The screen was run on all twenty-seven books, one at a time, each book against the other twenty-six. The question was simple: how deep is the longest string of consecutive words this book shares with the rest of the New Testament? Matthew reaches thirty-four. Acts reaches thirty-four. Philemon — twenty-five verses long — reaches twelve. 2 Peter and 2 John stop at five, and Jude and 1 John at six. Every book on the list reaches at least five. One does not. 3 John stops at four, and it is the only book in the New Testament that does. Then a second measurement, run for a different reason, landed on the same book: 3 John is the only book in the New Testament that never writes Jesus, never writes Christ, and never writes Lord — and the one thing it says about that name is that men went out ὑπὲρ τοῦ ὀνόματος, for the sake of the Name. See the method →
3 John 1–15 (selections)
Greek New Testament (SBLGNT via MorphGNT) · ESVThe Shape of the Passage
Sequence — three “Beloved” movements and two named men, hinged on one maxim. NOT a chiasm.3 John names nobody as its author and no city as its destination. It is signed the elder and addressed to one man. Everything else about author and audience is inference — and this page tries to keep the inference visible as inference. What can be measured is measured; what cannot is named as such.
Author
A man who signs with an office, expects to be obeyed, and expects to arrive. Verse 9 says he has already written to the church. Verse 10 says that when he comes he will raise the matter publicly. Verse 12 adds his own testimony to Demetrius as though his word settles something. That is a man with standing, writing to a congregation he does not directly govern.
What the measurement says about the tie to 2 John, and what it does not. Measured: the exact two-word string ὁ πρεσβύτερος occurs three times in the New Testament, and two of the three are the openings of 2 and 3 John. Measured: the four-word string ἐγὼ ἀγαπῶ ἐν ἀληθείᾳ occurs in exactly two verses in the New Testament, 2 John 1 and 3 John 1. Measured: στόμα πρὸς στόμα occurs in exactly two verses, 2 John 12 and 3 John 14. Those three facts are consistent with one writer and with several other explanations, and this page does not choose between them. The tradition that connects the elder to the apostle John is early — and it is a tradition, not a measurement. Nothing here tests it.
And a caution about the other direction. Screened verse by verse against 2 John alone, eight of 3 John’s fifteen rows share no two consecutive words with any verse of 2 John. The two letters are far less alike, word for word, than their reputation suggests. See stage 4.
Audience
One named man, in a congregation with a problem. Gaius is addressed in the singular throughout — σοι, σε, ποιεῖς. The name is one of the commonest in the empire; measured, it occurs four other times in the New Testament (Acts 19:29, Acts 20:4, Romans 16:23, 1 Corinthians 1:14) — whether those are four men or fewer is itself disputed — and nothing here identifies our Gaius with any of them. The dative form Γαΐῳ occurs once in the New Testament.
A congregation on a road. Verses 5–8 assume a steady traffic of travelling believers who arrive, are housed, are provisioned and are sent on. Verse 7 says they take nothing ἀπὸ τῶν ἐθνικῶν — a word for outsiders that occurs three other times in the New Testament, all three in Matthew — with the cognate adverb once more at Galatians 2:14. Their refusal to take support from outsiders is the reason insiders have to give it.
And a church where somebody can shut the door. Verse 10 says Diotrephes refuses the brothers, prevents those who are willing, and puts them out. Whatever authority he holds, it is enough to override the willing. That is a datum about the audience: this is a congregation small enough for one man to control its hospitality.
Orient on a private letter, three names, a disputed corner of the canon, and an offset inside the English Bible.
Search by topic: John, Letters of; elder (presbyteros); Gaius; Diotrephes; Demetrius; hospitality in early Christianity; itinerant missionaries; letter of recommendation; house church; excommunication, early forms of; Antilegomena; Muratorian Fragment; versification, history of.
What kind of document is 3 John?
A private letter, and the shortest book in the New Testament. Measured on the corpus held here: 3 John is 219 normalised word tokens, against 2 John’s 245, Philemon’s 334 and Jude’s 459. It has more verses than 2 John and fewer words. That fact is a confound this page has to carry, and it is named again in stage 4 and stage 5 — a short text has fewer chances to hit a long run.
It follows the ordinary shape of a Greek private letter — sender, addressee, health wish, body, greetings, farewell. That it does so more closely than any other New Testament book is the judgement of the standard literature and was NOT measured here — no papyrus corpus is on this shelf. Verse 2 is the health-wish formula. Verses 13–14 are the apology for writing rather than coming. Verse 15 is the farewell.
