3 John — The Elder, Gaius, and the Man Who Loved to Be First

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

The Third Letter of John is the least imposing text in the New Testament, and one of the most revealing. It is shorter than any other book of Scripture. It never quotes the Old Testament, never mounts an argument, and—alone among the twenty-seven books—never once names Jesus or Christ. What it gives us instead is something no doctrinal treatise could: a candid glance through a keyhole at a real congregation near the end of the first century, with real people at odds over a very human problem.⁠¹

That problem is hospitality, and behind it, authority. A man named Diotrephes has begun turning away the traveling missionaries the Elder sends, slandering the Elder himself, and expelling from the church anyone who dares to take the visitors in. Against him the Elder holds up two others: Gaius, the loyal host to whom the letter is addressed, and Demetrius, a man “well spoken of by all.” In fifteen short verses the whole drama of a divided church is laid bare—its generosity, its quarrels, its jockeying for place—and it is laid bare without a single line of theology to soften it.⁠²

This post reads 3 John the way the rest of this series has read the disputed books: the text first, closely; then the three men who fill it; then the hardest question the letter raises—what exactly Diotrephes had done; then the theology of hospitality that gives the little note its lasting weight; and finally the long, doubtful road by which the last-attested book in the New Testament became, at last, defined Scripture.

A letter you can read in a minute

Begin with the whole of it, because the whole of it is very short. After a greeting to Gaius, the Elder rejoices that his friend “walks in the truth,” praises the hospitality Gaius has shown to traveling “brothers,” and urges him to keep it up. Then comes the trouble: “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to dominate, does not acknowledge us.” The Elder promises, if he comes, to call Diotrephes to account. He exhorts Gaius to “imitate good” and not evil, commends Demetrius, and closes—as 2 John closes—by setting aside “pen and ink” in hope of a visit. That is the entire letter.⁠³

Read straight through, its plainness is the first thing that strikes a reader used to the density of Paul or the soaring prologue of John’s Gospel. There is no doctrine here to expound. The Elder does not argue; he thanks, he warns, he recommends. The letter belongs to a recognizable ancient genre—the letter of recommendation, the note a patron writes to introduce or vouch for a traveler—and its closest kin in the New Testament are the practical, personal notes rather than the great theological epistles.⁠⁴ The Catholic Scriptures say as much in their own introduction: 3 John “is less theological in content and purpose,” a letter whose “goal was to secure hospitality and material support” for the Elder’s missionaries.⁠⁵

Three features make the brevity worth pausing over, because each is, in its own way, a record. The first is length itself. By the standard reckoning of the Greek text, 3 John runs to about 219 words—the fewest of any book in the Bible. Its twin, 2 John, is a little longer at roughly 245 words, though it is divided into fewer verses (thirteen, against the fourteen or fifteen of 3 John, depending on the edition). The popular claim that 3 John is “the shortest book in the Bible” is therefore true, but only by the measure of words; count verses instead, and 2 John is the shorter.⁠⁶

The second is a silence. 3 John is the only book in the New Testament that never uses the name “Jesus” or the title “Christ.” When the Elder describes his missionaries, he says they “have set out for the sake of the Name”—and that reverent circumlocism, “the Name,” is as close as the letter comes to naming its Lord. The word “God” appears twice, but the divine Name at the center of the Christian confession is present only by allusion. For a book of Scripture the omission is unique, and it is one more sign that we are reading not a sermon but a private letter, written to a man who needed no reminding whose missionaries he was housing.⁠⁷

The third is what the letter does not contain: any citation of the Old Testament, any developed argument, any of the ringing Johannine antitheses of light and darkness, life and death. The nearest thing to a doctrinal sentence is a single line—“Whoever does what is good is of God; whoever does what is evil has never seen God”—and even that is offered not as teaching but as counsel to Gaius on how to conduct himself amid a quarrel.⁠⁸ All of this has made 3 John easy to overlook and easy to doubt. It also makes it precious, for it preserves what almost nothing else in the New Testament preserves: the ordinary texture of church life, with its hospitality and its politics, caught in a moment.

