Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › 3 John
The Third Letter of John is a private note of a single chapter from ‘the Elder’ to a Christian named Gaius. It praises Gaius for his hospitality to travelling missionaries, complains of a certain Diotrephes who refuses to acknowledge the Elder’s authority and turns away his messengers, and commends one Demetrius, perhaps the bearer of the letter. The Latin text is the Vulgate, the late fourth-century revision of the Old Latin version of the Greek.
Third John is the shortest book in the Bible and the most personal of the Johannine letters. Its quarrel over hospitality and authority offers a rare view of the practical life and the tensions of the churches at the end of the first century. Its authorship was debated in antiquity together with that of 2 John, and both were only gradually received into the canon in the Latin West. Short as it is, it preserves a lively and unguarded voice from the early church.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the Lasciva Roma collection of additional Latin texts (edition: Jerome's 405 a.d., Latin Vulgate These files were produced following modern scholarship of the available Vulgate mss. The apocryphal books are prefixed with…), licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.