Who are the three men?
Gaius — the addressee, commended for what he does for travelling brothers. One of the commonest names in the Roman world; four other men bear it in the New Testament, and nothing in this letter links him to any of them.
Diotrephes — named once in Scripture, here. The word used of him, φιλοπρωτεύων, occurs once in the Greek New Testament. The letter never says what he teaches. It says what he does: he will not receive, and he expels those who will.
Demetrius — the name occurs three times in the New Testament: twice of the silversmith at Ephesus in Acts 19, and once here. They are almost certainly not the same man, and the measurement cannot tell you either way — a shared proper name is a shared word, not a shared person.
Where did 3 John stand in the canon?
Among the disputed books, and it is honest to say so at the top. Eusebius lists 2 and 3 John among the antilegomena, the books spoken against; Origen knew the question before him. The letter is short, private, quotes no Scripture and names no doctrine, which is exactly the profile that made ancient readers hesitate. It was received. The hesitation is part of the record, not an embarrassment to be hidden.
This page takes no position on authorship and reports what it measured about the tie to 2 John in stage 4. Consult a dictionary article for the history of the debate; nothing here settles it.
Does 3 John have a versification offset? Yes — and it is unusual.
Measured on disk, not assumed: the SBLGNT text of 3 John has 15 verses and the editions that keep the traditional numbering have 14. Verses 1–13 are identical in every edition. The difference is at the end. The critical Greek editions divide the closing into I hope to see you soon… (14) and Peace be to you… (15); the Textus Receptus tradition and the KJV after it — and the NIV, which follows a critical Greek text but keeps the traditional numbering — print both as one verse 14. The ESV, NASB, CSB and NRSV number 15.
Why this matters for a reader. A cross-reference to “3 John 14” means I hope to see you soon in one Bible and I hope to see you soon, and peace be to you, and greet the friends by name in another. This is one of very few places in the New Testament where two mainstream English Bibles disagree about how many verses a book contains.
The letter form, the road, and the rule about how long a visitor may stay.
Read the letter as an artefact of its own postal world before reading it as theology. Almost every feature that looks personal in 3 John — the health wish, the apology about ink, the greeting by name — is a convention with thousands of parallels in the Greek papyri. Knowing that does not empty the letter. It tells you which sentences are formula and which are the writer’s own.
The health wish of verse 2
This is the standard opening of an ordinary Greek letter, and it is the reason verse 2 should not be read as a promise. The formula runs: I pray that you are well and that things go well with you. 3 John writes εὔχομαί σε εὐοδοῦσθαι καὶ ὑγιαίνειν and then does something the papyri do not do: it turns the formula into a standard of comparison — as it goes well with your soul.
What this page can and cannot say about that. NOT VERIFIABLE FROM LOCAL CORPORA: the documentary papyri are not held on this shelf, so the claim that the health wish is conventional is reported from the standard literature (Deissmann, and the papyrological handbooks after him) and was not measured here. What was measured: both verbs occur in these forms exactly once in the Greek New Testament, and εὐοδόω occurs elsewhere in the New Testament only at Romans 1:10 and 1 Corinthians 16:2 — a journey and a collection.
Travelling teachers, and how a congregation was supposed to handle them
The problem 3 John is written into is the problem the Didache legislates for. Didache 11–12 tells a church to receive an apostle or prophet as the Lord, and then sets a limit: he may stay one day, or two if he must; if he stays three he is a false prophet. If he asks for money he is a false prophet. If he wishes to settle, let him work. Verses 5–8 of 3 John and Didache 11–12 are two sides of the same practical question: who feeds the traveller, and how is the traveller kept honest?
What was and was not measured. The Didache is not on this shelf in any language and was not screened. It is cited here as a historical witness to the practice, not as Scripture and not as a measured parallel. Measured, on the other hand: προπέμπω, the verb of verse 6, occurs nine times in the Greek New Testament and all nine are journey-support contexts. That is a New Testament-wide pattern, and it is countable.
Taking nothing from outsiders
Verse 7 states a support policy, and the ancient world had a name for the alternative. Wandering philosophers, Cynics above all, were known for begging; the charge of taking money for teaching was a standard slur. A group that went out accepting nothing from the Gentiles was refusing the most obvious source of income available to it — and by refusing it, was making itself dependent on believers like Gaius.
