2 John — The Elder’s Letter to the Chosen Lady

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

The Second Letter of John is the kind of text that is easy to overlook and hard, once read closely, to forget. It runs to thirteen verses—a single short paragraph in most Bibles, briefer than the page you are now reading—and it never gives its author a name. He signs himself only “the Presbyter,” the Elder, and writes to a recipient he calls “the chosen Lady and her children.”⁠¹ In that brief space it manages to pair truth with love as tightly as any book of the New Testament, to name the heresy it fears, and, in two of its verses, to do something that has unsettled readers for nineteen centuries: it tells a church to shut its door.

That combination—extreme brevity, an anonymous author, a tender address, and a hard command—is what makes the letter worth a long look. By the measure of pages, 2 John is almost the smallest thing in the canon. By the measure of what it reveals about how the early Church guarded its faith and discerned its Scriptures, it is one of the more instructive. It was doubted for centuries precisely because it is so slight and so anonymous, and it survived because the churches kept reading it until the question of its place answered itself.

This post reads 2 John the way the rest of this series has read the disputed books: the text first, closely; then the question of who “the Presbyter” was; then the riddle of the “chosen Lady”; then the hardest verse and what it does and does not mean; then the letter’s tight kinship with 1 and 3 John; and finally the long road from suspicion to definition, and what the Church gained by keeping a note so many of the Fathers were prepared to lose.

A letter you can read in two minutes

Begin with the whole of it, because the whole of it is short. After a greeting, the Presbyter rejoices over the readers’ fidelity, presses on them the old commandment of love, warns sharply against deceivers, forbids hospitality to them, and signs off with a promise to visit. That is the entire letter. Its architecture is plain: a salutation (vv. 1–3), a body in two movements—an exhortation to love (vv. 4–6) and a warning against false teachers (vv. 7–11)—and a brief farewell (vv. 12–13).⁠²

What a reader notices first is the saturation of a single word. In the opening three verses the Presbyter uses “truth” four times, and it recurs through the letter; for a text of this length the concentration is extraordinary.⁠³ He loves the recipients “in truth,” he writes “because of the truth that dwells in us and will be with us forever,” and he rejoices to find her children “walking in the truth.” Truth here is not an abstraction but a way of life and a content of belief at once—the right confession of Christ, lived out. And it is bound immediately to love. The one explicit request of the letter is the old commandment: “not as though I were writing a new commandment but the one we have had from the beginning: let us love one another.”⁠⁴ Truth and love, in the Presbyter’s shorthand, are the two watchwords of the whole Johannine teaching, and he will not let either stand without the other.

Then, abruptly, the warning. “Many deceivers have gone out into the world,” he writes, “those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh; such is the deceitful one and the antichrist.”⁠⁵ The word translated “antichrist” appears in the New Testament only in the Johannine letters, and the test it attaches to is precise: the refusal to confess that Jesus Christ has come, or comes, in the flesh.⁠⁶ The Greek phrase is worth pausing over. Where 1 John 4:2 uses a perfect participle—Christ “having come” in the flesh—2 John 7 uses a present participle, “coming” in the flesh, and commentators have long debated whether the shift points to the permanence of the Incarnation or carries a further nuance.⁠⁷ Either way the doctrine is the same, and it is the doctrine on which the letter pivots: the false teachers deny that the eternal Son truly took flesh, and on that denial everything else turns.

The Presbyter presses the point with a verse that has provoked uneasy commentary ever since. The deceiver, he says, is anyone “so ‘progressive’ as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ”—a wry rendering, in the NABRE, of a phrase that means literally “everyone who goes ahead.”⁠⁸ The false teacher fancies himself advanced, having progressed beyond the plain doctrine of Christ-in-the-flesh to some higher spiritual knowledge; the Presbyter answers that to go beyond that teaching is not to advance but to abandon God altogether. And then the command that is the subject of so much later argument: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him in your house or even greet him; for whoever greets him shares in his evil works.”⁠⁹ We will come to that verse on its own, because it deserves it. The letter closes gently, with the Presbyter setting aside “paper and ink” in the hope of a visit, “face to face, so that our joy may be complete,” and a greeting from “the children of your chosen sister.”⁠¹⁰

“The Presbyter”: who wrote 2 John?

