aside: the X form

We all know that poetry is (sometimes) written with careful attention to form.  You probably remember from school, if you are not a literary sort, the idea of sonnets at least.  Most of us are aware of the structure in reports, because these days one is expected to make it obvious by using headings a numbering system.  But what we often don't notice is, creative prose can also have a structure.

In other words

• length of lines or sentences 
• types of words
• punctuation 
• repetition of words 
• kind of writing (metaphor/story/abstract ideas etc)
• juxtaposition of pieces of all the above

all matter, and affect the meaning.

One of the common devices used in the time of John, both in poetry and prose, was the X form.
This is called chiasm (or chi-form, which has nothing whaterver to do with Chinese exercises or words) with the 'ch' pronounced as if you are clearing your throat - like g in the Afrikaans word gogga.  This relates to the Greek letter called 'chi' which looks like an X.
The way it works is that different stanzas or paragraphs are arranged so the first and last have some key commonality, so do the second and second-last, and so on all the way to the middle one, which usually doesn't have a pair, or possibly come in two parts.  Like this:

A

    B

        C

            D

        C'

    B'

A'

Apart from making the whole thing simply more elegant and appealing, this form can help to highlight the middle section or it can demonstrate the flow of ideas without spelling it out in so many words.


There was an absense of any form of punctuation in ancient texts; this means the use of structural forms makes sense even more than in equivalent writing today because it helped mark paragraphs or sections.  Since there was no printing texts were hand copied; this meant that important things were often read aloud to a group of people, and they would all be trying to remember as much as possible of what they had heard; literary devices like the X form would have helped a lot.

You can see how this is working in this first bit of John.