NOT VERIFIABLE FROM LOCAL CORPORA: Lucian, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom and the Cynic epistles are not on this shelf and none of them was screened. The paragraph above is background from the secondary literature, and this page flags it as such rather than dressing it as a finding.
Letters of recommendation
Verse 12 is doing a recognisable job. A letter of recommendation vouches for a person to a host who has not met him: it names witnesses, states that the writer adds his own word, and asks that the bearer be received. Verse 12 names three witnesses — everyone, the truth itself, and we — and then says you know that our testimony is true. It is at least possible that Demetrius carried this letter, which would explain why the commendation is the last thing before the close. That is a reasonable reconstruction and not a measurement, and the page marks it as one.
Four lemmas found nowhere else in the New Testament, and four common words this letter puts to uncommon use.
Every count below was taken from the corpus, not from a lexicon. Word forms come from MorphGNT field 6, the normalised word; lemma counts come from MorphGNT field 7. A form count and a lemma count are different questions and the page says which it is asking. Of 3 John’s 152 distinct word forms, 27 occur nowhere else in the Greek New Testament — but most of those are ordinary words in an unusual case. Measured on lemmas instead, exactly five lemmas in 3 John occur nowhere else in the Greek New Testament: Διοτρέφης, μειζότερος, φιλοπρωτεύω, φλυαρέω and ἐπιδέχομαι. Four of those five have a card below. The other four cards are common words this letter puts to uncommon use, and each card states its own count.
One occurrence in the Greek New Testament: 3 John 9. A compound of φιλ-, loving, and πρῶτος, first. Note what it does not say. It is not a word for heresy, or for greed, or for immorality. The charge against Diotrephes is a disposition about rank.
Two occurrences in the Greek New Testament, and both are in this letter, two verses apart, both negated. Verse 9: he does not receive us. Verse 10: he does not receive the brothers. The verb that names the letter’s whole subject exists in the New Testament only here, and only as a refusal.
One occurrence in the Greek New Testament, and zero in the 30,348 Greek Old Testament verse units screened here. (First counted over 23,061; re-run 24 September 2026 on the enlarged corpus, and still zero.) A double comparative: μείζων is already greater, and -τερος makes it greater again. It is the sort of form that belongs to speech rather than to composition.
One occurrence in the Greek New Testament: 3 John 10. The root is the noun for idle chatter, bubbling talk. The ESV’s talking wicked nonsense is carrying two Greek words: λόγοις πονηροῖς and the participle.
Nine occurrences in the Greek New Testament, in eight different forms, and every one of them is a journey. Acts 15:3, 20:38, 21:5; Romans 15:24; 1 Corinthians 16:6, 16:11; 2 Corinthians 1:16; Titus 3:13; 3 John 6. This is not a word for waving goodbye. It carries the sense of equipping.
The word group occurs five times in the Greek New Testament and three of the five are in Matthew. Matthew 5:47, 6:7, 18:17; Galatians 2:14 (as an adverb); 3 John 7. Matthew 18:17 is the church-discipline verse — let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector — and 3 John is a letter about a man putting people out of a church. The page reports the overlap of vocabulary and asserts no dependence in either direction.
Verse 15 is the only place in the New Testament where a congregation greets another congregation as the friends. The forms φίλοι and φίλους occur in Luke, John 15 and Acts, but nowhere else as the name a church calls itself. John 15:15 is the nearest thing to a warrant for it — no longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends — and the connection is thematic, not verbatim: the two verses share no two consecutive words — only the single word φίλους itself.
Twice in the letter, at the two ends of its argument. Verse 7: they went out for the sake of the Name, and the Name is not said. Verse 15: greet the friends κατ’ ὄνομα, by name — a phrase which occurs in exactly two verses of the Greek New Testament, John 10:3 and this one. The unnamed Name at the start; every friend named at the end.
The word that is not here
Measured across all twenty-seven books: 3 John is the only book in the New Testament with no occurrence of Ἰησοῦς and no occurrence of Χριστός. It also has no κύριος and no πνεῦμα. θεός occurs three times: once in verse 6 and twice in verse 11.
What this does and does not prove. It does not prove the letter is less Christian than its neighbours; the whole of it presupposes a mission carried out for a Name and a truth that can be walked in. What it does show is that a fifteen-verse private letter about hospitality could be written by an early Christian leader without the central names appearing once — and that verse 7 handles the omission by calling it the Name, absolutely, with no genitive after it. The bare ‘the Name’ is itself a countable idiom: ὑπὲρ τοῦ ὀνόματος stands in five other New Testament verses, four of them in Acts.