Here is the first and oldest puzzle, and it begins with the signature. The author does not call himself John, or an apostle, or an eyewitness. He calls himself, simply, “the Presbyter”—in Greek ho presbyteros, the Elder.⁠¹¹ The title implies more than age: it bespeaks a recognized position of authority in the early Church, and the absence of any further name suggests that the writer was so well known to his readers that none was needed. It is the same self-designation that opens 3 John, and the two letters are the only books in the New Testament headed this way.⁠¹²

That anonymity is exactly what made the early Church uncertain. The earliest extant discussion of the question is Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Ecclesiastical History around 325. Eusebius sorted the New Testament writings into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the spurious, and he was careful to place 1 John among the books received without controversy while marking 2 and 3 John as disputed. “Of the writings of John,” he wrote, “not only his Gospel, but also the former of his epistles, has been accepted without dispute both now and in ancient times. But the other two are disputed.”⁠¹³ When he came to list the disputed books, he named them with a telling qualification: among the antilegomena are “those that are called the second and third of John, whether they belong to the evangelist or to another person of the same name.”⁠¹⁴

“Whether they belong to the evangelist or to another person of the same name”: that sentence is the hinge of the whole authorship debate, and it did not originate with Eusebius. A century earlier Origen had registered the same hesitation. John, he said, “has left also an epistle of very few lines; perhaps also a second and third; but not all consider them genuine.”⁠¹⁵ The doubt, in other words, ran back to the most learned biblical scholar of the third century, and it was a doubt not about orthodoxy but about authorship and authenticity.

Behind the hesitation lay a curious tradition about a second John at Ephesus. Eusebius found it in the prologue of Papias of Hierapolis, a writer of the early second century, who described gathering the sayings of the Lord’s first disciples and named John twice—once among the apostles, and once, separately, as “the presbyter John,” listed after a certain Aristion and apart from the Twelve.⁠¹⁶ Eusebius seized on the double mention. “It is worth while observing here that the name John is twice enumerated by him,” he wrote, taking the first to be the evangelist and the second to be a distinct figure; and he added that “there were two persons in Asia that bore the same name, and that there were two tombs in Ephesus, each of which, even to the present day, is called John’s.”⁠¹⁷ Whether Papias really meant two different men, or merely mentioned the same John in two connections, has been disputed from antiquity to the present—Eusebius, who disliked the apostle’s authorship of Revelation, had his own reasons for wanting a second John to whom Revelation might be assigned.⁠¹⁸

Jerome inherited the question and passed it on. In his catalogue of Christian writers, On Illustrious Men, he reported that the two shorter Johannine letters—“the first is ‘The elder to the elect lady and her children’ and the other ‘The elder unto Gaius’”—“are said to be the work of John the presbyter, to the memory of whom another sepulchre is shown at Ephesus to the present day.”⁠¹⁹ In his chapter on Papias he was blunter still, recording “the opinion…that the last two epistles of John are the work not of the apostle but of the presbyter.”⁠²⁰ Jerome reported this as the view of many rather than his own settled conclusion, and he noted the rival opinion that the two Ephesian tombs honored one and the same John. But he handed the medieval and modern Church a live alternative: the letters might be the work of an Elder who was not the son of Zebedee.

Modern scholarship has not closed the question; it has refined it. The careful work of weighing Papias has produced no consensus—Theodor Zahn and George Salmon held that Papias knew only one John, while Lightfoot, Westcott, and others defended the existence of a distinct presbyter.⁠²¹ What most contemporary critics share, across confessional lines, is a broader framework: the Gospel and the three letters of John are best understood as the products of a “Johannine school” or community, a circle of disciples gathered around the tradition of the Beloved Disciple, within which an authoritative figure—the Elder—wrote to the churches of his orbit.⁠²² On that reading 2 John is a short circular from the head of the school, sounding in compressed form the alarms that 1 John sounds at length.

A Catholic reader should be clear about what is, and is not, at stake here. The Church receives 2 John as inspired and canonical Scripture, and that reception does not depend on settling whether the Presbyter is the Apostle John, a separate John the Elder, or another teacher of the Johannine circle. The letter itself claims only the title; it makes no apostolic boast. The introduction to the Catholic edition of the Scriptures says as much, describing the two short letters as “products of the Johannine school” whose author, “although traditionally attributed to John the apostle,” was “probably” a disciple of an apostle, while treating the question of identity as genuinely open.⁠²³ The canonicity is a matter the Church has defined; the human authorship is a matter she has left to honest inquiry. That distinction will matter again when we reach the question of how a disputed, anonymous note became Scripture at all.

