, editing. Uh, and so when this

• 7:18Speaker 04

  kind of all came together, it didn't surprise me that this letter would begin just the same as three John. And there's actually a name hidden right, uh, at the start that got, uh, lost because of two duplicated letters got dropped out.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  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, 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. Um, I, I've got, I was saying just before we started recording, I have different tabs pulled up of different translations of, uh, of second John. Second John is just literally one chapter. It's, it's, it's just a, a short, single, uh, epistle, a, a letter. And it starts out the first, the first, uh, two, the first two verses are just sort of the, the, the dear so-and-so part of the letter.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And it's generally translated, I mean, King James has it, "The elder unto the unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and I 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, is A, it's a little weird, no matter what, but, but it doesn't comport the, the, the sort of, until your book, the received

• 9:02Speaker 01

  understanding of it for the last 150 years or so, has been that it's to, that the elect lady is, is, is what, another church? Is that right? Talk about that.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  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. The select lady is, is a congregation. And people would say, well, you have this word lady in Greek, korea, it's a feminine, say, well, it's kind of like standing in for ecclesia, right? The word church. In fact, it's interesting, and I mentioned this in the book, that in some later manuscripts, even gloss the word korea, and elect put 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.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Especially when you 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, all together. And so

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Can you put a 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. Can you just explain what's going on here?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Well, Dan's doing my job over here.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  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 continue, 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.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And it's torture. It sounds like torture. I don't know how. And it's, and it's all uppercase, right? There are cases in these, in, in, in these languages, but like, uh, but in this case it is all the same. It's all one case and it's just no spaces.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  This is something I don't know. I, 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 does it, do they usually end a line with a word and then go to the next line?

• 11:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  And so there are some predictable 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, um, you know, there, 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. But, uh, it's very disorienting when I'm trying to end a papyrus.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Accents or breathing marks or anything like that either.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Spaces.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Without spaces and write a paragraph.

• 12:28Speaker 01

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

• 12:38Speaker 00

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

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Well, you know, so you have this, you know, text, you know, it's undifferentiated. And 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, um, you know, kind of moving from Clement, uh, that helped, I think, really crack this, uh, 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 lacuna and holes, um, or it might be effaced. And if I hit like a formula, like maybe the beginning of an epistolary pre-script, I

• 13:33Speaker 04

  can predict where things are, where if I can pick up a few letters here and there, I can reconstruct the whole part because it will, it's very formulaic.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  About the way to this in the Roman period. Now, they'll do this in a later period, like in the Byzantine, he's getting like the third, fourth, fifth, but the order changes. But there is a definite order of how you begin a letter in the Roman period in the papyri.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  So not unlike, like, if I understand you correctly, it would be sort of the equivalent to if we found, you know, a piece of paper now and it's a letter and it's like all torn up or whatever. And at the end of it, it says, you know, 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, that's, you know what I mean? Like, is that basically the kind of thing you're talking about?

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, there, there's formulaic parts, um, of, you know, of letters and, you know, they tend to be, at least in the Roman period, in the, you know, in the introduction of the pre-script and then in the valediction, you'll find there's some pretty, they're pretty standard, uh, with what they do. And so, um, you know, when you think of this and to get to, you know, uh, into two John, in a Roman letter, it always begins with the name or title of the, um, 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 two or three John, you have the elder. And that's pretty standard. That will change in later periods, but the Roman period is what

• 14:57Speaker 04

  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, the 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 is 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 that in the book. So when you read 2 John,

• 15:40Speaker 04

  what you have now, and this is what's strange, is it begins with, right, the name of the sender, right, the elder. But then they're saying is the third word is not a name, it's now an adjective.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Right? Eklecte. So you have eklecte, which is, it is an adjective, and I'll talk a bit more about that. And then the next word is kuria, or lady. So this is right, 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. They never actually precede it. In fact, you know, from the Roman period, you know, I checked this, there's about 2,300 published letters. So we have a pretty good idea, right? Every, you know, every, you know, year, there's more being added to this, but it's pretty secure. We just don't begin letters where an adjective fronts like a name, or you don't do this in the Roman period.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  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 eklecte as an adjective, right? So it's lowercase, and you accent it a certain way. And then they say, well, the courier 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 eklecte. And You know, I began thinking about this and you know, the order would make sense if that third word were, um, and you know, a proper name. And so one of the things that is part of my work in this book is, you know, is this, you

• 17:19Speaker 04

  know, eclectic, if we get rid of all the modern stuff and just had like this letter string eclectic there, you know, could that be a proper name? And in fact, the name does exist. I spent an entire chapter giving examples, both in Greek and in Latin. And it was interesting, this name actually is mostly attested in the Roman period as a female name.