Truth, and the truth vocabulary’s hard stop
Seven words of the ἀληθ- family in fifteen verses. Verse 1 (ἀληθείᾳ), verse 3 (twice), verse 4, verse 8, verse 12 (ἀληθείας and ἀληθής). The first is the last word of verse 1 and the last is in the last clause of verse 12; verses 13–15 contain none.
And truth is something you walk in, not something you hold. περιπατέω stands in verses 3 and 4 and nowhere else in the letter, both times with a truth-word but not the same one — verse 3 anarthrous, ἐν ἀληθείᾳ, verse 4 with the article, ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ. The three-word string ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ occurs in John 8:44, 16:13, 17:17 and 3 John 4 — four verses in the Greek New Testament.
Twenty-seven books screened one at a time. One of them stops short of all the others.
The screen, in full, so it can be checked. Greek against Greek. MorphGNT field 6, the normalised word — the column that already resolves elision and the movable nu; the CATSS FORM column (cols 0–24), beta-code transliterated first. Both sides lowercased, accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, then filtered to Greek letters — the same filter applied to both corpora. Contiguous runs of whole word FORMS, never lemmas. The tie band is reported beside every run, because a run without its band is misleading. Greek-side convention throughout, unigram fallback ON — so a row reporting 1 shares at least one single word and no two consecutive words. Exhaustive and deterministic; nothing sampled, so no seed applies. Direction of influence is never asserted.
The headline: every New Testament book but one reaches five
Each of the 27 books was screened against the other 26, its own verses excluded from the target. Here is the deepest contiguous shared run each book reached.
Matthew 34 · Mark 23 · Luke 26 · John 9 · Acts 34 · Romans 12 · 1 Corinthians 12 · 2 Corinthians 12 · Galatians 9 · Ephesians 17 · Philippians 12 · Colossians 17 · 1 Thessalonians 11 · 2 Thessalonians 11 · 1 Timothy 12 · 2 Timothy 12 · Titus 8 · Philemon 12 · Hebrews 10 · James 10 · 1 Peter 11 · 2 Peter 5 · 1 John 6 · 2 John 5 · 3 John 4 · Jude 6 · Revelation 11.
3 John is the only book on the list that never reaches five. Its whole distribution, against 7,912 other New Testament verses: all 15 rows reach two, 10 reach three, 4 reach four, and nothing reaches five.
⚠️ The confound, stated before anyone else states it. 3 John is also the shortest book in the New Testament by word count — 219 normalised tokens. A shorter text has fewer chances to hit a long run, and this result cannot be separated from that. What can be said is how narrow the gap is: 2 John is 245 tokens, twelve per cent longer, and reaches five twice. Philemon is 334 tokens and reaches twelve. Length makes the finding weaker; it does not make it empty. The honest sentence is: among the shortest books, 3 John is the one that never reaches five, and the next shortest does.
3 John’s four deepest rows, with their bands
Four rows out of fifteen reach four. Two of them are real, one is Johannine, and one is noise.
3 John 1 — run 4, tie band 1. ἐγὼ ἀγαπῶ ἐν ἀληθείᾳ, landing on 2 John 1 and on no other verse in the New Testament.
3 John 14 — run 4, tie band 1. καὶ στόμα πρὸς στόμα, landing on 2 John 12 and on no other verse in the New Testament.
3 John 11 — run 4, tie band 5. ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν, tying John 7:17, 1 John 4:1, 4:2, 4:7 and (as τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν ὁ) John 6:33. All five ties are Johannine — four of them on the same four-word string, the fifth on a different window.
3 John 5 — run 4, tie band 1 — and it is worth nothing. εἰς τοὺς ἀδελφοὺς καί lands on 1 Corinthians 8:12, a verse about sinning against the conscience of weaker brothers. Same depth, same band as verse 1, and no relationship at all. This page prints it deliberately, so that its other fours are not read as more than they are.
The twins that are not twins: 3 John screened against 2 John alone
The two letters are famous for looking alike. Verse by verse, they barely touch each other’s words. Screened against the 13 verses of 2 John and nothing else, 3 John’s fifteen rows come out: two rows at four (verses 1 and 14), five rows at two, and eight rows at one — and on the Greek-side convention used here, a row reporting one shares no two consecutive words with any verse of 2 John at all.