“The Presbyter”: the same anonymous Elder

The author of 3 John does not give his name. He calls himself, exactly as in 2 John, “the Presbyter”—in Greek ho presbyteros, the Elder—and 2 and 3 John are the only two books in the New Testament whose authors head their letters in this bare, titular way.⁠⁹ The title implies a recognized authority, and the absence of any further name implies a writer so well known to his readers that none was needed.

Who that Elder was—whether John the Apostle, a distinct “John the presbyter” remembered at Ephesus, or another teacher of the Johannine circle—is the oldest question these two letters raise, and it is the same question for both. Because the previous post in this series worked through it at length, there is no need to re-argue it here; it is enough to note that the ancient doubt about the author of the two short letters was a doubt about authorship and authenticity, not about orthodoxy, and that the Church has defined the canonicity of 3 John without binding any answer to the historical question of who held the pen.⁠¹⁰ What matters for reading 3 John is simpler and surer: the man who wrote it spoke with authority in his churches, expected to be obeyed, and was, in the case of Diotrephes, defied.

The Catholic Scriptures place both short letters within what scholars call the “Johannine school”—a circle of disciples gathered around the tradition of the Beloved Disciple—and describe their author as the Elder, “although traditionally attributed to John the apostle.”⁠¹¹ On that reading 3 John is a working letter from the head of the school to a friendly householder in one of its congregations, sent to shore up the mission against a local leader who had turned against it.

Gaius, Diotrephes, and Demetrius

Three men are named in fifteen verses, and the letter is, in effect, their story.

Gaius is the addressee and the hero of the piece. The Elder greets him as “the beloved Gaius whom I love in truth,” wishes him health of body to match the health of his soul, and rejoices that visiting brothers have “testified to how truly you walk in the truth.” He calls Gaius one of “my children,” which suggests that the Elder had converted or instructed him.⁠¹² Gaius’s virtue is precise and practical: he has been “faithful in all you do for the brothers, especially for strangers,” welcoming and provisioning the traveling missionaries the Elder sends. The name Gaius was one of the commonest in the Roman world—several men bear it in the New Testament—and no attempt to identify this Gaius with any of the others has ever convinced. He is simply a good man who kept his door open.⁠¹³

Diotrephes is the antagonist, and the Elder draws him in a single, devastating phrase: he is the one “who loves to dominate.” The Greek is a rare and vivid participle, philoprōteuōn—literally, “the one who loves to be first”—and it fixes the man’s fault as a hunger for preeminence. He “does not acknowledge” the Elder’s authority; he is “spreading evil nonsense” about him; he refuses to receive the missionaries; and, worst of all, he expels from the church those members who would receive them.⁠¹⁴ The Catholic study Bible notes shrewdly that the Elder “does not deny Diotrephes’ place as leader”—the man evidently held real authority in his congregation—“but indicates that his ambition may have caused him to disregard” the Elder’s letter and influence.⁠¹⁵ Diotrephes is the first named church boss in Christian history, and he is remembered for exactly one thing: he loved to be first.

Demetrius appears only in the last movement, and his function is transparent. “Demetrius receives a good report from all,” the Elder writes, “even from the truth itself. We give our testimonial as well, and you know our testimony is true.” This is the language of a letter of recommendation, and the most natural reading—the one the Catholic notes adopt—is that Demetrius was the very man who carried the letter to Gaius, sent ahead with the Elder’s endorsement precisely because Diotrephes had made the reception of strangers dangerous.⁠¹⁶ Later legend tried to give Demetrius a fuller biography—identifying him with the silversmith of Ephesus in Acts, or with a later bishop—but none of it has any historical foundation, and the letter itself tells us only that he was a man whose life bore witness to his faith.⁠¹⁷

Around these three the Elder arranges a small moral tableau: the generous host, the domineering rival, and the trustworthy traveler. It is, deliberately, a lesson in whom to imitate.

“Who loves to be first”: what had Diotrephes done?

