Everyone is Wrong About 2 John!

Dan McClellan stumbling across a passage on 2 John 1 that I thought, "Wow, no one's really 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 this was just him, just some wild musings.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Turned to my scriptures and Bible and thought, "Well, what's he saying here?" And the more I began looking at it, and working with Greek papyri, I'm like, "No, there's a name here." Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan 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?

Dan Beecher Things are peachy.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Things are peachy. Today, I have talked before on this show about going with you to the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and hearing talks that 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. We're going to dive into one of those things.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher 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?

Dan McClellan Absolutely. Today, we are honored to have here with us 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.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Me too. I remember, I think it was 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 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 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, who we've all talked enough about Clement of Alexandria in- Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher I talk about him constantly ... on this show, but I'm always on Clement of Alexandria.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher You can't shut me up about him.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher So Clement is a church figure, writing in the late second, early third century.

Dan McClellan Writes various works. Some of them have survived. Of course, some haven't. And I got interested in his work when I was working in Egypt. I was editing some papyri and inscriptions, and when you're working on these things, you go into Greek databases, and you start finding parallels and stuff. And that 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, no one's really 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. And I thought this was just him, just some wild musings.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Turned to my scriptures and Bible and thought, "Well, what's he saying here?" And the more I began looking at it, and working with Greek papyri, I'm like, "No, there's a name here."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So that kind of started it off.

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

Dan McClellan No, you cannot say papyruses.

Dan Beecher I can do what I want, man.

Dan McClellan Papyri, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah, papyrologist.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Work with papyri.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. It mentions paper now. It's an idiomatic translation.

Dan McClellan But I've worked a lot with ancient letters on papyri, and 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 all came together, it 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 two duplicated letters got dropped out.

Dan Beecher I guess we shouldn't bury the lead. Let's get to what the crux of the argument is, and then we can sort of get to Why we think it is what we-- why you're saying it is what you're saying it is. 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 "Dear so and so" part of the letter. And it's generally translated, 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, 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.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So if you go back, certainly in scholarship, the dominant way to read this, and the way that I read it was that, initially was 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, Korea." It's a feminine, and say, "Well, it's kind of like standing in for ecclesia," right, the word church. In fact, it's interesting, and I mention this in the book, that in some later manuscripts, they even gloss the word Korea in the lecture, put the margin, read it as church.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so, take it as just a reference to a church.

Dan Beecher But, as you begin reading this letter, it's very short, a total of 13 verses. It strikes me as incredibly strange that such a short letter would have this overarching metaphor.

Dan McClellan Especially when you have another letter written by the elder that is very straightforward, right, mentions Gaius, it's personal, dealing with issues. And, what this opening, right, to an elect lady or the elect lady is, as I began working on this, is that when you read the Greek New Testament, of course, Greek today has accents, it's capitalized, you have word spacing. All these interpretive features are not there in the original text.

Dan Beecher It's just undifferentiated text written scriptio continua altogether.

Dan McClellan And so- Can you butch, pause real quick.

Dan Beecher Go ahead.

Dan McClellan 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? Because so we can paint a picture.

Dan Beecher Oh, Dan's doing my job over here. I love it.

Dan McClellan You bet. I'd be happy to. So, when people write, when I read papyri, 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.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan imagine reading a book in English today where there's no word space, everything's just put together, and you need to figure where a word ends and begins. And so it- It's torture.

Dan Beecher It sounds like torture. I don't know how- And it's all uppercase, right? There are cases in these languages, but in this case, it is 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, 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?

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. And so there are some predictable about when they break.

Dan McClellan But yeah, that's just common.

Dan Beecher It will break.

Dan McClellan And the text is just undifferentiated. You just have-- 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 it's very disorienting when I'm trying to edit a papyrus. No accents or breathing marks or anything like that either in this time period.

Dan Beecher Very few.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Maybe in literary manuscripts later on, you'll get a little bit of that.

Dan McClellan But generally, imagine just typing all caps in a paragraph and just going and don't stop- Without spaces.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan without spaces and write a paragraph. That's what it looks like.