The closing everybody calls identical is not identical. Compare 3 John 13 with 2 John 12 — the two I had much to write… pen and ink sentences. Measured pair run: ONE. The single word they share consecutively is πολλά. 2 John writes χάρτου καὶ μέλανος, paper and ink; 3 John writes μέλανος καὶ καλάμου, ink and pen. Different nouns, different order, different verbs. The resemblance readers feel is real and it is a resemblance of idiom, which a contiguous-run screen is not built to find.
Where they do touch, they touch hard. Two four-word strings occur in exactly two verses each in the entire Greek New Testament, and in both cases the two verses are one in 2 John and one in 3 John. That is the measurement’s actual finding about the two letters: not broad similarity, but two narrow and exclusive contacts.
3 John against the Greek Old Testament: no contact
Screened against 30,348 verse units of the Greek Old Testament (63 CATSS files screened, of 64 held), 3 John’s deepest run is FOUR — once, tie band 1 — and it is an accident. Verse 11’s τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν ὁ falls the same way as a clause in 2 Kings 23:17. The distribution: 9 rows at two, 5 at three, 1 at four. Nothing else in the letter reaches beyond three. This screen was first run over 23,061 verse units in 44 files; it was re-run on 24 September 2026 over the enlarged corpus, which added Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Wisdom and the rest, and every figure in this paragraph held — the same four, the same single partner, the same 9 / 5 / 1.
3 John quotes no Scripture. There is no citation formula in the letter — γέγραπται does not occur, and the only verb of writing is the writer’s own. Measured: no citation formula occurs, and no row of the letter reaches beyond four words against any Greek Old Testament verse. Not measured: this page did not run a canon-wide census of which New Testament books quote nothing, so it does not say how rare that is.
One phrase does come out of the Old Testament, and the screen almost misses it. Εἰρήνη σοι at verse 15 is a run of only two, so on depth alone it is nothing. But counted as a phrase it occurs once in the whole Greek New Testament and eight times in the Greek Old Testament held here: Judges 6:23 and 19:20 in both the A and B texts, 1 Samuel 20:21, 2 Kings 4:26, 1 Chronicles 12:19 (English Bibles: 12:18), Daniel (Theodotion) 10:19 — re-counted on 24 September 2026 over all 30,348 verse units screened, and still those eight. It is the Hebrew shalom lekha in Greek dress — and a run screen, which ranks by depth, would have thrown it away.
What the screen could not see, twice on this page
A method section that only lists successes is advertising. Two of this page’s best observations were found in spite of the run screen, not by it, and both are printed above.
One: verse 7. The screen scored it at three, on ὑπὲρ γὰρ τοῦ, against Romans 5:7 — a meaningless hit. The real idiom, ὑπὲρ τοῦ ὀνόματος, is broken by one particle and the screen cannot step over it.
Two: verse 15. κατ’ ὄνομα is a run of two at best, and yet it occurs in exactly two verses of the New Testament and one of them is John 10:3. Depth is a poor proxy for significance in a short phrase. The phrase search — asking where an exact sequence occurs, without ranking by length — found both of these; the run screen found neither.
What was not consulted, what could not be checked, and where this page is weakest.
This section is the one that makes the rest of the shelf usable. A page that reports only what it found is not a research page. Everything below is a limit on the paragraphs above.
The single biggest weakness of this page
3 John is 219 words long, and the headline finding is a negative claim about a 219-word text. “It never reaches five” is a statement about something that did not happen, in the smallest sample in the New Testament. Everything about brevity that makes the result striking also makes it fragile. A single extra sentence of quoted liturgy would have destroyed it.
What would strengthen it, and was not done. A proper test would normalise for length — for example by sampling 219-word windows from every other book and asking how often a window of that size fails to reach five. That normalisation was not run. Until it is, the correct reading of this page is: 3 John is the only whole book that stops at four, and its shortness is part of the reason.
What was not consulted
No commentary was read for this page. The standard works on 3 John — Brown’s Anchor Bible Epistles of John, Lieu, Painter, Jobes, Yarbrough, Kruse, Smalley — are named here as the places a reader should go next, and none of them was consulted in writing this page. The argument here is a measurement plus its caveats, and it should be checked against people who have spent careers on the letter.