Here is the question that has occupied the commentators, and it is worth handling carefully, because the popular answer is almost certainly wrong. It is often assumed that Diotrephes was a heretic—that he had gone over to the very false teaching 2 John warns against, and that the Elder is fighting him for the faith. The letter gives no warrant for this. Read what it actually charges him with: loving preeminence, ignoring the Elder’s authority, spreading malicious talk, refusing hospitality, and expelling members. Every one of these is a fault of conduct, not of belief. Nowhere does the Elder accuse Diotrephes of teaching anything false.⁠¹⁸

That silence is telling, because the Elder was not shy about naming heresy when he saw it. In 2 John he identifies the error precisely—the denial that “Jesus Christ” has come “in the flesh”—and orders the church to shut its door against anyone who carries it.⁠¹⁹ If Diotrephes had been a false teacher, the man who wrote 2 John would have said so. The most defensible conclusion is the one most modern scholars reach: the conflict in 3 John is a struggle over authority and the control of hospitality, not a dispute over doctrine. Diotrephes’ sin is that he loved to be first.⁠²⁰

There is a sharp irony here, and a Catholic scholar has put it well: in refusing to receive those he disapproved of, Diotrephes was doing very nearly what the Elder himself had recommended in 2 John—not receiving those who bring a different teaching.⁠²¹ The two short letters are mirror images. In 2 John the Elder tells a church to close its doors against genuine false teachers; in 3 John, Diotrephes closes his doors against the Elder’s own orthodox emissaries. The same instrument—the refusal of hospitality that was, in the early Church, the refusal of fellowship—is wielded rightly in one letter and abused in the other. Hospitality, the letters together show, is a weapon that cuts both ways: it guards the truth when the truth is at stake, and it wounds the Church when it is turned to the service of one man’s ambition.

Honesty requires a qualification, and the Catholic Scriptures supply it themselves. The NABRE’s own note on the passage keeps a doctrinal motive open: Diotrephes, it suggests, “may have been critical of the teachings of the Presbyter and sought to maintain doctrinal purity.”⁠²² The introduction to the letter goes further, laying out three possible Diotrephes side by side—“an overly ambitious local upstart trying to thwart the advance of orthodox Christianity,” “an orthodox church official suspicious of the teachings of the Presbyter,” or “a local leader anxious to keep the debates in the Johannine community out of his own congregation”—and concedes that “the division…may also rest on doctrinal disagreement.”⁠²³ A century of scholarship has floated bolder reconstructions still: Adolf von Harnack read Diotrephes as an early monarchical bishop asserting local episcopal power against the itinerant Elder, while Ernst Käsemann, in a famous inversion, proposed that Diotrephes was the orthodox officer and the Elder the suspect party he was rightly disciplining.⁠²⁴

The honest verdict is the modest one. What the letter states is behavioral: Diotrephes loved preeminence, slandered the Elder, refused the brothers, and expelled the faithful. What lay beneath—raw ambition, doctrinal suspicion, or a bishop’s instinct to guard his flock—the text does not say, and every reconstruction of his motive goes beyond the evidence. A careful reader holds the surface fact firmly and the motive loosely. What is certain is that the New Testament preserves, in its shortest book, a portrait of the oldest and most ordinary of ecclesiastical sins: the love of being first.

The theology of hospitality

Strip away the quarrel and 3 John is, at heart, a letter about welcome—and welcome, in the first-century Church, was no small thing. It was the infrastructure on which the whole mission ran.

The Elder’s missionaries, he tells Gaius, “have set out for the sake of the Name and are accepting nothing from the pagans.”⁠²⁵ The principle was deliberate: the traveling preachers refused support from the unbelievers they evangelized, so as not to appear to be peddling the gospel for money, or to be mere beggars. The Catholic notes draw the obvious conclusion—since the missionaries took nothing from outsiders, “they required support from other Christians”—and cite Paul’s long defense to the Corinthians of a laborer’s right to his wages.⁠²⁶ The mission, in other words, was fed entirely by the hospitality of believers like Gaius. To take a missionary into your house was not a private kindness; it was to become, in the Elder’s luminous phrase, a “co-worker in the truth.”⁠²⁷ The man who housed the preacher shared in the preaching.