• 17:36Speaker 01

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

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, of the, you know, I think there's around 33 or four, you know, different women's names that appear in the New Testament. And you know, some are really, really, you know, you know, popular names, like for example, like Mary, that will come to appear all over the place, in parks, the rise of Christianity is a very popular name. Names like Claudia, of course, or Julia are just incredibly popular. But you know, most women's names that appear in the New Testament, if you get rid of, you know, you know, Christians talking about, they were commenting on, when you look in like inscriptions or papyri, they have less than, you know, 200 attestations. But they're there, like for example, the name Lois doesn't appear anywhere else. It's really strange, right? This is a letter from the pastorals.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  You do, it is a unisex name, there's a masculine form that does appear. And so this name eclectic, it would be, in ancient Greek, it would be undifferentiated from an adjective. And so, because there's no, you know, they're 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 meets 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, when you first look at this based on letters, this should be a name, right? And again, you have Gaius.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  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 names, women's names that appear in the New Testament. Now, what's interesting is the, and I bring this up in the book, but being able to make a stronger case is, you know, our grammar for two John one, when you look at a papyri, it doesn't actually work. You know, even, you know, when you look at some of the commentators, and some of the really, like Raymond Brown writes, I think, a really good commentary. There's others, you know, over the years, 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 Wes Scott,

• 19:57Speaker 04

  who, back at the end of the 19th century, you know, who does, they kind of do the, the new text of the New Testament. He has a commentary on the John nine epistles, and he points out saying, there's problems here, but he says, nonetheless, you know, 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, ecclecte curia, like it's an adjective followed by the noun curia. 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 woman, ecclecte curia. Like curia, you know, cura 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.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  But it's interesting, actually, they have, they give us an alternate reading, and it shows me that they're on to something. They're like, something's up here.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  And so what you have then is you have this curia that follows. And when you start looking at letters, like in papyri, you have this title, curia, or lady. And you have the male, you know, curios, like lord or master. You know, these appear, you know, combined about three or 400 times in Roman period letters. 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, you know, so and so, my lord, or my master, and same with lady.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Well, in 3 John 1, it's "Gaiotou agapito." So you have the adjective following after, and it's usually in English translation is "the well-beloved" gaios 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.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  What does that tell us?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And everybody that's like me and didn't pay attention during grammar class, put on your seatbelts.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Okay, this is...

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Because we're getting deep grammar here.

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  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house.

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  And then even though it took some discipline and there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and we're able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, "Oh, this will never end," actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

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• 26:15Speaker 04

  This is where we get to argue over two letters that make the argument.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Because, you know, if I just capitalize ecclectae and you have curia, 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. You know, 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, you know, this point before ecclectae that's written, 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 ecclectae, right? Which can be a name and curia is, you need a definite article. So it's always right to ecclectae the lady, right? Or like Gaius the beloved. This is standard Greek. This is what good Greek is.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  You don't have this. Now, the definite article in this case would be a taueta. Or just 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 curia appear in papyri. You know, there's a definite art, 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, you know, I began, you know, thinking about this. And so, and I mentioned in the first chapter, what I did is I began kind of trying to think, you know, what is Clement seeing? How can I, you know, solve this issue? Is I put all the letters together, undifferentiated, in script, you can do in caps.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  And I began looking at it, saying, what's he seeing? And all of a sudden, the taueta that ends ecclectae could actually be the definite article that goes with curia. Now you have the word eccle, which doesn't have a proper ending, right? You need that, that ending there. But I began to think, wait a second, I'm on to something here. Something is going on here, because you need the definite article.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  So, so if it had, so what you're saying, sorry, if I can just make sure that I'm following. What, what, what you would have, if you had the article, would be ecclectae ends in a taueta. And then you would have another taueta.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And then you would have the word curia.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  And so, so it would be, yeah, you'd have the Taueta Taueta and then, and that. But it doesn't, but, but, but none of the manuscripts that we have seen have that Tau, that extra Taueta, right?