Dan Beecher It's so funny to me the thought that the space was at one point a mind-bending innovation.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You know what I mean?

Dan Beecher That's so crazy.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So there were probably people who were like, "Accents, that's the coolest thing since spaces- Right ... that we're adding to our text." Sorry, we interrupted, the flow there.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan what were you getting to? Well, so you have this text, it's undifferentiated, so you're working your way through this, and I've read a lot of letters. So my dissertation was on ancient letters from Egypt, Christian letters, and I've translated letters. I've been in Egypt, pulled them out of the ground and published them. And one of the things, 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.

Dan Beecher It's very standard.

Dan McClellan And so I can edit a papyrus that is full of lacuna and holes, or it might be effaced. And if I hit 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- Yeah ... the way they did this in the Roman period. Now, they'll do this in a later period, like in the Byzantine, who'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.

Dan Beecher So, not unlike, if I understand you correctly, it would be sort of the equivalent to if we found a piece of paper now, and it's a letter, and it's like 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?

Dan McClellan Yeah. There's formulaic parts of letters. And they tend to be, at least in the Roman period, in the introduction or 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.

Dan Beecher Nice. And so that's always the first word or two of the letter.

Dan McClellan 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 in the Roman period, that's 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.

Dan Beecher And it's just like clockwork. Now, this is what you have in 3 John 1.

Dan McClellan So if you go to the Greek, you have 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 the name of the sender directly to-- It's called an A to B greeting.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It'll reverse in the Byzantine period, but we don't need to worry about that here. I go at that in the book. So when you read 2 John, what you have now, this is what's strange, is it begins with the name of the sender, "The elder," but then they're saying is the third word is not a name, it's now an adjective.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Eklekte. So you have eklekte, which 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 in the translation. "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.

Dan Beecher In fact, from the Roman period, I checked this, there's about 2,300 published letters.

Dan McClellan So we have a pretty good idea.

Dan Beecher Every year, there's more being added to this, but it's pretty secure.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Yeah. 3 John begins with a name.

Dan McClellan Right. And so what you've had historically is in Greek Bibles, they articulate this word eklekte as an adjective. So it's lowercase, and you accent it a certain way. And then they say, well, the kuria that follows is like a noun, and so you have elect lady. Now, going back to Clement.

Dan Beecher Clement said that it's written to a lady called Eklekte.

Dan McClellan And I began thinking about this, and the order would make sense if that third word were a proper name.

Dan Beecher And so one of the things that is part of my work in this book is, is this Eklekte?

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher 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.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think there's around 33 or 34 different women's names that appear in the New Testament, and some are really, really popular names. For example, like Mary. That will come to appear all over the place. In parts of the rise of Christianity, it becomes a very popular name.

Dan Beecher Names like Claudia, of course, or Julia are just incredibly popular.

Dan McClellan But most women's names that appear in the New Testament, if you get rid of Christians talking about them or commenting on them, and you look in inscriptions or papyri, they have less than 200 attestations.

Dan Beecher But they're there.

Dan McClellan Like, for example, the name Lois doesn't appear anywhere else, which is really strange. This is a letter from the Pastorals.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. It is a unisex name. There's a masculine form that does appear.

Dan McClellan And so this name Eklekte, in ancient Greek, it would be undifferentiated from an adjective.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Because 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 take the name Stephen.

Dan Beecher Stephanos. It means crowned. It's a proper name.

Dan McClellan So when you read this, context will tell you, well, this is now a name, or it's now a crown. And so when you first look at this based on letters, this should be a name. 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 women's names that appear in the New Testament. Now, what's interesting is, and I bring this up in the book, but we can make a stronger case, is our grammar for 2 John 1, when you look at a papyri, it doesn't actually work.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan When you look at some of the commentators, and some of them are really good. Raymond Brown writes, I think, a really good commentary. There's others over the years that even hint. They say something's up with this grammar. In fact, when you look at one of the best commentaries that I think is really remarkable is by Westcott, who back at the end of the 19th century, 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, ekklette 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, Ekklekte Kuria.