This is why Diotrephes’ inhospitality was so grave, and why the Elder treats it not as a breach of manners but as an assault on the mission itself. To slam the door on the missionaries was to cut the supply line of the gospel and to arrogate to oneself the power to decide who could and could not preach. Set against that closed door is Gaius’s open one, and set against Diotrephes’ ambition is the Elder’s single line of counsel: “Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good.”⁠²⁸ It is the one quasi-doctrinal sentence in the letter, and it turns out to be pure Johannine theology, an echo of 1 John: “Whoever does what is good is of God; whoever does what is evil has never seen God.”⁠²⁹ The choice between Gaius and Diotrephes is, in the end, the choice between the two ways the whole Johannine corpus sets before its readers—between the one who is “of God” and the one who has “never seen” him—and it is decided, characteristically, not by a creed but by a door.

The last book into the canon

The path of 3 John into the New Testament is the most doubtful of any book’s, and it makes the letter a kind of limiting case—a test of how the early Church discerned its Scriptures when the external evidence was thinnest.

The thinness is the first fact to reckon with. 3 John is the most weakly attested book in the entire New Testament. Around the year 180 Irenaeus of Lyons quotes 1 John and 2 John by name, treating them as the work of “John, the disciple of the Lord”—but he never quotes 3 John at all.⁠³⁰ For most of the first two centuries the little letter leaves no trace. The earliest datable notice of it anywhere comes only around the middle of the third century, from Dionysius of Alexandria, and even that is not a quotation of its contents but a passing observation about its form. Arguing about the authorship of Revelation, Dionysius remarks that “neither in the reputed second or third epistle of John, though they are very short, does the name John appear; but there is written the anonymous phrase, ‘the elder.’”⁠³¹ That sentence—a remark about the letter’s superscription, dropped in service of another argument—is the oldest secure footprint 3 John leaves in the record. No book of the New Testament waited longer to be noticed.

The great third-century scholars registered the doubt without resolving it. Origen, the most learned biblical critic of his age, knew of the shorter letters but reported the hesitation frankly: John “has left also an epistle of very few lines; perhaps also a second and third; but not all consider them genuine.”⁠³² A generation earlier Clement of Alexandria had commented on the catholic epistles—Eusebius says he gave “abridged accounts” even of the disputed books—but the notes that actually survive from Clement’s work cover 1 Peter, Jude, 1 John, and 2 John, and stop there; 3 John is absent even from the man who is often credited with commenting on it.⁠³³ The oldest surviving list of New Testament books, the Muratorian Fragment, mentions only “two” epistles of John as received in the Church—and whether those two are 1 and 2 John, or 2 and 3 John, is a puzzle no one has solved.⁠³⁴

When Eusebius of Caesarea took stock of the whole question around 325, he set 3 John where the evidence put it—among the antilegomena, the “disputed” books that were nevertheless “recognized by many.” His catalogue lists together “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, whether they belong to the evangelist or to another person of the same name.”⁠³⁵ The doubt was strongest at the edges of the Christian world. In the Syriac-speaking churches the standard Bible, the Peshitta, simply left 3 John out—together with 2 Peter, 2 John, Jude, and Revelation—and the letter entered Syriac use only with the later Philoxenian and Harklean revisions of the sixth and seventh centuries.⁠³⁶ Jerome, cataloguing the Christian writers around 392, recorded that the two short letters—“the elder unto Gaius the beloved whom I love in truth” being the third—“are said to be the work of John the presbyter,” not the apostle.⁠³⁷ For three centuries, over much of the Church, the shortest book in the Bible was read where it was read at all with a lingering question mark beside its name.

The question mark was erased, as it was for the other disputed books, in the fourth century and after. 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 qualification, “of John, three.”⁠³⁸ 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.⁠³⁹ A millennium later the Council of Florence, in its 1442 Bull of Union with the Copts, enumerated the identical canon, “three of John” among them.⁠⁴⁰ And in the Fourth Session of 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent defined the canon with the full weight of the Church’s authority, naming “three of John the apostle” among the sacred books and attaching the anathema against anyone who would “receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts.”⁠⁴¹ The book that had waited longest to be noticed, and had been doubted longest of all, was now irrevocably Scripture.