The “chosen Lady”: a woman, or a church?

If the author hides behind a title, the recipient hides behind one too. The letter is addressed “to the chosen Lady and to her children”—in Greek eklektē kyria—and what those two words mean has divided readers since antiquity.⁠²⁴

The dominant reading, and the one the Catholic Scriptures themselves adopt, is that the “chosen Lady” is a personified local church and her “children” are its members. The NABRE’s note on the first verse states it plainly: “The description is of a specific community with ‘children’ who are its members.”⁠²⁵ Several features of the letter point that way. The Presbyter alternates between addressing the recipient as a single “you” and as a plural “you”; he rejoices over “some of” her children, an odd thing to say of one woman’s literal household; and he closes with greetings from “the children of your chosen sister,” which reads naturally as one congregation greeting another.⁠²⁶ On this view the letter is what it has long been taken to be: a brief, vivid piece of correspondence from one church to a sister church, cast in the warm idiom of a family. Raymond Brown and Judith Lieu, two of the most influential modern commentators on the Johannine letters, both favor the ecclesial reading.⁠²⁷

The main competitor is the older and simpler reading: that the “chosen Lady” is an actual Christian woman, unnamed, a person of standing in her community, and her “children” her literal offspring or household. This reading has the merit of taking the address at face value, and it draws support from 3 John, which is unquestionably written to a named individual, Gaius—so that a personal female addressee in 2 John would be no anomaly.⁠²⁸ Two further possibilities turn on the Greek words themselves: that kyria is a proper name (“to the elect Kyria”), or that eklektē is (“to the lady Electa”). Both are noted in the NABRE’s own footnote, and both have been defended; the second runs into the awkwardness that verse 13 would then require a second sister also named Electa.⁠²⁹

This is the kind of detail that popular summaries tend to flatten, presenting one option as settled fact. The honest position is that the personified-church reading is the majority view and the one the Catholic study Bible endorses, while the individual-woman reading remains a serious and defensible alternative. The letter does not finally tell us, and a careful reader holds the question with an open hand—noting only that on either reading the substance is the same: a community, or a household-become-community, is being warned to guard the truth and to love.

“Do not receive him into your house”: the hardest verse

We come now to the verse that has done the most to make 2 John uncomfortable. “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine,” the Presbyter writes, “do not receive him in your house or even greet him; for whoever greets him shares in his evil works.”⁠³⁰ Taken flat and out of its world, the command sounds like a charter for shunning, a license to be cold to anyone whose theology one dislikes. That is precisely how it has often been misread, and it is worth the trouble to read it as its first hearers would have.

Two pieces of background change the meaning entirely. The first is the institution of the house church. The earliest Christians had no church buildings; they met in homes, and to “receive” a visiting teacher “into the house” was to give him the floor in the assembly—a platform, an endorsement, the use of the congregation’s gathering as his pulpit.⁠³¹ The second is the figure of the itinerant teacher. The early Church was crisscrossed by traveling preachers who depended on the hospitality of local communities, and that hospitality was itself a form of fellowship and approval. The NABRE’s note captures the setting exactly: the false teachers “were considered so dangerous and divisive as to be shunned completely. From this description they seem to be wandering preachers,” and the letter reflects “a natural suspicion of early Christians concerning such itinerants.”⁠³²

The Greek confirms the point. The greeting the Presbyter forbids is chairein, the standard salutation of the ancient world—but in this context the formal greeting extended to a visiting teacher functioned as a token of communion, a public welcome that signaled the congregation’s endorsement. To withhold it was not mere rudeness; it was the refusal to lend the community’s name and platform to a man propagating a specific and soul-destroying lie—the denial that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh.⁠³³ The command is narrow, not broad. It is aimed at the traveling propagandist seeking to use a church, not at the neighbor, the inquirer, or the opponent in honest debate. Read this way, 2 John 10–11 is of a piece with the rest of the letter: it is what love looks like when love must protect the truth, and it has an exact counterpart in 3 John, where the villain Diotrephes abuses the same custom of hospitality from the opposite direction, refusing to welcome the Presbyter’s own missionaries.⁠³⁴

There is a striking irony in the verse’s afterlife. The earliest datable quotation of 2 John anywhere—the first time a Christian writer is caught citing it—is this very command. Around the year 180, Irenaeus of Lyons, writing against the Gnostics, reached for it: “John, the disciple of the Lord,” he wrote, “has intensified their condemnation, when he desires us not even to address to them the salutation of ‘good-speed’; for, says he, ‘He that bids them be of good-speed is a partaker with their evil deeds.’”⁠³⁵ The first man we can watch using the Second Letter of John used it exactly as the Presbyter intended—to keep the heretic out of the assembly. Elsewhere in the same great work Irenaeus quotes the letter again, this time its warning about the deceivers who “confess not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh,” the words that name “a deceiver and an antichrist.”⁠³⁶ The little letter was, from the first, a weapon for guarding the Incarnation.

