3 John

The Third Epistle of John

Hospitality and Pride

If 2 John warns against welcoming the wrong people, 3 John — written around the same time, likely as a companion letter — commends welcoming the right ones, and does so through the most personal, individually addressed writing anywhere in John's letters. There is no veiled congregation here, no elect lady standing for a church; Gaius is a real, named individual, evidently a member (perhaps a leader) of a congregation elsewhere, known personally to John and warmly loved by him.

The letter's occasion is almost certainly a leadership conflict. Itinerant missionaries sent out, it seems, with John's own commendation, had been traveling among the churches; Gaius had received them warmly, in keeping with the truth (v. 3), while a man named Diotrephes — evidently exercising considerable, self-appointed authority in his own local church — had refused to receive either the missionaries or John's own authority, going so far as to expel from the church anyone who disagreed with him. Between these two men, John's approval falls entirely and unambiguously on the side of ordinary, faithful hospitality over ambitious, self-serving control — a contrast as relevant to church leadership in any century as it was in the first.