The Catechism lists it among the twenty-seven—“1, 2 and 3 John”—and states the principle that 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.”⁠⁴²

What the Church received from 3 John

It would be easy to treat 3 John as a curiosity—a scrap of ancient mail that slipped into the canon on the coattails of its longer relatives. That would be a mistake, for the letter earns its place, and it teaches two things nothing else in the New Testament teaches quite so plainly.

It teaches, first, the sanctity of hospitality. In an age when the gospel traveled on foot and depended for its bread on the welcome of strangers, the man who opened his home to a missionary was doing the work of the mission. 3 John raises that ordinary generosity to the level of the sacred: to receive the preacher is to become a “co-worker in the truth,” and to refuse him, as Diotrephes did, is to war against the truth itself. The letter that looks most like a private note turns out to enshrine a doctrine of the Church as a communion of welcome—a body knit together not only by shared belief but by the open door.

It teaches, second, a lesson about the canon itself, and it teaches it more sharply than any other book because its own case was so weak. 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.”⁠⁴³ If ever a book was kept by that tradition rather than by the force of its external credentials, it is 3 John. It has no doctrine to make it indispensable, no apostolic signature to compel assent, and the thinnest attestation of any book in the New Testament. It was kept because the churches went on reading it until its place was clear, and because the Church’s Tradition recognized in it the authentic voice of the apostolic age. And because the Church receives it as inspired, its slightness 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 fifteen-verse letter that hallows hospitality and unmasks the love of power is teaching exactly that.⁠⁴⁴

In the Church’s public worship 3 John is heard, fittingly, at the very edge. It has no Sunday reading in the Roman Rite. It appears in the weekday Lectionary exactly once—verses 5 through 8, on the Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time, and then only in the even-numbered years—read the day after 2 John, as though the two short letters keep each other company even in the calendar.⁠⁴⁵ The portion the Church proclaims is the heart of the letter: the praise of hospitality, the missionaries who go out “for the sake of the Name,” and the call to be “co-workers in the truth.” Of the letter’s fifteen verses, four are read aloud, and only every second year—a small liturgical measure of how quietly the shortest book in the Bible sits within the Church’s life, and how completely it belongs to it.

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 Third 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 what it gives us: a window onto a real first-century congregation, a doctrine of hospitality as the Church’s common work, and a warning, drawn from life, against the love of being first.

What remains open is nearly everything else. Whether the Elder is John the Apostle, a distinct John the presbyter, or another teacher of the Johannine school; who exactly Gaius and Demetrius were; what precisely moved Diotrephes to shut his door; when and where the letter was written—these the evidence does not finally answer, and the Church has bound none of them.⁠⁴⁶ A careful reader holds them with an open hand, and notices that the letter itself models the posture: confident about the good that must be imitated and the welcome that must be given, it is content to leave its author, its recipients, and the details of its quarrel in shadow.

For the shortest book in the Bible, that is a great deal to carry: a portrait of the Church in miniature, generous and quarrelsome at once, and a reminder that the faith has always traveled on the hospitality of ordinary people. It was doubted longer than any other book; it survived because the Church kept reading it until the question answered itself; and it turns out to guard, in its few verses, a truth the Church can ill afford to forget—that to open the door to the stranger who preaches Christ is to share in the work of Christ.

Key scholarly works on 3 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. 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 her earlier The Second and Third Epistles of John: History and Background (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. On the history of the canon, the indispensable survey is Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 3 John really the shortest book in the Bible?

Yes, by the standard measure. In the Greek text 3 John runs to about 219 words, fewer than any other book of Scripture. Its twin, 2 John, is slightly longer at roughly 245 words—yet 2 John is divided into fewer verses (thirteen, against the fourteen or fifteen of 3 John). So the common claim that 3 John is “the shortest book in the Bible” is true when you count words, while 2 John is the shorter when you count verses. Both are among the briefest texts in the New Testament, along with Philemon.