Dan Beecher Like Kuria is a woman's name.

Dan McClellan But they say this doesn't really make sense, having a double name here, but the grammar would then work.

Dan Beecher But it's interesting, actually, they give us an alternate reading, and it shows me that they're onto something.

Dan McClellan They're like, "Something's up here." And so what you have then is you have this Kuria that follows. And when you start looking at letters, like in papyri, you have this title, Kuria, or Lady, and you have the male, Kyrios, like Lord or Master. These appear 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 the name. They always come after the name.

Dan Beecher And so it's to so and so, my Lord, or- Right ...

Dan McClellan my master. And same with Lady. Well, in 3 John 1, it's Gaioto Agapito.

Dan Beecher Exactly.

Dan McClellan 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?

Dan Beecher And everybody that's like me and didn't pay attention during- Go slow ... during grammar class, put on your seat belts. Okay, this is- Because we're getting deep grammar here. This is where we get to argue over two letters that make the argument.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because, if I just capitalize ekklette and you have Kuria, there's still a grammatical problem.

Dan Beecher Okay?

Dan McClellan 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 ekklette 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 ekklette, which can be a name, and Kuria, is you need a definite article. So it's always write, "To Ekkte, the lady." Or like, "Gaius, the Beloved."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan This is standard Greek, and this is what good Greek is. You don't have this. Now, the definite article, in this case, would be a tau eta, or just think of a TH that you have between the two. And so as Dan pointed out, when you go and read 3 John 1, you have the name, a definite article, and an adjective. And when you read these letters in Greek where you have Kuria appear in papyri, there's a name, a definite article, a two-letter definite article, and then the name.

Dan Beecher And of course, it's all put together here.

Dan McClellan Well, I began thinking about this, and I mentioned this in the first chapter. What I did is I began trying to think, what is Clement seeing? How can I solve this issue? Is I put all the letters together undifferentiated in scriptio continua in caps. And I began looking at it saying, "What's he seeing?" And all of a sudden, the tau eta that ends ekklette could actually be the definite article that goes with Kuria. Now you just have the word ekklette, which doesn't have a proper ending. You need that ending there. But I began thinking, "Wait a second, I'm onto something here. Something is going on here." Because you need the definite article.

Dan Beecher So what you're saying, sorry, if I can just- Oh, you bet ... make sure that I'm following. What you would have if you had the article would be ekklette ends in a tau eta, and then you would have another tau eta- Yes ... and then you would have the word Kuria.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And so it would be, you'd have the tau eta, tau eta, and that.

Dan McClellan And then Kuria.

Dan Beecher 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.

Dan McClellan Oh! Albeit they're later manuscripts, they actually have that reading.

Dan Beecher Boom!

Dan McClellan Wow.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

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

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

Dan McClellan It was a little over halfway through on the manuscript evidence. See, that was the juiciest part, Dan.

Dan Beecher Look, I was trying, but as Dan said earlier, maybe before we started recording, it's a thick book. It's dense, and I like it. But 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 what we get to, is that I'm not a scholar.

Dan McClellan So in short, where we stand is that the missing element happens to exactly match the last two letters of the word ekklette.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So when I saw this, that hey, the takeaway with Kuria, I began thinking more about this, and I came across a letter. I started thinking about how do you ekklette. Because you have in papyri, for example, foreign names, like Semitic names, they don't decline them in Greek.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan They'll typically have an OS ending, but they just leave them in like Abraham instead of Abrahamos. I thought, well, is this a foreign name? But no, ekklette it's clearly Greek.

Dan Beecher Elect. But where it all kind of came together is I was looking at this one papyrus letter.

Dan McClellan I was thinking, "Well, how do you solve this?" Because this te now, is it the end of the name? Is it to go with now the tekuri, which you expect? Is I was just going through a letter. It was a letter between two women. And what you do when you edit a text is, when I edit Greek texts, you're always correcting stuff. Imagine writing without spellchecker- Mm-hmm ... 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, we call them caret brackets.