2 John, 1 John, and 3 John

It is impossible to read 2 John for long without feeling that one has read it before. The reason is that almost everything in it appears, at greater length, in 1 John. The new-yet-old commandment to love one another, the test of “walking in the truth,” the warning about the antichrist and those who fail to confess Christ in the flesh, the language of “remaining” in the teaching and so “having” the Father and the Son—each of these is a compressed echo of a theme developed in the first letter.⁠³⁷ The Catholic Scriptures print the cross-references in the margin, and they form a dense web back to 1 John at nearly every verse. The most natural explanation is that 2 John is a short, occasional note from the same hand and the same world as 1 John—a digest of its concerns, sent to meet a particular threat in a particular church.

Its kinship with 3 John is closer still in form. The two letters share the rare self-designation “the Elder,” they are of nearly the same compact length, and they end almost identically: in both, the Presbyter says he has much to write but will not use pen and ink, preferring to speak “face to face.”⁠³⁸ The three letters together—a substantial tract and two brief notes—read like the surviving correspondence of a single pastoral mind, and they are the chief textual ground for the Johannine-school hypothesis. Whatever one concludes about the identity of their author, the letters belong together, and they were received, doubted, and finally defined together.

The long road to the canon

The path of 2 John into the New Testament is a study in how the early Church actually discerned its Scriptures: slowly, by use, with real regional disagreement, and never by a single decree until very late.

The earliest evidence, as we have seen, is encouraging: Irenaeus quotes the letter twice by around 180, treating it as the work of “John, the disciple of the Lord.”⁠³⁹ Near the same time Clement of Alexandria thought the catholic epistles important enough to comment on; Eusebius reports that Clement gave “abridged accounts” of the disputed Scriptures, and the surviving Latin remains of that work include notes on the Johannine letters.⁠⁴⁰ The oldest known list of New Testament books, the Muratorian Fragment—usually dated to around 170—mentions “two” epistles of John as received in the Church; but which two it means is itself a famous puzzle, since the fragment elsewhere quotes 1 John in its discussion of the Gospel, and scholars divide over whether it counts 1 and 2 John, or 2 and 3 John, or whether a line has dropped out.⁠⁴¹

Against this early acceptance ran a current of doubt, and it was strongest at the edges of the Christian world. Origen knew that “not all consider them genuine,” and Eusebius set the verdict of his age in order by placing 2 and 3 John among the antilegomena, the books “disputed, yet recognized by many.”⁠⁴² The firmest resistance was in the Syriac-speaking churches: the Peshitta, the standard Syriac New Testament, simply omitted 2 John—along with 2 Peter, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation—and the letter entered Syriac use only with the later Philoxenian and Harklean revisions of the sixth and seventh centuries.⁠⁴³ For most of the first three centuries, in much of the Church, 2 John was read, valued, and quietly doubted.

The tide turned, as it did for the other disputed books, in the fourth century. In 367, Athanasius of Alexandria, in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, listed for the first time the exact twenty-seven books of the New Testament we now receive, and among the seven catholic epistles he named, without hesitation, “of John, three.”⁠⁴⁴ The North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified the same list for the Latin West, listing “three of John” among the canonical Scriptures.⁠⁴⁵ A millennium later, when the canon was reaffirmed against new pressures, the Council of Florence enumerated the identical list in its 1442 Bull of Union with the Copts, “three of John” among them.⁠⁴⁶ Finally the Council of Trent, in the Fourth Session of 8 April 1546, defined the canon with the full weight of the Church’s authority. Trent’s decree names “three of John the apostle” in its list of the sacred books and attaches the anathema: “if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts…let him be anathema.”⁠⁴⁷

The letter that had once been “disputed” was now, irrevocably, defined Scripture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists it among the twenty-seven—“1, 2 and 3 John”—and states the principle that had carried it there: “It was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books.”⁠⁴⁸

What the Church received from 2 John

It would be easy to treat 2 John as a footnote on canon formation—a test case, valuable mainly for the questions it raises about authorship and acceptance. That would be a mistake, for the letter earned its place not only by age and use but by what it carries.