Who wrote 3 John, and who were Gaius, Diotrephes, and Demetrius?

The author identifies himself only as “the Presbyter”—the Elder—the same title that opens 2 John, and the two are the only New Testament books headed this bare way. Catholic tradition has often attributed the letter to John the Apostle, though already in antiquity there was doubt whether the author was the apostle or a distinct “John the presbyter”; most modern scholars place him within a “Johannine school.” Of the three named men, Gaius is the letter’s recipient, a Christian praised for his hospitality; Diotrephes is a local leader “who loves to dominate” and has turned the Elder’s missionaries away; and Demetrius is a man warmly commended, most likely the one who carried the letter to Gaius.

Was Diotrephes a heretic?

Probably not. The letter charges Diotrephes with ambition (“who loves to dominate”), with spreading malicious talk about the Elder, with refusing to welcome the traveling missionaries, and with expelling from the church those who would—but never with teaching anything false. Since the same author names heresy plainly in 2 John, most scholars conclude that the conflict in 3 John is a struggle over authority and hospitality, not doctrine. The Catholic study Bible does keep a doctrinal motive open as a possibility—Diotrephes may have distrusted the Elder’s teaching—but the text itself accuses him only of the love of being first.

Why does 3 John never mention Jesus?

3 John is the only book in the New Testament that never uses the name “Jesus” or the title “Christ.” It refers to him once, obliquely, when it says the missionaries “have set out for the sake of the Name”—“the Name” being a reverent way of speaking of Jesus. The omission is not a sign of any deficiency in the letter’s faith; it reflects its genre. 3 John is a short, personal note about a practical matter—hospitality to missionaries—written to a friend who needed no reminder whose preachers he was housing.

Why was 3 John doubted in the early Church?

Because it is so short, so personal, and so anonymous, and because it left almost no early trace. It is the most weakly attested book in the New Testament: Irenaeus quotes 1 and 2 John but never 3 John, and the first datable notice of it comes only around 250, from Dionysius of Alexandria. Origen recorded that “not all consider” the shorter letters genuine; Eusebius placed 3 John among the antilegomena, the disputed books; and 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 3 John ever read at Mass?

Rarely. In the Roman Rite there is no Sunday reading from 3 John. It appears in the weekday Lectionary exactly once—verses 5 through 8, on the Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time—and then only in the even-numbered years (Year II), read the day after the single weekday reading from 2 John. The passage proclaimed is the letter’s heart: the praise of Gaius’s hospitality, the missionaries who go out “for the sake of the Name,” and the call to be “co-workers in the truth.”

Footnotes

1. 1. 3 John 1–15 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1. On the letter’s unique features—its brevity, its silence about the name of Jesus, and its lack of Old Testament citation—see notes 6 and 7 below.

2. 2. The three named figures are Gaius (3 John 1), Diotrephes (v. 9), and Demetrius (v. 12). The phrase “well spoken of by all” renders the NABRE’s “Demetrius receives a good report from all” (v. 12).

3. 3. 3 John 1–15 (NABRE). The quoted words are from v. 9 (“I wrote to the church…does not acknowledge us”), v. 11 (“imitate good”), and vv. 13–14 (“pen and ink…face to face”), which closely parallels 2 John 12; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1.

4. 4. On the letter of recommendation as an ancient epistolary genre, compare Romans 16:1–2 (Phoebe) and 2 Corinthians 3:1; the NABRE note on 3 John 12 explicitly aligns the commendation of Demetrius with this form. See Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982).

5. 5. NABRE, Introduction to the Third Letter of John: “This letter is less theological in content and purpose. The author’s goal was to secure hospitality and material support for his missionaries”; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/0.

6. 6. By the standard word-count of the Greek New Testament (Nestle-Aland), 3 John has about 219 words, the fewest of any biblical book; 2 John has about 245 words, and Philemon about 335. 2 John is nevertheless divided into thirteen verses, against the fourteen (in the Textus Receptus, followed by the King James Version) or fifteen (in the critical text, followed by the NABRE) of 3 John. The variation is a matter of where the closing verses are divided, not of content. The claim that 3 John is “the shortest book in the Bible” is therefore accurate by word count only.