Dan Beecher They look like this. You put them in there, and it means the editor's restoring what should be there.

Dan McClellan 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 clear. And 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. What happened was you have these two te te.

Dan Beecher This goes together.

Dan McClellan At some point, the second one got dropped." And so it shortened from ekklekte tekuria to ekklekte kuria. And 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 a homoioteleuton 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?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan That was the first break. So I thought, okay, the grammar now makes sense.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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 written by the same individual to 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.

Dan Beecher And the Greek makes sense. As it currently reads, it doesn't really work.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher I edit text all the time where I'm adding stuff, and this very error.

Dan McClellan I cite multiple letters where this very error, this article, is dropped out because the name ends with the same letter that the article ends with. This is not uncommon.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I've edited texts where articles, things like this, 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.

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

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher You bet.

Dan McClellan So we have a way that this could've happened. We have a text critical argument. There's some meat on that bone because this is something that 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 the shorter reading? Or you mean- Well, because either reading requires we fiddle with the text a little bit.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And we've figured out a way to account for how the ekklekte as a name reading could be what was in the autograph.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan 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? In the manuscripts, this is interesting. Of course, our earliest manuscripts of 2 John are in, Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, right? These two major Bibles from the fourth century. And both of them have the shorter reading, right?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. This have ekklekte kuria- Mm-hmm ...

Dan McClellan in both those. And what's interesting is you start looking, you have also Alexandrinus. But what's interesting there, and I point this out, that in fact there, 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- Oh, okay ...

Dan Beecher there.

Dan McClellan So actually, you have the two, but you don't have Alexandrinus. There's a sheet of papy-- Well, it's actually parchment. It's 0232 in the numbering scheme they have for this. It's P Antonopoulos 12. And what's interesting with this, you have the beginning of 2 John, but it actually begins with kuria.

Dan Beecher You're missing the first line before it that got lost, which is kind of like, "Oh my goodness. It would be nice to have a bit more."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then you have another manuscript, GAO 48, where it's a palimpsested text from the fifth century, but the first passage- So palimpsest is where the text has been overwritten by another- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Scraped out ...

Dan McClellan 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, 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 a fragment about this big from 2 John 1 with six letters, and so you can't make any definitive argument. And so what's interesting is when you look at the list of manuscript evidence, for the first eight, nine 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 problem.

Dan Beecher And then you're now into minuscules, which are a different Greek script.

Dan McClellan 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, ekklektai te kuria, is attested.

Dan Beecher Mm. And in a couple pretty important minuscules. It first appears in one, it's called Ga, which stands for Gregory-Aland. It's this numbering system they use.

Dan McClellan It's 1243.

Dan Beecher It's from St. Catherine's, dates to the 11th century, but a very important text.

Dan McClellan Mm. 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. You mentioned textual criticism because as you know, often you have these families of manuscripts, and they might copy things. Because it is possible, right, that somebody could say, "Hey, this is actually an error where somebody's copied an extra te."

Dan Beecher Right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Ekkklektai threw an extra te, and it was a one-off. But 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."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. So its strength, and we're actually dealing with a real variant reading here, which is interesting. All the manuscripts have it are actually related- Yeah ... to this.

Dan McClellan And so, the manuscript evidence, it appears later, but we only have, right, really early, we have the two earlier manuscripts where they have only the shorter reading, not the longer one.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan There.

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

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's very clear. Now, we only have Clement in Latin, right?

Dan McClellan So he's translated. His text this comes from where he preserves commentaries. Early Christians mention it. Eusebius talks about it. We only have a couple later fragments via Cassiodorus from the sixth century, and we have his outlines on a couple 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's unmistakable there.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan He's reading as a woman by name, Ekklekte. And what's interesting for me is in that first chapter of the book, I go through 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.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan 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 Ekklekte." Jerome talks a little bit about it, but it's not altogether clear.

Dan Beecher He'll mention this.

