to compose his Gospelaccording to the laws of parallelism.Commentators down through the centuries have been all too content to laudJohn's Gospel for its theological depth and for its occasional brilliant literary sorties.But on the whole, they apologized for the seemingly pedestrian literary gifts of theauthor. When John is seen through the focus of chiastic parallelism, this judgmenthas to be revised. Any author who could compose so elaborate a structure with suchartistic attention to detail and over so long a work deserves to be ranked with the bestof antiquity's literary artists.As you study John's chiastic structure on the nextpage, note particularly how he has paralleled partwith part, sequence with sequence, and section withsection. The total effect of such a structure whenpresented to the eye is similar to the effect of anelaborate mosaic or a large Persian rug.The Rewards of ParallelismStudying the chiastic outline of John's Gospel on page 25, the reader will noticethat the author has paralleled in a chiastic structure PART for PART, SEQUENCEwith SEQUENCE, and SECTION with SECTION. With the relative ease which theliterary style of John can now be detected, this study will make it a key that virtuallyanyone can use to gain access to the all too often "hidden" treasures of the Scriptures.Richard Greene Moulton emphasizes the importance of printing the text in sucha way that the chiastic structure can be seen visually and thus adverted to: "Theessential thing is that the verse structure should be represented to the eye by properprinting of the text. Where this is done further explanation is superfluous; wherestructural arrangement is wanting, no amount of explanation is likely to be of muchavail."Admittedly, such a structure is alien to modern experience and difficult toappreciate. But for the reader who is willing to study the principles of parallelstructure and apply them to the Gospel of John as a whole, the aesthetic, literary,...
