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The first ancient document I ever edited was a fragile scrap of papyrus from the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. It carried a date corresponding to March 17, AD 291, and contained a petition, written in Greek, that was submitted to the local police chief by a woman named Aurelia Hermanoubiaina. In the document, she reported that her husband, Cyril, had left on business six weeks earlier with a sailor named Ischyrion but had never returned. On the day she submitted the petition, she saw Ischyrion back in the city, wearing her husband’s clothes. Fearing the worst, she demanded that he be detained and that justice be carried out. The papyrus breaks off there, leaving the mystery about her missing husband unresolved.

Editing this ancient document was both frustrating and thrilling. The 1,700-year-old text was riddled with grammatical errors and holes, but slowly the words began to reveal the voice of a desperate woman pleading for justice. Since then, I have edited many other texts—tax receipts, leases, amulets, love spells, classroom notes, and biblical fragments—yet letters have always captured my imagination. They are at once formulaic and deeply personal, each one offering a glimpse into ordinary lives that might otherwise have vanished. A similar experience led to the rediscovery of a lost woman in the New Testament.

An Unlikely Clue

That same fascination with ancient letters ultimately led me to one of the shortest books in the New Testament, 2 John, since it was clear that this letter was originally written on papyrus. In the KJV, 2 John 1:12 reads, “Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full.” The reference to “paper” is both idiomatic and anachronistic; the correct rendering is “papyrus.”

Fast-forward to the spring of 2023. While working on an archaeological project in Egypt, I found myself rereading the writings of Clement of Alexandria (ca. AD 150–215). Clement was one of early Christianity’s most learned voices, and in one passing remark, he made an astonishing claim about the Second Epistle of John. He said the letter was written “to a . . . woman, by name Eclecte.”

At first, I laughed out loud. Clement must have been mistaken. The Greek text of 2 John 1:1 clearly reads “unto the elect lady and her children.” Still, Clement was a native Greek speaker with a subtle mind. I couldn’t shake the question: what if he saw something that later readers missed?

When I returned home to Provo, I decided to look again, this time through the eyes of a papyrologist.

A Continuous Script

In the ancient world, Greek manuscripts were written in scriptio continua, i.e., in continuous writing with no spaces, no punctuation, and no lowercase letters. Looking at early manuscripts, I realized how easily a small copying slip could alter meaning.

In modern Bibles, 2 John 1:1 reads:

“The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth . . .”

But in an ancient form, it would have appeared like this:

THEELDERTOTHEELECTLADYANDHERCHIL
DRENWHOMILOVEINTHETRUTHANDNOTON
LYIBUTALLWHOKNOWTHETRUTH

To ancient eyes, a missing pair of Greek letters tau-eta (TH) in a letter string THTH could easily go unnoticed. Yet those two letters make all the difference. With them restored, the phrase shifts from “to the elect lady” (EKLEKTHKYRIA) to “to Eclecte the lady” (EKLEKTHTHKYRIA). That means the letter wasn’t addressed to a metaphorical “church” personified as a woman, as contemporary scholarship maintains, but to a woman whose name was actually Eclecte. Suddenly, Clement’s strange claim didn’t seem so strange after all.

Following the Evidence

Once I recognized the possibility, I began tracing the evidence. My background in papyrology made me keenly aware of how Greek letters followed standard epistolary formulas: “The elder unto the wellbeloved Gaius” (3 John 1:1) is identical in structure to “The elder to Eclecte the lady.” That alignment, along with numerous papyrus parallels, convinced me that the original address of 2 John was intended as a proper name.

I then turned to the epigraphic record. If Clement was right, the name Eclecte should appear elsewhere. Remarkably, I found eighteen Greek and Latin inscriptions from the first and second centuries that bear that name. One funerary inscription from around AD 53–62 reads, “Eclecte made this for herself and for her most devoted spouse.” The name was genuine, common enough to appear across the Roman world, and entirely plausible for the first-century setting of 2 John.

This is an important discovery, not because it unearthed a new artifact, but because it recovered a woman’s name that had been hidden in plain sight for nearly two thousand years. Two small Greek letters, omitted by an early scribe, had silenced her; restoring them brought her back.

Why It Matters

If the Second Epistle of John was addressed to Eclecte, she becomes the only woman personally named and addressed in a New Testament epistle. The letter portrays her as a respected leader whose home likely served as a gathering place for believers. She is cautioned to guard her community against false teachers and encouraged to walk in truth and love.

For centuries, readers have taken the “elect lady” as a metaphor for the church, but a literal reading fits both the language and the context far better. Seeing 2 John as a real letter written to a real woman aligns it with hundreds of other papyrus letters I have edited—from wives to husbands, parents to children, or officials to citizens. As in those everyday correspondences, it preserves the rhythms of friendship, instruction, and faith.

Recovering Lost Voices

The story of Eclecte has become, for me, a symbol of why I study ancient texts at all. From Aurelia Hermanoubiaina’s petition about her missing husband to Eclecte’s rediscovered name in Scripture, my work seeks to restore human voices lost to time. Each papyrus or inscription, however small, represents someone who once lived. My book, Lady Eclecte: The Lost Woman of the New Testament, tells the story of Lady Eclecte and how she was tragically omitted from the biblical text due to a minor omission of two reduplicated letters. It also shows that even in the world’s most studied book, discovery is still possible.

As I learned years ago in that first faded petition from Oxyrhynchus, sometimes the past survives in the thinnest of threads. And sometimes, those threads lead us to someone who was there all along, waiting to be read once more.

Caption: Mich.inv. 1960: Greek petition from ancient Oxyrhynchus