It carries, first, a doctrine. In its few verses 2 John states the test that the whole Johannine corpus turns on: the confession of “Jesus Christ coming in the flesh.” Against an early form of the docetic error—the notion that the divine Christ only seemed to inhabit a human body, or descended on the man Jesus and departed before the cross—the Presbyter sets a single, non-negotiable line: the eternal Son truly became flesh, and to deny it is to side with the antichrist.⁠⁴⁹ This is why Irenaeus reached for the letter against the Gnostics, and why it matters out of all proportion to its size. A community can lose almost anything and recover; it cannot lose the Incarnation and remain the Church.

It carries, second, a lesson about the canon itself. The story of how 2 John was received is, in miniature, the Catholic account of how the whole New Testament was received. No council created the canon; the Church discerned it, slowly, by the apostolic Tradition living within her. The Second Vatican Council put the principle exactly: “Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known.”⁠⁵⁰ A short, anonymous note that some of the greatest ancient scholars doubted was kept—not because a decree imposed it, but because the churches went on reading it in worship until its place was clear, and the Church’s Tradition recognized in it the authentic voice of the apostolic faith. And because the Church receives it as inspired, the brevity is no objection: on the Council’s teaching, the inspired books teach “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” and a thirteen-verse letter that guards the Incarnation and binds truth to love is teaching exactly that.⁠⁵¹

In the Church’s public worship, fittingly, 2 John is heard rarely and at just the right moment. It has no Sunday reading in the Roman Rite. It appears in the weekday Lectionary exactly once—verses 4 through 9, on the Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time, and then only in the even-numbered years—with 3 John read the very next day.⁠⁵² The portion the Church proclaims is the heart of the letter: the call to walk in the truth, the old commandment to love, and the warning against the deceivers who will not confess Christ in the flesh. The closed-door verses are left in the background—a small liturgical echo of the ancient compromise, which kept the letter and let its hardest words rest.

What we know and what remains open

It is worth ending, as honesty requires, with the ledger of the settled and the unsettled.

What is settled is the letter’s place. The Second Letter of John is canonical Scripture, defined as such by the Church, read in her liturgy, and received without qualification as the inspired word of God. Settled, too, is the shape of its message—a brief, urgent appeal to keep truth and love together and to guard the confession of Christ come in the flesh, sealed with a hard command against those who would carry a different gospel into the household of faith.

What remains open is the human story behind the text. Whether the Presbyter is John the Apostle, a distinct John the Elder, or another teacher of the Johannine school; whether the “chosen Lady” is a church or a woman; precisely when and where the letter was written, though Ephesus near the end of the first century is the traditional and plausible setting—these questions the evidence does not finally answer, and the Church has bound none of them.⁠⁵³ A careful reader holds them with an open hand, and notices that the letter itself models the posture: confident about the truth that must be confessed and the love that must be kept, it is content to leave its author, its recipient, and a good deal of its own machinery in shadow.

For a book of thirteen verses, that is a remarkable amount of history to carry, and a remarkable amount of doctrine. It was doubted for being slight and anonymous; it survived because the Church kept reading it until the question answered itself; and it turns out to guard, in its small compass, the one confession the Church cannot do without.

Key scholarly works on 2 John

The standard critical commentary remains Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), which treats the three letters together and works out the Johannine-community framework in detail; Brown’s earlier The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979) develops the historical reconstruction behind it. Among more recent treatments, Judith M. Lieu, I, II, & III John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), is especially strong on the social setting and the “elect lady” question, and her earlier The Second and Third Epistles of John (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986) is devoted to these two letters alone. For a Catholic exegetical reading, John Painter, 1, 2, and 3 John, Sacra Pagina 18 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), is the natural starting point. Stephen S. Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John, Word Biblical Commentary 51 (Waco: Word Books, 1984; rev. ed. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), and Robert W. Yarbrough, 1–3 John, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), round out the field across the critical and evangelical traditions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Second Letter of John?