• 28:42Speaker 04

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

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:50Speaker 04

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

• 28:56Speaker 01

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

• 29:00Speaker 04

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

• 29:03Speaker 00

  See, that was the juiciest part.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  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, I'm picking up what you're putting down. So I, I, I am not a scholar. That is, that is what we get to is I'm not a scholar.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  In short, where we stand is that the missing element happens to exactly match the last two letters of the word ecclecti.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  In other, and, 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.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. So when I saw this, you'd, hey, the take of the Curia, I began thinking more about this and, you know, I came across a letter. I started, you know, thinking about how do you ecclect, right? Like, cause you know, you have in papyri, like, for example, foreign names, like Semitic names, they don't decline them in Greek. Like they have an OS ending or, 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 no, ecclect, you know, ecclecti is clearly, it's clearly Greek, right? Elect. 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? Cause this te now, is it the end of the name? Is it to go with now the te Curia, which you expect? Is I was just going through a letter. It was a letter between two women.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  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 in like, we call them carrot brackets. They look like this. You put them in there, and it means the editors 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 made clearance. So you add this in as 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.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  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 eklecte te kuria to eklecte kuria.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  And this is, this is a pretty common thing that happens in the transcription of texts, where you have letters on the end of one, 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 homoeotetan, or something like that. And so this is the, the argument that you decide is, it makes the most sense of what's going on here in the, in the manuscript, correct?

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, that was the first, right? 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, you know, across the board. They follow, you know, they might change titles, but the collocation's there. And now you have the same Application, right? You have the name, you have a definite article and you have a modifier. You know, this is substantive or you have in three John, you know, one, an adjective. And the Greek makes sense, you know, as it currently reads it, it just, it doesn't really work. And so that was the first part saying, oh my goodness, this, this actually works. What you always, and just to go back before we go on here, this is common in the papyri.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  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, I had a question for you.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Do that.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  So we have, we have a way that this could have happened. We have a text critical arguments that has some, there's some meat on that bone. Cause this is something that we can demonstrate happens a lot in, in these kinds of letters. What, 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?

• 34:24Speaker 04

  So to have like the, the shorter reading or you mean?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Well, if, if we're, if we're going to, because it doesn't, either reading requires we fiddle with the text a little bit. And we've, and we've, we've figured out a way to account for how the eclectic as a name reading could have, could be what was in the autograph. What, 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?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  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, two John are in, you know, Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, right? These two major, you know, bibles from the fourth century. And both of them have the shorter reading, right? This has Eclecta Coria. 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 is torn off. So you actually don't know what the reading is.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  There. So actually, you have the two, but you don't have Alexandrinus. Then you have, um, there's a sheet of papier, well, it's actually parchment. Um, it's, uh, O two, three, two, and the numbering scheme they have for this. It's P. Anthonopoulos, um, 12. And what's interesting with this, you have the beginning of two John, but it actually begins with Coria. You're missing the first line before it got lost, which is kind of like, oh, my goodness. It would be nice to have a bit more.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  And then you have another manuscript, GAO 48, where it's a Palimpsest text from the fifth century. But the first verse is-

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Palimpsest is where the text has been overwritten by another, where they scraped 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.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  So you can't tell, the first verse of two 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 two John one with like six 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, eight, nine centuries, you only have Vaticanus and Sinaiticus for this. And so they have shorter, but all the other ones are not, um, 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. Um, and you get lots and lots of minuscules.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  And what's interesting is, once you invite the miniscule evidence, this longer reading, Eclecta te Coria, is attested.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  And in a couple of pretty important minuscules, it first appears in one, it's called GA, which stands for Gregory Alon. 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 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. And you mentioned textual criticism, because as you know, you know, often you have these families of manuscripts and they might, you know, copy the, because it is possible, right? That somebody maybe, somebody could say, hey, you know, this is actually an error where somebody's copied extrait, right? Eclecte threw an extrait and it was a one-off. But

• 37:56Speaker 04

  when you actually see a family repeating this again and again and again, over five, six manuscripts, you're like, no, that is being deliberately copied. So it's strength of the record, you're going to the real variant reading here, which is interesting, is all the manuscripts have it are actually related to this. And so the manuscript evidence, it appears later, but we only have, right, really early, we just have the two earlier manuscripts where they have the, you only have the shorter reading, not the longer one.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Is it your idea that, that when Clement, in the late second century, talked about a lady named Eclecte as being the recipient of this letter, do you, do you think that Clement was looking at a manuscript that had the tay in it?

