person
Diotrephes
Διοτρεφής
Diotrephes was a church leader who loved to be first and refused to welcome John and his companions.
- verses
- 1
- first named
- 3 John 1:9
- last named
- 3 John 1:10
- period
- the New Testament
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Diotrephes?
Diotrephes is mentioned in 3Jn.1.9-10 as a church leader who opposed the apostle John and his associates. John describes Diotrephes as someone "who loves to be first" among the church members, suggesting that he had a dominant and controlling personality.
According to John, Diotrephes refused to welcome him and his companions and even went so far as to speak maliciously against them. Moreover, Diotrephes would not receive other believers who were associated with John and would expel from the church those who did welcome them (3Jn.1.10).
John's letter to Gaius, in which Diotrephes is mentioned, was written to commend Gaius for his faithfulness and hospitality towards traveling ministers (3Jn.1.5-8). By contrast, Diotrephes' behavior was a hindrance to the spread of the gospel and the unity of the church.
John declared his intention to confront Diotrephes about his actions when he visited the church (3Jn.1.10).
Relations
Direct connections
The kinship import reads the registry's own columns — parent, child, sibling, spouse — for every entity in it, and records none here. An extracted relation would be listed beside them, and none names this person either.
Not stated
No family is recorded for this person.
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Diotrephes is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
1 verse across 1 of 66 books; 65 write the name nowhere. Named in 3 John (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — one, across 1 book.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
Sources