The letter identifies its author only as “the Presbyter”—the Elder (2 John 1)—with no proper name and no claim to be an apostle. Catholic tradition has often attributed it to John the Apostle, but already in antiquity there was doubt: Origen noted that “not all consider” the second and third letters genuine, Eusebius classed them among the disputed books and asked “whether they belong to the evangelist or to another person of the same name,” and Jerome reported the view that they are the work of a distinct “John the presbyter.” Most modern scholars place the letter within a “Johannine school” and treat the author as an authoritative Elder of that circle. The Church defines the letter’s canonicity and inspiration, not its human authorship, which remains genuinely open.

Who is the “elect lady” or “chosen Lady” in 2 John?

The letter is addressed to “the chosen Lady and to her children” (Greek eklektē kyria). The majority view among scholars, and the reading adopted in the footnotes of the Catholic NABRE, is that the “Lady” is a personified local church and her “children” are its members—so that “the children of your chosen sister” in verse 13 are a sister congregation. A serious minority reads it as a literal Christian woman and her household, on the analogy of 3 John, which is addressed to the individual Gaius. Two further proposals take Kyria or Eklektē as a proper name. The text does not settle the question, but the personified-church reading is the most widely held.

What does “do not receive him into your house or even greet him” mean?

In its setting (2 John 10–11), the command is narrow, not a license for general rudeness. The earliest Christians met in house churches, so to “receive” a traveling teacher “into the house” meant giving him a platform in the assembly, and the formal greeting was a public token of fellowship and endorsement. The Presbyter forbids extending that welcome and approval to itinerant false teachers spreading a specific, soul-destroying error—the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The NABRE note explains that such teachers “were considered so dangerous and divisive as to be shunned completely” and “seem to be wandering preachers.” It is the refusal to lend a church’s name to a propagandist, not a rule against ordinary courtesy or honest conversation.

Why was 2 John doubted in the early Church?

Chiefly because it is so short and so anonymous. Its author gives no name beyond “the Presbyter,” which left ancient readers uncertain whether the writer was the Apostle John or, as Papias’s tradition of a second John at Ephesus suggested, a different figure. Origen recorded that “not all consider” the letter genuine, and Eusebius placed it among the antilegomena, the disputed-but-widely-recognized books. The Syriac churches omitted it from the Peshitta for centuries. Its acceptance grew through the fourth century—Athanasius’s canon of 367, the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397)—and it was defined as Scripture at the Council of Trent in 1546.

Is 2 John ever read at Mass?

Yes, but rarely. In the Roman Rite there is no Sunday reading from 2 John. It appears in the weekday Lectionary exactly once—verses 4 through 9, on the Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time—and then only in the even-numbered years (Year II), with 3 John read on the following Saturday. The passage the Church proclaims is the heart of the letter: the call to walk in the truth, the commandment to love one another, and the warning against those who do not confess Jesus Christ coming in the flesh.

Footnotes

1. 1. 2 John 1 (NABRE): “The Presbyter to the chosen Lady and to her children whom I love in truth.” The letter has 13 verses; among the books of the New Testament only 2 John, 3 John, and Philemon are comparably short. The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), bible.usccb.org/bible/2john/1.

2. 2. 2 John 1–13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org/bible/2john/1. The division into salutation, exhortation, warning, and farewell is standard in the commentaries; see Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982).

3. 3. “Truth” (Greek alētheia) occurs four times in 2 John 1–3 (“whom I love in truth…all who know the truth…because of the truth that dwells in us…in truth and love”) and again in v. 4 (“walking in the truth”), an unusual density for so brief a text.

4. 4. 2 John 5–6 (NABRE). Cf. the “new yet old” commandment of 1 John 2:7–8 and John 13:34; the NABRE prints the cross-references at 2 John 5–6.

5. 5. 2 John 7 (NABRE). The Greek has polloi planoi, “many deceivers,” and ho antichristos, “the antichrist.”

6. 6. The term “antichrist” (antichristos) occurs in the New Testament only in 1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3 and 2 John 7. The NABRE note on 2 John 7 cross-references 1 John 2:18–19, 22; 4:3.

7. 7. 2 John 7 uses the present participle erchomenon (“coming” in the flesh), where 1 John 4:2 uses the perfect participle elēlythota (“having come”); commentators debate whether the present tense underscores the abiding reality of the Incarnation. See Brown, The Epistles of John, and Judith M. Lieu, I, II, & III John: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008).