7. 7. 3 John is the only New Testament book that contains neither the name “Jesus” nor the title “Christ.” The one reference is 3 John 7 (NABRE): “For they have set out for the sake of the Name.” The Greek is hyper tou onomatos, “for the sake of the Name”; the NABRE note explains that “the Name” is “of Jesus Christ” (cf. Acts 5:41; 1 John 2:12; 3:23; 5:13); bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1. The word “God” does appear (vv. 6, 11).

8. 8. 3 John 11 (NABRE). The verse is counsel to Gaius on conduct amid the quarrel, not a doctrinal exposition; see the NABRE note on v. 11: “Gaius should not be influenced by the behavior of Diotrephes.”

9. 9. 3 John 1 (NABRE): “The Presbyter to the beloved Gaius whom I love in truth.” Greek ho presbyteros, “the elder/presbyter” (2 John 1; 3 John 1). 2 and 3 John are the only New Testament books whose authors title themselves simply “the Presbyter.”

10. 10. On the identity of “the Presbyter” and the ancient tradition of a second John at Ephesus (Papias in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 9, 18), see the companion post in this series, 2 John—The Elder’s Letter to the Chosen Lady. The Church defines the canonicity and inspiration of the letter, not its human authorship.

11. 11. NABRE, Introduction to the Second and Third Letters of John, which 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” near the end of the first century; bible.usccb.org/bible/2john/0. The “Johannine school” framework is associated above all with Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).

12. 12. 3 John 1–4 (NABRE). The NABRE note on v. 3 observes that the description “presents Gaius as following the teachings of the Presbyter in contrast to Diotrephes,” and the Introduction suggests the Presbyter “perhaps had converted or instructed” him; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1. “My children” is v. 4.

13. 13. 3 John 5 (NABRE). The name Gaius also appears at Acts 19:29; 20:4; Romans 16:23; and 1 Corinthians 1:14; there is no basis for identifying the Gaius of 3 John with any of these. See Brown, The Epistles of John.

14. 14. 3 John 9–10 (NABRE). The Greek participle is philoprōteuōn (from philoprōteuō, “to love being first”), which the NABRE renders “who loves to dominate” (KJV: “who loveth to have the preeminence”). The name Diotrephes (Diotrephēs) means “nourished by Zeus.” The phrase “spreading evil nonsense about us” renders the Greek logois ponērois phlyarōn, “prating against us with malicious words.”

15. 15. NABRE note on 3 John 9: “the Presbyter does not deny Diotrephes’ place as leader but indicates that his ambition may have caused him to disregard his letter and his influence”; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1.

16. 16. 3 John 12 (NABRE). The NABRE note reads: “Demetrius: because of the fear of false teachers, Demetrius, perhaps the bearer of the letter, is provided with a recommendation from the Presbyter; cf. 2 Cor 3:1; Rom 16:1.” The recommendation-of-the-carrier reading is the mainstream scholarly view.

17. 17. Later identifications of this Demetrius with Demetrius the silversmith of Ephesus (Acts 19:24) or with a subsequent bishop are legendary and without historical foundation; the letter says only that “the truth itself” testifies to him, which the NABRE note takes to mean “the manner of Demetrius’s life that testifies to his true belief.”

18. 18. 3 John 9–10 (NABRE). The four charges—loving preeminence, refusing to acknowledge the Presbyter, spreading malicious talk, and refusing/expelling the brothers—are all matters of conduct; no accusation of false doctrine is made against Diotrephes anywhere in the letter.

19. 19. 2 John 7, 10–11 (NABRE): the deceivers “do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh,” and the church is told, “do not receive him in your house or even greet him.” See 2 John—The Elder’s Letter to the Chosen Lady.

20. 20. The reading of the conflict as one of authority and hospitality rather than doctrine is the majority scholarly position; see Brown, The Epistles of John; Judith M. Lieu, I, II, & III John: A Commentary, New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008); and John Painter, 1, 2, and 3 John, Sacra Pagina 18 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002). The point is often put as a matter of heteropraxy (bad practice) rather than heterodoxy (false belief).

