The second letter of John is an appeal to ‘the elect lady’, a chosen authority in the community of the addressees. The letter is also addressed to ‘her children’, that is, all those under her authority.

Tekna, ‘children’, is the term the Elder uses to signify spiritual minors. The interpretation of the addressee’s designation as signifying a church rather than a female individual is an old one, but the Byzantine commentator Oecumenius comes close to the plain sense of the text: ‘He [i.e., the Elder] writes with commandments of the Gospel to a church, or to some woman giving spiritual governance to her household’ (Cramer 1840: 146–47).

Apparently independently, the latter interpretation is also that of the Order of the Eastern Star, an African American organization of the wives, widows, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the Prince Hall order of Masons. Eastern Star rites claim five biblical women as heroines: ‘Adah’, daughter of Jephtha; Ruth; Esther; Martha; and ‘Electa’, the ‘elect lady’ of 2 John. The sisters of the Eastern Star hold Electa to be an ideal matron: reputed to have been an early martyr, she is the paragon of womanly Christian virtue.

Angelica Kauffmann’s Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to her Children as Her Treasures is a painting in the narrative genre of the exemplum virtutis, the representation of an ancient model of virtue that stimulate and cultivate the viewer’s moral sentiments. The painting illustrates a Roman legend about the virtue of the famed Roman noblewoman Cornelia, mother of the patrician politicians Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. According to the legend, another noblewoman once came to Cornelia’s home to show off her expensive jewellery and gems, whereupon Cornelia presented her two young sons to her guest, declaring, ‘These are my jewels’.

Kauffmann’s scene is framed in what appears to be the portico of an ancient Roman villa. The ostentation of Cornelia’s visitor is met with what appears to be Cornelia’s demure rebuff as she gestures toward her two young sons. The younger carries a small scroll; the elder bears what looks to be a book in his left hand as he leads the younger, lagging slightly behind him, with his right. The boys are the children of an elect lady, already ‘walking in the truth’ (2 John 4) under their mother’s devout auspices.

References

Cramer, J.A. 1840. Catena in epistolas catholicas accesserunt OEcumenii et Arethae commentarii in Apocalypsin, vol. 8 of Catenae graecorum Patrum in Novum testamentum (Oxford: e Typographeo Academico)

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend. 2000. ‘The Virtues of Brotherhood and Sisterhood: African American Fraternal Organizations and Their Bibles’, in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. by Vincent Wimbush (New York: Continuum), p. 399

Martin, Dana. 2016. ‘Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia Pointing to her Children as Her Treasures’, www.smarthistory.org, available at https://smarthistory.org/angelica-kauffmann-cornelia-pointing-to-her-children-as-her-treasures/ [accessed 27 April 2022]