8. 8. 2 John 9 (NABRE). The NABRE note explains: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’: literally, ‘Anyone who goes ahead.’ Some gnostic groups held the doctrine of the Christ come in the flesh to be a first step in belief, which the more advanced and spiritual believer surpassed…The author affirms that fellowship with God may be gained only by holding to the complete doctrine of Jesus Christ.”

9. 9. 2 John 10–11 (NABRE).

10. 10. 2 John 12–13 (NABRE). The NABRE note on v. 13 reads: “Chosen sister: the community of which the Presbyter is now a part greets you (singular), the community of the Lady addressed.”

11. 11. Greek ho presbyteros, “the elder/presbyter” (2 John 1; 3 John 1). The title denotes a recognized position of authority; the absence of a proper name indicates a writer already well known to his readers.

12. 12. 3 John 1 (NABRE): “The Presbyter to the beloved Gaius whom I love in truth.” 2 and 3 John are the only New Testament books whose authors title themselves simply “the Presbyter.”

13. 13. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.24.17–18, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), 2nd ser., 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert; newadvent.org.

14. 14. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); newadvent.org. The full sentence lists among the disputed books “the so-called epistle of James and that of Jude, also the second epistle of Peter, and those that are called the second and third of John.”

15. 15. Origen, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.25.10 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); newadvent.org. The parallel statement on Peter (6.25.8) reads: “Peter…has left one acknowledged epistle; perhaps also a second, but this is doubtful.”

16. 16. Papias of Hierapolis, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.4 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1): “what Andrew or what Peter said…or by John…and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say”; ccel.org.

17. 17. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.5–6 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); ccel.org.

18. 18. Eusebius, who doubted the apostolic authorship of Revelation, used the “second John” of Papias to suggest an alternative author for that book (cf. Ecclesiastical History 3.39.6; 7.25). The interpretation of Papias is contested; see the following note.

19. 19. Jerome, On Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) 9, in NPNF, 2nd ser., 3, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson; newadvent.org. Composed c. 392–393.

20. 20. Jerome, On Illustrious Men 18 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 3): the elder John named by Papias is distinguished from the apostle, “because…it is declared by many that the last two epistles of John are the work not of the apostle but of the presbyter”; newadvent.org.

21. 21. On the long dispute over whether Papias attests one John or two, see the discussion and references in J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion (London: Macmillan, 1889), and the survey in Brown, The Epistles of John. Theodor Zahn and George Salmon held for a single John; Lightfoot and B. F. Westcott for a distinct presbyter.

22. 22. The “Johannine school”/community framework is associated above all with Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), and his The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30 (Doubleday, 1982).

23. 23. NABRE, Introduction to the Second and Third Letters of John, which describes their author as “the Presbyter,” calls the letters “products of the Johannine school,” and states that although “traditionally attributed to John the apostle, these letters were probably written by a disciple or scribe of an apostle” at Ephesus near the end of the first century. The letter’s self-identification is at 2 John 1.

24. 24. 2 John 1 (NABRE). The Greek eklektē kyria combines eklektē, “chosen/elect” (feminine), with kyria, “lady” (the feminine of kyrios, “lord”).

25. 25. NABRE note on 2 John 1: “The chosen Lady: literally, ‘elected’; this could also be translated ‘Kyria (a woman’s name) chosen (by God)’ or ‘the lady Electa’ or ‘Electa Kyria.’…The description is of a specific community with ‘children’ who are its members”; bible.usccb.org/bible/2john/1.

26. 26. 2 John 1, 4, 5, 13 (NABRE); the alternation of singular and plural “you” and the greeting from “the children of your chosen sister” are commonly read as marks of a corporate addressee.

27. 27. Brown, The Epistles of John, and Lieu, I, II, & III John, both favor the personified-church reading; Lieu treats the two short letters at length in The Second and Third Epistles of John (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986).

28. 28. 3 John 1 (NABRE), addressed “to the beloved Gaius.” The clearly individual address of 3 John is the main argument that the addressee of 2 John could likewise be a single person.

29. 29. See the NABRE note on 2 John 1 (quoted in note 25), which records the “Kyria” and “Electa” proper-name options. If Eklektē were a name, v. 13’s “your chosen [eklektē] sister” would awkwardly imply a second sister of the same name.

30. 30. 2 John 10–11 (NABRE). The Greek prohibition is mē lambanete auton eis oikian kai chairein autō mē legete, “do not receive him into a house, and do not say ‘greeting’ to him.”