No critical apparatus was examined. The SBLGNT text on disk carries editorial sigla marking places where the editions differ, and this page stripped those sigla to print clean Greek without reporting a single variant. Verses 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13 and 14 all carry one. A reader who wants to know where the manuscripts diverge will not learn it here.
No papyrological or patristic corpus was screened. The Didache, Eusebius, the documentary papyri and the Cynic material cited in stage 2 are all secondary reports. None of them is on this shelf and none was measured.
What could not be checked
The Greek Old Testament gap this page first reported has been closed, and the result held. Every book of the CATSS Greek Old Testament is now held: 64 files, 30,637 verse units, of which 63 files and 30,348 units are screened (the Odes are held but withdrawn from screening, because Odes 9 and 13 are Luke 1–2 and ten others duplicate passages already in the corpus). Re-run on 24 September 2026 over that corpus, 3 John’s deepest run is still four, once, tie band 1, at 2 Kings 23:17, and no row moved. The claim is still a claim about the corpus screened, which is not the whole Septuagint. Until 24 September 2026 this read: “Twenty CATSS files are missing from this shelf — among them Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua and the Wisdom of Solomon. The claim that 3 John makes no verbatim contact with the Greek Old Testament is a claim about the 44 files held.”
Style, register and syntax were not tested. The run screen counts shared sequences. It cannot measure whether two texts sound alike, which is precisely the evidence people use when they argue that 2 and 3 John came from one hand. This page’s finding that the two letters share almost no verbatim material is not an argument against common authorship, and must not be read as one.
Authorship, date and destination are left open. Nothing on this page identifies the elder, dates the letter, locates Gaius’s church, or decides whether Diotrephes’s offence was doctrinal or personal. The letter does not say, and the corpus cannot.
Where the ESV quotation ceiling stands on this page
This page prints twelve verses of 3 John in the ESV, and even the percentage is caught by the offset. Twelve of fifteen is 80.0 per cent on the ESV’s own count. The shelf’s footprint tool takes its denominators from a verse-count table that gives 3 John fourteen verses, and therefore reports 85.7 per cent for this page. Both numbers are right; they are answers to two different questions, and the versification difference this whole page is about follows it into its own disclosure.
Either way it is over the ceiling. Crossway’s standing permission for unlicensed quotation covers up to 500 verses, under half of any one book, and under 25 per cent of a work. Eighty per cent of one book is over that ceiling and the page says so rather than hoping nobody counts. A fifteen-verse letter cannot be studied whole under a half-a-book rule.
What has been done about it. The page discloses the figure rather than burying it, and the shelf’s long answer is its own translation: when the Pleasant Springs Version is finished it will carry the English column, and the ESV will step down. The shelf’s overall position, and its disclosure, are set out at The Texts We Print.
Where to go next
- Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John (Anchor Bible 30). The fullest English treatment of the Johannine community reconstruction behind Diotrephes.
- Judith M. Lieu, I, II, & III John: A Commentary (NTL), and The Second and Third Epistles of John. Consistently sceptical about the reconstructions; the right corrective.
- Karen H. Jobes, 1, 2, & 3 John (ZECNT), and Robert W. Yarbrough, 1–3 John (BECNT).
- Abraham J. Malherbe, “The Inhospitality of Diotrephes,” in Social Aspects of Early Christianity — the standard essay on the hospitality question.
- The Didache, chapters 11–12, in any edition of the Apostolic Fathers. The nearest thing we have to the rule 3 John assumes.
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.24–25, on the disputed books.
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, for the variants this page stripped and did not report.
Bring it to the table — and bring the objection with it.
Heiser’s sixth stage is not a postscript. Research that is never said out loud to people who can push back on it is not finished. Take the finding and the confound.
Three questions for a group
1. Verse 2 says I pray that all may go well with you. Verse 7 says the missionaries take nothing from outsiders. What does it do to a prosperity reading of verse 2 to learn that verse 2 is the formula every Greek letter opened with, and that five verses later the letter is about people who refused money?
2. The letter never says what Diotrephes taught. It says he loves to be first, will not receive, and puts out those who will. Why might a New Testament letter treat a disposition about rank as a matter serious enough to name a man in Scripture?
3. Verse 7 says they went out for the sake of the Name, and the letter never says the Name. Read verse 15 next to it: greet the friends by name. What is the letter doing by leaving one Name unsaid and insisting that every friend be named?