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I would take, it's very clear, like, now, we only have Clement in Latin, right? So he's translated, we, his text this comes from, you know, where he preserves commentaries. Early Christians mention, Eusebius talks about it. We only have a couple later fragments via Cassidorus from like the sixth century. And we have his, like, you know, outlines on, you know, a couple of letters, like one and two John. When he reads it, it's clear that he's reading this as a proper name, right? The Latin's unmistakable there. He's reading as a woman by name Eclecte.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  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 two John one? And there's not a whole lot, you know, when you actually start breaking this down, at least with the Adresi, 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. And he says, oh, it's written to a woman by name, Eclecta. You know, Jerome talks a little bit about it. It's not altogether clear he'll mention this. And then, once you hit the sixth, seventh century, you then have some writers like, and some container that talk about, well, it could be a woman.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  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 sixth, seventh, eighth 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 Eclecta te curia.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Now, now, one of the, 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 Sinaticus 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 century or later. The two things that are going to come up are going to be Lectio de Facilior, 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

• 41:09Speaker 00

  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 they're 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, that's those are the two things they're going to say, okay, you are preferring the

• 41:53Speaker 00

  longer reading, you are preferring the easier reading. Now, what are you going to, what do you say in response to to that challenge?

• 42:03Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Micah Sargent. This week on Windows Weekly, we've got a great show for you. Paul talks about his time with the RTX Spark hardware, three different RTX computers and the frustrations therein. We also talk about Xbox's Project Helix, and we get a special cocktail, the Theranos cocktail. If you'd like to check out this episode of Windows Weekly, just look for Windows Weekly wherever you get your podcasts, or head to twit.tv slash W W. Hey, it's Micah Sargent from Tech News Weekly, and this week we go hands on with Jennifer Patterson Tuohy. Jen was at the Apple Welcome Home event and had an opportunity to try out Home View, the new device from Apple for the smart home. We talk about how it's

• 42:48Speaker 06

  kind of like a big Apple Watch tied to a low HomePod Mini, and we also talk about the other gadgets Apple announced that day, including the Apple TV 4K at its most expensive price, the HomePod Mini 2 at, well, its less saturated colors, and so much more. Then I've got a quick little story about how eight states have decided to sue OpenAI as part of a consumer protection lawsuit, but how it's really about getting the reins on training AI with AI. You can check out Tech News Weekly by looking for Tech News Weekly wherever you get your podcasts, or by heading to twit.tv slash T N W.

• 43:28Speaker 07

  Every Sunday, we cover the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte from the Twit Podcast Network, inviting you to join me this week for a doozy. Jason Calacanis and Gina Smith join me. We're going to talk about so many things, the flying car from Tesla, the guy who bugged the OpenAI conference room, wrapped it in toilet paper, and the new Surface Laptop. It's all coming up on Twit. You'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Fair question. What I would say, and I bring this up, is I would cite the work of James Royce that I cite in the work. And so James Royce, just to get 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.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  In fact, he said, what he found was, in fact, he said, it is lectio longior potior. He says, in fact, it's the longer reading. And when he qualified this thing, it's not like when people are adding a whole verse, or, you know, all this. He says, when you have a longer reading of a few letters or a word, he says, his studies showed that, in fact, this tended to be the better 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, you know, principle that goes back to, you know, Griesbach who said this. He said, yes, in bigger parts

• 45:25Speaker 04

  could be the case that in 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've joked about this. Let's say, you know, I bring up the book, if I were to find two John, if I just got back from Egypt last week, I was there working on dig and working on stuff, if I would have found two John for the first time, and let's say it starts off as it does in our Greek New Testament, right? Ho presbuteros eclectae curia, 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?

• 46:09Speaker 04

  I would transcribe that as eclectae and then put the brackets in te curia because it makes no sense. And I would then put a footnote, you know, in there and to 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 curia always follows right with a definite article. And I would do that in like a paprological addition and it would be no more than a two sentence footnote and no one would argue. I think when you do it to the New Testament now, that two sentence footnote has to become a 300 page book.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  To do, I'm dead serious, but really, when I present with the paprologists, everybody's like, well, yeah, of course this is work because we see this all the time at papyri. If we're to find that, 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 and textual criticism. And yeah, I think there are things to this, but James Horst's work's really interesting where he says, I did the work and in fact, the very opposite was the case with papyri. Well, these little things.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  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 the, 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 gonna, we're gonna throw in a little, little tau eta here. And what do you, what do you say about somebody who brings up that objection?

