Why the Literary Design of John’s Gospel Sets It Apart

By James Hamilton

 John’s Gospel is like a magnificent cathedral, everything beautifully proportioned, perfectly balanced, with flying buttresses and soaring arches, every beam in place, the architecture pointing beyond itself to the transcendent glory of the one it celebrates. As with a cathedral, the point is not to study the architecture by merely dissecting the construction. We must enter in and allow both the sobering elegance of lofty ceilings and the priceless grandeur of it all to do their work on us. We want to feel small in the vastness, to be moved by the resonance of the acoustics, to hear the echoes in the silences and the reverberations of the songs. 

How the Gospel of John Is Organized Sets It Apart Among the Gospels 

There are four canonical Gospels that tell the story of Jesus, but the Gospel of John is without parallel. I take nothing away from the others or the achievement of their authors when I say that no other Gospel writer shows the daring of the son of Zebedee.  

Nothing in all the world’s literature compares, for instance, to what we find in John 5:19–30, where John presents Jesus explaining that the Son joins the work the Father does because “the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing” (5:20 ESV). Nowhere else in the world do readers find the Second Person of the Godhead saying of the First, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (5:26 ESV). The words that John records Jesus saying in these and similar passages give unparalleled insight into the relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it took some dash to do it. 

It is Vital to Our Understanding of Scripture to Study the Chiastic Structure in the Gospel of John 

We cannot understand John’s theology without an understanding of the literary structure of his Gospel, because the literary structure of the Gospel is not merely the transport vehicle delivering the freight of the theology; it is an essential part of the message itself. To rightly understand what John has communicated, we must understand how he has communicated it.  

To read English poetry we must know the English language and English poetic forms. To read biblical literature we must know the biblical languages and the literary forms employed by the biblical authors. The possibilities and limitations of language and form provide parameters for what authors can do with their messages, and when working with known forms, authors intend their audiences to interpret in accordance with how the medium creates a kind of biosphere in which the message lives and moves and has its being. 

The Gospel according to John evidences intentional, strategic, purposeful arrangement, from the first word to the last, and the whole thing is one wide-angle chiasm made up of smaller units that are themselves chiasms built of chiasms. 

Chiasms are extensions of parallelism that provide structure and boundaries within which authors work and, when recognized, can function as mnemonic aids to an audience, enabling authors to create both synergy between corresponding parts and an artistically beautiful, intellectually satisfying finished product. This statement can be exposited by putting it into chiastic shape. Chiasms are:

Extensions of parallelism 

 	          Providers of structure and boundaries 

                                  Aids to memory
 
                  Creators of synergy 

Vehicles for artistic beauty 

 

If as the author it was my intention for these descriptors to appear in a certain order because I had a chiastic structure in mind (and it was), then it was also part of my intention to suggest that the first and last are to be read together, as are the second and second to last. With minimal effort, one could use this structure to establish its statements in memory, accomplishing its centerpoint. Parallelism is a literary form that juxtaposes related statements and adorns writing with artistic beauty, and extending parallelism increases that beauty. Similarly, structure and boundaries provide context within which synergy happens. And if I want my audience to remember the structure of my statements, giving them an architecture that facilitates memory is a good practice. The intellectual satisfaction of the concluding statement forming a latch with the opening creates the impression of completeness. Everything that needed to be said has been said, even if there was more that could have been said. 

For a biblical author with as much to say as John (cf. John 21:25), such a structure is vital. I have been studying the Gospel of John for decades now, and in the process of grasping its chiastic structures, I have a new and firmer mental hold on the Gospel’s contents, so that I can easily reproduce them simply by taking a mental stroll through the components of the structure in relationship to one another.