‘Stunning find’: Meet the missing woman in the Bible rediscovered by a BYU researcher

A BYU researcher has conclusively recovered the name of the woman who received the New Testament letter known as 2 John, according to a new book.

Meet Electa, an early Christian woman whose identity was concealed for nearly 2,000 years due to corrupted Greek texts and centuries of New Testament commentaries that mistakenly believed the original writer called her only “an elect lady.”

Her name has been considered a mystery because scribes copying original Greek texts accidentally dropped two letters, says Lincoln Blumell, associate dean of research in the BYU Department of Ancient Scripture.

Part of the problem was that every study of the past 150 years universally accepted the mistake without questioning the manuscript texts.

That error shrouded Electa’s actual name, which in Greek is Eclecte (eh-KLEK-tay), from billions of Bible readers because scholars thought it was instead the Greek adjective eclecte, meaning elect. (Electa is the Latin version of her name.)

Some debated the issue over the centuries, but in 1881, one expert said solving the issue about to whom the letter was addressed was impossible.

“On the whole it is best to recognize that the problem of the address is insoluble with our present knowledge,” Cambridge professor Brooke Westcott said then.

Blumell brings to bear new evidence gathered over the past 140 years.

“For me, it’s a stunning discovery,” he said. “The Bible — especially the New Testament — is probably the most studied book in the world. A lot of eyes have looked at this and yet we can have something so subtle that has such huge implications.

“In this case, there should be another woman in our New Testament. She’s been hiding there in plain sight the whole time.”

Blumell collated papyri pulled from what he called “the rich sands of Egypt” since Westcott’s statement. He studied inscriptions on graves.

His argument will be published this week in his new book, “Lady Eclecte: The Lost Woman of the New Testament.”

It compiles powerful corroboration that two simple letters missing from the earliest Greek manuscripts must be restored, and Electa with them.

One good way to describe what happened to her would be to compare Greek to text messages between teenagers.

Teens today send long texts with no capitalization or punctuation. Now imagine a text like that with no spaces between the words.

That is exactly how ancient Greek manuscripts of the Bible are written, complicating their translation.

Even a trained eye looks at a papyrus from the year 291 and faces an unbroken string of letters. They appear as one long, run-on word written by someone on Red Bull, both knees bouncing.

In the field, it is called “scriptio continua,” or continuous writing.

In the case of Electa, the confusion centered on the Greek article τῃ, which means “the.” The exact same letters are also the final two letters of Eclecte’s name.

In the introduction to 2 John in the Greek manuscript, the τῃ at the end of her name was crammed up against the τῃ for “the.” It looked like this, but without the accents:

ὁπρεσβύτεροςἐκλέκτῃτῇκυρίᾳ (in Blumell’s reading, “The elder to Eclecte the Lady”).

A scribe or scribes inadvertently dropped one pair of those letters. The scribes may have wanted to save space, Blumell said. They may have thought the double pairs were a mistake. They may have just read over them or simply skipped them accidentally.

What was left with just a single τῃ was “elect lady”:

ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἐκλεκτῇ κυρίᾳ.

For more than 1,000 years, most scholars argued the letter’s introduction was a metaphor. The letter’s writer, they said, was referring to the church itself as a lady and to church members as her children.

The omission of the letters was catastrophic. The name of the only woman to whom a New Testament letter was written was lost.

Blumell shows the reading should be:

ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἐκλέκτῃ τῇ κυρίᾳ.

Whatever the cause, scribes copied the mistake again and again, and Electa’s identify was lost for hundreds of years.

In fact, the mistake is perpetuated today in the standard text in the field, Nestle-Aland’s 28th Edition of the Greek New Testament.

The mistake also led to centuries of wild theories in biblical studies, Blumell said. Some argued the unnamed elect lady might be Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary.

One said it might be a love letter. Some even argued the letter was fictional.

“No,” Blumell said, “the Greek just got corrupted. I give dozens of examples of the same kind of error occurring in early Christian manuscripts or papyri, where two are duplicated letters get dropped.”