• 47:38Speaker 04

  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 in the Byzantine period, adjectives will front nouns, but that's not until the third and fourth century. And so I mentioned that in the book, but in fact, they'll actually get, what you'll find is in the Roman period, it's very clear A to B. And by the time you hit later third, but really fourth, fifth, it goes basically to B 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,

• 48:20Speaker 04

  if people are seeing this mistake and it's not a problem because epistolary habits have changed over, you know, by the time you third, fourth, fifth century in the Byzantine period.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  So it's no longer, it's no longer the lectio de facili or by the time that these manuscripts are being copied.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  I 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 third century. This this change goes on with epistolary prescripts.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Okay, Dan, sorry.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Well, so I, you know, we, we, I feel that we have, uh, we, we've sort of covered the, the, 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, you know, you would just put that tay in there in the carrots and then you're good. My question for you is, uh, and because you said, uh, you know, that in, in a biblical context, this becomes a very big deal. I want to know, I want to explore what the big deal is. Uh, why it's why this little change from being, you know,

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I may either to a lady that we don't know or, or to the church, to a, you know, a sister church on the other side of the world or whatever. Well, talk to me about what it means biblically that now this is to Lady Electa, a person, a specific person.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  You know, well, I, 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, um, a named woman. So that would help us. And this I argue in the book is it kind of fill out, um, roles of women in the New Testament, help enlarge that picture. And it's that where I think it becomes very significant.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  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. 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 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, in the book, I don't say this is definitely a house church. I think there's a good direction, or it doesn't actually

• 51:02Speaker 04

  mention this, but we know early Christians typically met in homes. It seems to me that Eclecte 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."

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  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, "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, 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, I've 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

• 52:06Speaker 04

  it, but for me, it makes much more sense.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  And this would probably fit within the role of women within the first few centuries, because you did have women who were, 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, 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

• 52:52Speaker 00

  that dating to as late as the fifth, maybe even the sixth 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 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?

• 53:22Speaker 04

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

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, the earliest.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, or a year out. But you know, when you look at this, you know, and I mentioned the book, the last chapter is kind of like, okay, what can we now say, you know, about, you know, Eclecte, 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 letters on papyri is, you know, they can have about five or six interpretations, but at least saying here, 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. Or think of, you know, in Colossians, it's 415, the church in the house of Nympha, who is a

• 54:11Speaker 04

  woman. In fact, you know, some translations put Nympha as a man, but mostly I know this is a woman. So it would fit within that context where she would be there and kind of act as a gatekeeper. In fact, I talked last chapter how, you know, women would often even outside of that, this word, you know, curia, has that can carry that meaning. 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 one and verse five. But outside, it could be used as, you know, kind of like in a sense of a mistress, you know, later on. Uh, you know, fourth, fifth century could use for a deaconess. Uh, I don't push that. I, you know, if it would need to have it, but I, I just kind of, I would fit her

• 54:54Speaker 04

  within this kind of framework that we already see a little bit. You know, you could add Priscilla and Aquila, right? There's a church there that she would be part of this network. Um, and so, yeah, I'm curious to think what people say there. I don't think it, it changed our picture. In fact, I think it's just kind of complements what we already know based on some other references in the New Testament.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it would surprise a lot of people though, to know that, uh, 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, I think it does change the, the perspective.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  To hear, you know, you know, when Dan, uh, early on in our show, we did a, an episode where we talked about unia, uh, and, and how that, you know, there's this, there's this woman's name that was, that is often thought to be a man or is, you know, is glossed over and, uh, and she, you know, this could be a person that was, that was very much in authority. And, and I think that, uh, that there are good reasons, there are sort of obvious reasons why people wouldn't want, you know, people's men, certain men in authority wouldn't want this to be a woman

• 56:20Speaker 01

  in authority, because it, it challenges a lot of, a lot of commonly held ideas about who can and can't run a church. But I think it's great. I think, I, I think it's clear that if this is, uh, you know, if, if people start accepting your argument, which I think is a very strong argument, it, it, it really opens up the idea of, of, of what a woman's role in, in the early church was.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, and I see this here, you know, with the letter, you know, kind of take 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 that in those verses there, you know, kind of in, you know, nine 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 feel, you know, imagine this, 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,

• 57:33Speaker 04

  is that you do have, it talks, you know, I spend most of the book talking, right? The elder to the lady ecclech day. 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, use 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

• 58:15Speaker 04

  as children. And so I see that going on there with, you know, important 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.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 00

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

• 58:37Speaker 04

  They go back and forth.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  They go back and forth, okay.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  You actually have singular and plural. And so what I would say is when you're plural is kind of, you know, talking 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 a plural. Typically, who's being, you know, being addressed here and then as a collective.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  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, is this a metaphorical reference to a church? The commentaries always go, well, the last verse seals it because the last verse says, "Your, your elect sister." What's the, what's the significance of the apparent adjectival use of elect? The very last word of the entire letter too? How we understand the greeting?