31. 31. On the house church as the normal setting of early Christian assembly, see Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philemon 2. To “receive” (lambanein) a teacher “into a house” (eis oikian) was to admit him to the gathered community.

32. 32. NABRE note on 2 John 10–11: “At this time false teachers were considered so dangerous and divisive as to be shunned completely. From this description they seem to be wandering preachers. We see here a natural suspicion of early Christians concerning such itinerants and can envisage the problems faced by missionaries such as those mentioned in 3 Jn 10”; bible.usccb.org/bible/2john/1.

33. 33. The forbidden greeting is the infinitive chairein (from chairō, “rejoice”), the conventional salutation (cf. James 1:1; Acts 15:23). In context the greeting extended to a visiting teacher carried the force of public endorsement and fellowship; older English versions render the phrase “neither bid him God speed” (KJV).

34. 34. 3 John 9–10 (NABRE), where Diotrephes “does not acknowledge us” and refuses to welcome the brothers, even expelling those who would—the mirror image of the hospitality the Presbyter commends, abused in the opposite direction.

35. 35. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.16.3, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut; newadvent.org. Written c. 180, this is the earliest securely datable citation of 2 John; the quoted words are 2 John 11, with the v. 10 prohibition just before.

36. 36. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.16.8 (ANF 1): “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. Take heed to them, that you lose not what you have wrought” (2 John 7–8); newadvent.org. Irenaeus runs together the language of 1 and 2 John, treating them as a single Johannine witness.

37. 37. Compare 2 John 5–6 with 1 John 2:7–8; 2 John 7 with 1 John 2:18–22; 4:2–3; and 2 John 9 with 1 John 2:23. The NABRE prints these cross-references in the margin of 2 John.

38. 38. 2 John 12 and 3 John 13–14 (NABRE) are nearly identical: in both the Presbyter declines to write further with “paper and ink” (2 John) or “pen and ink” (3 John), hoping to speak “face to face.”

39. 39. See notes 35 and 36; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.16.3 and 3.16.8.

40. 40. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1): Clement, in the Hypotyposes, gave “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books,—I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles”; newadvent.org. Clement’s surviving Latin Adumbrationes include notes on 1 and 2 John.

41. 41. The Muratorian Fragment refers to two epistles of John received in the catholic Church, but its enumeration is famously ambiguous; see the text and discussion in Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV, and the fragment at bible-researcher.com. The fragment is usually dated c. 170, though a minority argue for a fourth-century date.

42. 42. Origen in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.25.10, and Eusebius’s own classification at 3.25.3 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); see notes 14–15.

43. 43. The original Peshitta New Testament contained 22 books, omitting 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation; these entered Syriac use with the Philoxenian version (507/508) and the Harklean revision (616). See Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

44. 44. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39 (AD 367), the earliest surviving list of exactly the 27 New Testament books, naming “of John, three” among the seven catholic epistles; text at bible-researcher.com.

45. 45. Council of Carthage (397), with the Council of Hippo (393) behind it, lists “three [epistles] of John” among the canonical Scriptures; see the African canons at bible-researcher.com.

46. 46. Council of Florence, Bull of Union with the Copts (Cantate Domino), 4 February 1442, listing “three of John”; English in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990).

47. 47. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, which names “three of John the apostle” and attaches the anathema; trans. James Waterworth (London, 1848), bible-researcher.com. Denzinger–Hünermann 1502–1503; the Latin reads “Ioannis Apostoli tres.”

48. 48. Catechism of the Catholic Church 120, which lists “1, 2 and 3 John” among the 27 books of the New Testament and states that “it was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books”; vatican.va.

49. 49. 2 John 7 (NABRE); cf. 1 John 4:2–3. The error in view is an early docetic or separationist Christology that denied the reality of the Incarnation; see the NABRE notes and Brown, The Epistles of John.

50. 50. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 8: “Through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known”; vatican.va.

51. 51. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 11: the books of Scripture “must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation”; vatican.va.

52. 52. In the Roman Lectionary, 2 John 4–9 is the First Reading for Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II (Lectionary no. 495), and 3 John 5–8 for the following Saturday (no. 496); 2 John has no Sunday reading. See the index of Johannine-epistle readings compiled by Felix Just, S.J., catholic-resources.org.

53. 53. On the traditional setting of Ephesus near the end of the first century, see the NABRE Introduction to the Second and Third Letters of John (note 23). The Church’s definitions concern the canonicity and inspiration of the letter, not its date, place, or human authorship.