Experts say Blumell has proved that Electa should be restored to all editions of the Bible.

“Blumell shows conclusively that the addressee of 2 John, one of the 27 books of the New Testament, is a woman named Eclecte,” said AnneMarie Luijendijk, the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion at Princeton University, in a statement on the book’s dust jacket.

Another expert said Blumell’s skillset was perfect for recognizing the error and restoring the missing letters and Electa’s true identity.

“His monograph is a demonstration of how painstaking philology, attention to the transmission of history of Christian texts and deep knowledge of papyri can uncover long-hidden meanings,” said John S. Kloppenborg, a specialist in Christian origins at the University of Toronto.

Blumell fell for papyrology when, already trained in Greek, he edited a police report from March 17, 291. The record showed a woman in Egypt reporting the kidnapping of her husband.

An ancient family came alive for Blumell.

Electa is a beneficiary.

Blumell’s journey to her identity began with reading a commentary by Clement of Alexandria written in the late second century or early third century. He wrote that 2 John “was written to a certain Babylonian woman, by name Eclecte.”

Blumell found that most commenters spent the next 1,700 years discounting Clement, in part because there is no proof that Electa was Babylonian.

Some of those who dismissed her name said there was no proof that any Greek woman of that period had been named Eclecte.

They called it a ghost name.

One of Blumell’s contributions is how he pulled together examples of the name from the Roman period. He found 18 examples of Eclecte in Greek and Latin inscriptions on graves. The earliest, from the mid-first century (about 53-62 CE), is a poetic example of a woman commemorating her husband.

“Eclecte made this (inscription),” it reads, “for herself and for her most devoted spouse, about whom she never had anything to grieve except when he died.”

He found several examples where it was used as a second name — Julia Eclecte, Claudia Eclecte, Cuspia Eclecte, Livia Eclecte and Munatia Eclecte.

And yet a leading scholar wrote in 1909 that there were no examples of Electa’s name. Even though much of today’s research and databases didn’t exist then, that scholar could have known he was wrong when he wrote it, Blumell said.

In fact, Eclecte was attested as the name of a woman in a book published in 1650, Blumell found. There are more known examples of Eclecte as a name from the Roman period than there are for Lois or Lydia, he found. In fact, it is found more widely than about 25% of the women’s names in the New Testament.

The lesson is that scholars should avoid repeating what others write without testing it, Blumell said.

Another part of his case for Electa in 2 John is how it parallels the address in 3 John.

• 2 John: “The elder to Electa the lady.”
• 3 John: “The elder to Gaius the Beloved.”

Blumell said this pattern is ubiquitous in that time period. He has found more than 2,000 examples from letters in the Roman period.

The evidence is so compelling, he said, that if the first papyrus with 2 John were discovered today without the baggage of unprovable theories, modern standards would have restored the τῃ because it is a well-attested phenomenon.

Discovering it now is a staggering seismic shift, said Blumell, who wrote that the Lady Eclecte’s name is now indisputably established.

“(I) will demonstrate,” he wrote in his book, “that there has always been a book in the New Testament whose principal recipient is a named woman, but that she has been lost in history to the omission of two reduplicated Greek letters.”

At the end of the book, Blumell considers Lady Electa’s possible role. The letter is written to her and clearly shows she has some authority at a house that could have been part of the early Christian network of homes where travelers could have stayed.

The elder instructs her to care for her children in part by turning away some who would arrive saying they were Christian but who would teach false doctrine.

While some Christian writers coupled “lady” with the office of “deaconess,” there is no indication that 2 John carries that meaning.

Still, Lady Electa may have performed some ecclesiastical function, Blumell said.

“With the use of ‘lady,’” he wrote, “the elder may have also been subtly signaling Eclecte’s authoritative position as the ‘female master of the house,’ which could extend to a position of authority among the Christians who were gathering there.”

Blumell hopes Electa’s name will be printed in future Bibles and he anticipates other scholars will revisit interpretations of her role in the church and the meaning of the letter.