How to argue with this page
The strongest objection is the one printed in stage 4 and again in stage 5. 3 John is the shortest book in the New Testament, and short texts have fewer chances at long runs. If you want to test the finding rather than repeat it, the way to do it is to draw 219-word windows out of Romans, or Luke, or Revelation, and ask how often such a window fails to reach five. If it fails often, the finding is about length. If it fails rarely, the finding is about 3 John.
The second objection is about what a run screen is for. It finds verbatim contact, not allusion. This page says twice, in stage 4, where the screen walked past something real. Do not let a number stand in for a reading.
Every Deep Research page traces its passage across the whole sweep — the Old Testament, the Second-Temple world between the testaments (historical witnesses, not Scripture), and the New Testament. Follow the thread:
Pleasant Springs Church — Deep Research
Research method after Michael S. Heiser’s Bible Research Method (examine dictionaries → ancient literature → important words → textual connections → academic publications → share), with the Pleasant Springs “Author & Audience” foundation. Scripture set in the Hebrew, the Greek editions named on each page and the ESV (Old Testament), and the Greek New Testament and the ESV (New Testament), per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. 3 John research grounded in Brown (Anchor Bible), Lieu (NTL), Jobes (ZECNT) and Yarbrough (BECNT) — named as the next step for a reader, and not consulted in writing this page. Text: Greek New Testament from the SBL Greek New Testament as digitized by MorphGNT; Greek Old Testament from Rahlfs’ Septuaginta as digitized by CATSS. There is no Hebrew column and no Septuagint column on this page, because 3 John is a New Testament book; the Greek Old Testament appears here only as a target corpus to measure against. ⚠️ VERSE NUMBERING — there IS an offset, and it is inside the English. Derived, not assumed: the SBLGNT text of 3 John on disk runs to 15 verses; the printed editions consulted for versification stop at 14. Verses 1–13 agree everywhere. The ESV, NASB, CSB and NRSV number a verse 14 and a verse 15; the KJV and the NIV print both as verse 14. 3 John 15 on this page is 3 John 14b in a King James Bible. ⚠️ The measurement, in full. Greek against Greek. MorphGNT field 6, the normalised word (the column that already resolves elision and the movable nu); CATSS FORM column (cols 0–24), beta-code transliterated first. Both sides lowercased, accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, then filtered to Greek letters — the same filter applied to both corpora. Contiguous runs of whole word FORMS, never lemmas. Corpora: the 15 SBLGNT rows of 3 John against 7,912 MorphGNT verses (3 John’s own rows excluded from the target); the same 15 rows against 30,348 CATSS verse units in 63 files (of 64 held; the Odes are held but not screened) — first run over 23,061 units in 44 files, re-run on 24 September 2026 with every Greek Old Testament figure unchanged; and the whole-canon comparison in stage 4, in which each of the 27 books was screened against the other 26 in turn. Greek-side convention throughout, unigram fallback ON — so a row reporting 1 shares at least one single word and no two consecutive words. Exhaustive and deterministic; nothing sampled, so no seed applies. ⚠️ What the corpus does NOT contain. Every CATSS Greek Old Testament file is now held (since 30 August 2026; until then twenty were missing, among them Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua and the Wisdom of Solomon), and the Greek Old Testament result is a result about the 63 files screened — not the whole Septuagint. The Didache, Eusebius, the documentary papyri and the Cynic literature cited in stage 2 are held in no language on this shelf and were not measured; they are reported as secondary background and flagged as such in place. ⚠️ The confound is printed, not buried. 3 John is the shortest book in the New Testament by word count — 219 normalised tokens against 2 John’s 245 and Philemon’s 334 — and a shorter text has fewer chances to reach a long run. No length normalisation was performed. The finding is stated with that limit attached in stage 4 and again in stage 5. ⚠️ Direction of influence is never asserted. Nothing on this page says that 3 John used 2 John or that 2 John used 3 John; that either letter used the Gospel of John or 1 John or was used by them; that 3 John knew the Didache or the Didache knew 3 John; or that verse 7 depends on Acts. Runs and tie bands are reported. The inference is the reader’s. ⚠️ Editorial sigla were stripped and no variants are reported. Eight of the fifteen verses carry an SBLGNT apparatus marker. The Greek printed here is clean text; a reader who needs the variants must go to the apparatus. Typology is handled per the house position: what the text says, what the New Testament itself draws, and what we see from this side of the cross — with the seeing left to the reader.
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license, and the ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. www.esv.org
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