ppearance of being a supplement added to the Gospel as an epilogue bythe final editor.The above-mentioned displacements and rearrangements have been hypoth-esizedon the premise, rarely if ever questioned, that the Gospel was writtenaccording to the laws of narrative. If this premise were true, logic would demand thatsome hypothesis of displacements, rearrangements, and editions must be found,even though it reduces the Gospel as it stands to a hodgepodge of material puttogether by remarkably incompetent authors and editors. Reflecting on thissituation, C. H. Dodd thirty years ago remarked, "Unfortunately, when once thegospel has been taken to pieces, its reassemblage is liable to be affected by individualpreferences, preconceptions, and even prejudices" (The Interpretation of the FourthGospel, p. 290).If, on the other hand, the premise is false, then the situation is entirely different.There remains the possibility that the Gospel was indeed written according to theprinciples of parallelism rather than according to the principles of narrative. That thisis more than a mere possibility may be deduced from the fact that chiastic parallelismas a structural principle in ancient Middle Eastern books has been amply documentedin the last fifty years for both classical and biblical authors. C. H. Talbert isundoubtedly correct in his contention that books in the ancient Middle East werefrequently written according to the laws of chiastic parallelism, and in his subsequentjudgment that ". . . the very law of duality (i.e., parallelism) by which one part is madeto correspond to another by being either analogous or contrasting seems deeplyrooted in Near Eastern mentality" (Literary Patterns, Theological Themes, and theGenre of Luke-Acts, p. 74).In addition, I believe that John's Gospel is not simply constructed according tothe principles of chiastic parallelism, but also that each of its parts, numbering five,and each of the twenty-one individual seq...
