Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started, and we'll get started pretty quickly, because

tonight we're going to be doing 2nd John and 3rd John, both of which are sort of longish

paragraphs.

So, and I'm not going to do a ton of introduction for them because we kind of talked about that back when we started First John.

So by the time people are hearing the recording of this at least least they can go back and re-listen to that.

There wasn't a ton there about second and third John because, again, they are longish paragraphs.

So basically, you will sometimes see references,

as there's a not quite correct reference to this

in the Orthodox study Bible introduction,

to the fact that we find a lot of stuff in church fathers

and in lists of canonical New Testament books from the ancient church that just mentions an epistle of St. John.

Right.

And so everyone concludes, well, that's just First John.

And so these folks didn't know

second and third John existed.

And then some places you'll read like that mistaken reference I was talking about,

and people will say, well, those churches that only list and epistle of st john must have

rejected second and third john right which is sort of an inference without a lot of basis

and then some will even take that further and say, well, they must, why would they have

rejected it? Well, they must have not thought St. John wrote it.

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