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. 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 tae, right? Eclectae tae curia. If you go back, there's an edition of the New Testament called the Edictio Regia. It was printed by the famous print, you know, Robert Stephanus, right? Who does all this work in the middle of 16th century.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Put the verses in the, in the New Testament.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  Does versification, does this, had some notes. In his third edition, published in 1550, he capitalizes eclectae. And so for a time, that was thought, now, it doesn't solve the grammar problem. It still doesn't work, right? You have to have the tae there. But so people said, oh, this must be this woman, right? Eclectae, right? So it did, for about a hundred years. And people said, no, no, the grammar, you don't, it kind of came and went. But from that, commentators later on, like, you know, Theodore Beza and other, 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 eclectae because the end of the verse would mean then she has a sister with the same name.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  So it started with eclectae and ended with eclectae. The problem with that is they're not paying attention to the Greek grammar. In the first verse, eclectic is not preceded by a definite article.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  And perceptive commentators like Wes Scott 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 eclectic 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 eclectic or both as elect. And so you'll find that in scholarship today.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Even saying that the verse 13 governs how you read verse one.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Um, the thing is, it's the grammar. You know, even Boltman, he, he, in his commentary on two John says, well, it's an adjective at the end, it's got to be an adjective at the, at the start.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's a pun and, and you know, as you look at this, um, this is not unlike the name Peter, right? You have the pun, thou art Peter upon this rock.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  On this rock.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  The name Onesimus, you have this. And this is interesting because you have these, you know, puns or plays in Greek, they tend to happen on, on what are called simple names, meaning names that are undifferentiated from a noun or adjective, which is what eclectic would be. And so this, what you're having here is saying, look, there is a sister and you know, she's eclectic. So I see this as a play where it's clearly a name and then you have an adjective at the end.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Or when Patrick Stewart comes in and says, from now on, all the toilets in the kingdom will be known as John's. Um, one, one final question I had, you mentioned verse five, you do, you have another, the, um, the, uh, Kyriya.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  Kyriya.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Uh, in verse five, which is also Anarthris. Uh, so, so lacking the article, this is, this has got to be, um, This has got to be a vocative. Is that, is that, it's been a while since, since I've been this deep in my Greek. Is that standard for the vocative to, to omit the definite article?

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  Yes, it is. And what's interesting, and I know I point this out in the book, and look about 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 Kura, Kira, right? That being a proper name. And so they take this a proper name. And they say then he's addressing her by name in verse five, Kira, you know, we ought to, you know, love one another. That doesn't, the argument doesn't make any sense. The collocation's problematic. But what you have here is in papyrus letters, what you'll find is that people will be addressed by, you know, for example, you know, you know, to, you know, Thomas, my father. And what you'll

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  find then in the letter is when they refer to them again, they won't refer to them by their, their, their name, they'll defight to the, to the title. And often it'll be the title in the vocative, oh, father. And this is just defaulting now, saying clearly this is lady, oh, oh, lady. And then repeats that. And so there are examples of that, both with, you know, a kurios, where they'll say, you know, so and so, my lord, and they don't use the name in the letter, it just defaults to lord. And so that is yet another kind of parallel you'll find with this.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

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

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  you make a very strong case here. Dan, any, any final thoughts?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Not really. Just thanks so much for joining us, Lincoln. The book is Lady Eclecte. It's from Fortress Press and, and go out. Yeah, look, we both got it. Go out and get you a copy. It's a, it's a really compelling. Oh yeah, we've all got it. Everybody.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I brought it all here.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

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

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  And if you haven't heard enough of Lincoln, uh, we're going to get down and dirty. We're going to get real informal, uh, over in, on, in our Patreon. Uh, 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 slash data over dogma. Uh, sign up there and, uh, and become one of our favorite listeners, uh, slash viewers. Uh, if you can't afford to do that, leave us a five star review somewhere. Like, comment, subscribe, do all the things. That's always a great way to, uh, to help us out and we always appreciate

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  that too. Uh, thanks so much to our editor, Roger Gowdy. Thanks to JJ for, uh, producing the show. Uh, and we will talk to you again next time.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

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