The evidence is clear and it is worth setting out. Origen, in the third century, says John left one short epistle and perhaps a second and a third, and adds that not all regard these as genuine. Eusebius, early in the fourth century, places 2 John and 3 John among the disputed books while recording that they were well known. Jerome reports that many assign them to John the elder. The Syriac Peshitta omits both. Three ordinary explanations cover nearly all of it. The letter is fourteen verses long, so it was copied rarely and quoted almost never, and there is no early citation of it before the third century. Its subject is a local quarrel about hospitality with no doctrinal statement in it, which made its general usefulness hard to see. And its writer calls himself the elder, which raised the question of which John wrote it. The letters were received in the end because the churches judged them to come from the same hand as the first, and 3 John stands in Athanasius's list of AD 367 and in the councils that followed.
Brevity and a private subject explain the slow reception, and the letter is John's
held by most commentary; a note this short about one congregation's quarrel would leave almost no trace in the surviving literature whatever its author
The hesitation reflects a real ancient doubt about the writer
held by Jerome and Eusebius, and modern scholars who take the title elder at verse 1 as evidence that the churches knew these two letters came from a hand distinct from the Fourth Gospel
The churches tested every book and this one took longest because there was least to test
held by commentators who read the record of the disputed books as evidence of care; the same process worked over 2 Peter, Jude, James and Revelation before settling
Who Decided the Canon→
