‘Stunning find’: Meet the missing woman in the Bible rediscovered by a BYU researcher
An error in Greek manuscripts erased the name of the only woman to receive a New Testament letter – Published: Nov 8, 2025
Extracts from the article are below.
A BYU researcher has conclusively recovered the name of the woman who received the New Testament letter known as 2 John, according to a new book.
Meet Electa, an early Christian woman whose identity was concealed for nearly 2,000 years due to corrupted Greek texts and centuries of New Testament commentaries that mistakenly believed the original writer called her only “an elect lady.”
Her name has been considered a mystery because scribes copying original Greek texts accidentally dropped two letters, says Lincoln Blumell, associate dean of research in the BYU Department of Ancient Scripture.
Part of the problem was that every study of the past 150 years universally accepted the mistake without questioning the manuscript texts.
That error shrouded Electa’s actual name, which in Greek is Eclecte (eh-KLEK-tay), from billions of Bible readers because scholars thought it was instead the Greek adjective eclecte, meaning elect. (Electa is the Latin version of her name.)
“Blumell shows conclusively that the addressee of 2 John, one of the 27 books of the New Testament, is a woman named Eclecte,” said AnneMarie Luijendijk, the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion at Princeton University, in a statement on the book’s dust jacket.