21. 21. Felix Just, S.J., “The Johannine Letters: Introductions and Overviews,” labels the point “Irony”: “Diotrephes (in 3 John 10) seems to be doing just what the elder (in 2 John 10) had recommended: not receiving those who disagree with your teachings!”; catholic-resources.org.

22. 22. NABRE note on 3 John 10: “Will not receive the brothers: Diotrephes may have been critical of the teachings of the Presbyter and sought to maintain doctrinal purity; cf. 1 Jn 2:19 and 2 Jn 10–11”; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1.

23. 23. NABRE, Introduction to the Third Letter of John, which sets out the three reconstructions of Diotrephes and states that “the division…may also rest on doctrinal disagreement in which Gaius and the other ‘friends’ accept the teaching of the Presbyter, and Diotrephes does not”; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/0.

24. 24. Adolf von Harnack proposed that Diotrephes was an early monarchical bishop asserting local authority against the itinerant Presbyter; Ernst Käsemann proposed the inverse, that Diotrephes was the orthodox local officer and the Presbyter the party under suspicion. Both are minority reconstructions surveyed in the modern commentaries (e.g., Brown, The Epistles of John); each goes well beyond what the letter states.

25. 25. 3 John 7 (NABRE): “For they have set out for the sake of the Name and are accepting nothing from the pagans.”

26. 26. NABRE note on 3 John 7: “Accepting nothing: not expecting support from the pagans to whom they preach the gospel, so that they will not be considered as beggars; they required support from other Christians; cf. Paul’s complaints to the Corinthians (1 Cor 9:3–12)”; bible.usccb.org/bible/3john/1.

27. 27. 3 John 8 (NABRE): “Therefore, we ought to support such persons, so that we may be co-workers in the truth.”

28. 28. 3 John 11 (NABRE): “Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good.”

29. 29. 3 John 11 (NABRE); the NABRE prints the cross-references to 1 John 2:29; 3:6, 10 at this verse. Compare 1 John 3:6 (NABRE): “No one who remains in him sins; no one who sins has seen him or known him.”

30. 30. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.16.3 and 3.16.8, quotes 2 John (and conflates it with 1 John) but nowhere cites 3 John; see the discussion in Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 3 John is the most weakly attested book of the New Testament.

31. 31. Dionysius of Alexandria, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.25.11, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), 2nd ser., 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert; newadvent.org. Dionysius (bishop of Alexandria, d. c. 265) mentions the letters only in passing, to argue about the authorship of Revelation; this remark on their superscription is the earliest securely datable notice of 3 John.

32. 32. Origen, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.25.10 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1): “He has left also an epistle of very few lines; perhaps also a second and third; but not all consider them genuine”; newadvent.org.

33. 33. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1), reports that Clement of Alexandria’s Hypotyposes gave “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books,—I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles”; newadvent.org. The surviving Latin Adumbrationes of Clement, however, comment only on 1 Peter, Jude, 1 John, and 2 John; 3 John is not among them.

34. 34. The Muratorian Fragment refers to two epistles of John received in the catholic Church, but which two is famously disputed; see the text and discussion in Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 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.

35. 35. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3 (NPNF, 2nd ser., 1); newadvent.org. Cf. 3.24.17–18: of John’s writings “not only his Gospel, but also the former of his epistles, has been accepted without dispute…But the other two are disputed.”

36. 36. 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).

37. 37. Jerome, On Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) 9, in NPNF, 2nd ser., 3, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson; newadvent.org: the two short letters, of which the second is “The elder unto Gaius the beloved whom I love in truth,” “are said to be the work of John the presbyter.” Cf. On Illustrious Men 18. Composed c. 392–393.

38. 38. 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.

39. 39. 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.

40. 40. 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).

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

42. 42. 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.

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

44. 44. 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.

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

46. 46. 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 11). The Church’s definitions concern the canonicity and inspiration of the letter, not its date, place, or human authorship.