Dan McClellan And then once you hit the sixth, seventh century, you then have some writers, and some catena 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 notice how, no, it's got to be the church.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan It seems to me that in the sixth, seventh, eighth century, you 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.

Dan Beecher You'd have ekklektai te kuria.

Dan McClellan Right. And so- Now, one of the principles of textual criticism, what you're trying to do is weigh the evidence between a couple 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 century or later, the two things that are going to come up are going to be lectio difficilior, lectio brevior. And for the uninitiated- Mm-hmm ... 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 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 intentional changes, 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 do you say in response to that challenge?

Dan Beecher Fair question.

Dan McClellan 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, it came out 15 years ago, on scribal habits in New Testament papyri, where he goes through our earliest papyri manuscripts, some really famous ones- Mm-hmm ... that have gospels and stuff, and looks at how do scribes copy text. And he talks about this 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 kind of dictum isn't actually reflected in the papyri. In fact, he said what he found was, in fact, he said, "It is Lectio Longior," Patee says. In fact, it's the longer reading.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And he qualified this saying, "It's not like when people are adding a whole verse."

Dan Beecher Right. Or all this.

Dan McClellan But he says, "When you have a longer reading of a few letters or a word," he says his study showed that, in fact, this tended to be the better reading.

Dan Beecher Hmm. 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.

Dan McClellan 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.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. He said, "Yes, in bigger parts could be the case." He said, "In smaller ones," he found, he said, "it was distinct that, in fact, scribes actually shortened in errors, they did not lengthen."

Dan McClellan Hmm. 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. I've joked about this. Let's say, and I bring it up in the book, that if I were to find 2 John, I just got back from Egypt last week. I was there working on a dig and working on stuff. If I would've found 2 John for the first time, and let's say it starts off as it does in our Greek New Testament, right?

Dan Beecher right?

Dan McClellan 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 because it makes no sense.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And I would then put a footnote in there, and to say, "Look, all these examples of stuff dropping out, it doesn't make grammatical sense. We see this, it's a name, and kuria always follows with a definite article." And I would do that in a papyrological edition, and it would be no more than a two-sentence footnote.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And no one would argue.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I think when you do it to the New Testament now, that two-sentence footnote has to become a 300-page book.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher I'm dead serious. But really, when I present it with papyrologists, everybody's like, "Well, yeah, of course this works because we see this all the time in papyri," if we're to find that.

Dan McClellan But when you deal with the New Testament, people get, "Well, wait a second here. These two letters are... 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 Royce's work's really interesting where he says, "I did the work, and in fact, the very opposite was the case with papyri."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm. In these little things.

Dan McClellan 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, 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."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And what do you say about somebody who brings up that objection? Well, what I would say here is grammatically, again, the grammar doesn't work, right?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 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. Oh, really? Because in the Byzantine period, adjectives will front nouns, but that's not until the third and fourth century.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so I mention 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 actually will then, adjectives can front names.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan 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 by the time you hit third, fourth, fifth century in the Byzantine period.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Roman period doesn't work. It's no longer the lectio difficilior- Yeah ... 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 third century, this change goes on with epistolary prescripts. Very cool. So that may explain some of that. Okay, Dan.

Dan Beecher Sorry. Well, so I feel that 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 if this were just another papyrus, this wouldn't be a controversial issue at all. You would just put that te in there and the carrots, and then you're good. My question for you is, and because you said that in a biblical context, this becomes a very big deal. I want to explore what the big deal is. Why this little change from being either to a lady that we don't know or to the church, to a sister church on the other side of the world or whatever. Talk to me about what it means biblically that now this is to Lady Eklete, a person, a specific person. Well, it would be significant because now we would have one letter in the New Testament that is addressed to a named woman.

Dan McClellan Right?

Dan Beecher Otherwise, we have letters addressed to men or congregations, but we'd have one letter addressed to a named woman.

Dan McClellan So that would help us, and this I argue in the book, is it kind of fill out roles of women in the New Testament, help enlarge that picture.