I also wanted to make a brief comment on the whole, on chiasm in general, and I just think it's rather interesting that the chiastic structure of John eluded people in the West because we seem to naturally think in a narrative mode, whereas the people in the Middle East naturally view the universe in a chiastic way, as is evident, at least, in not just in the fact that John was written chastically, but that apparently other writers were written chastically. Yeah, it goes a long way. It goes along with such things as mandalas and all of those centred religious orders and structures. Yeah. But the fact that you have one group of people who totally misunderstands another culture

[01:04]

because of the way that they are expressing their particular universe, and as a result group A says that group B doesn't know what they're talking about, when in fact group B has their act together much more than group A ever, it's one to suspect, and this just sort of parallels, immediately I started thinking about the world, us and the East, the Orient, the Orient, and how much we've misunderstood the Orient for centuries because of differences in language. We always misunderstand wisdom cultures because we don't have a wisdom culture anymore, and the Orient is basically a tradition of wisdom cultures. That whole thing about narrative and symmetrical structure, narrative and chiasm, we'll get into the implications of that more later, but the biblical thing is not quite as simple as that because the Bible is very much narrative, okay? The Hebrews are more devoted to narrative than anybody else because they've got a historical

[02:07]

tradition which has a theological value. In other words, history for them is theological. So John brings that together with a kind of universal structure, which is the centered structure, which you can call chiastic, or in the end we'll see you can call it mandalic. That article of Cahill, which I put on the class shelf over there, is very good for that, showing how that centered structure, and for him it's just the Logos and the Prologue, he doesn't go any further than that, but how that centered structure opens up to all of the kind of big universal traditions of world religions and so on, and of anthropology. But with that, it's like you've got two things coming together here which can be put very simply cosmos and history, okay? Universe and history. As soon as you start thinking of universe, you're bound to start thinking, you start thinking of a unity and you start thinking also of a center. You think of a universe, a cosmos, you start thinking of a temple, you start thinking of maybe the sacred tree, but if the universe is one, if it's one thing, then you expect

[03:08]

it somehow, there's a natural archetypal tendency to think of it as a sphere with a center, or as some kind of a structure which has a central point, central axis, central pole, whatever you like in it, okay? Cosmos. And that's typical of the Greeks, and typical also of the East. On the other hand, you've got the tradition of history and the theological history, which is God's entry into the world and doing things with particular people, which is scandalous to this other view because it seems so vulgar, it seems so, what do you call it, so disorderly, so non-symmetrical. A scandal to the Greeks, and a scandal to the East, really. And such is the historical quality of the Bible, which was a scandal for many of the people in patristic times, in classical times, who were used to something much more symmetrical, something which was much more kind of literary fullness about it than they found, than they found immediately in the Bible.

[04:10]

But in John, these two things are brought together. So there's a tremendous kind of a nuclear collision in John, between history and cosmos. We'll go into that further. But it's represented in what we're doing by the intersection, the convergence, of narrative and of chiasm. Narrative and symmetrical structure. Now let's look at Ellis' treatment of chiasm. Excuse me, that's our chief task for today. Where is this from? This is the short book that you gave us. Is that from Ellis' book, The Genius of John? If you want to write that on there. What was his name? Ellis. Peter Ellis, The Genius of John. There are two copies of that that we have, so there should be always one of them over there on the shelf for you. I'd recommend that you look into it. You don't have to read the whole thing. One of our earnest students has already read the whole book.

[05:13]

Let's go to page... You don't have page nine, so I'm going to read you something that's just before what you have. You start with page ten. Here's Zarek's copy of Ellis. The part of his introduction was concerned with chiasm. Let me read to you about inclusion first. Inclusion is the mother of chiasm. Known among classical scholars as ring composition, inclusion is a storyteller's technique in which what is said at the beginning of a piece is repeated at the end. There are probably some nursery rhymes like that. The repetition forces the reader's attention back to the beginning and thus serves as a frame for the piece as a whole. It gives you a nice ring. A refrain does that, you know, a refrain in music. For his mercy endures forever. That's almost a form of inclusion, you could say. And the repetitive form tends to kind of get the whole thing in order and to bring you back to the beginning so that you're always starting out again. So it gives a kind of series...

[06:20]

It makes it a chain, which is a series of rings instead of just a straight line. So it introduces that circularity into what otherwise would be linear. John frames his whole gospel by repeating in chapter 21 words and names used in chapter 1 from 19 to 51. Note the return in chapter 1 of the name Simon, son of John, of Nathaniel, the two unnamed disciples. The words follow me. And the commissioning of Peter as rick or shepherd of the sheep, a commissioning already implicit in the change of Simon's name. When he says you're Peter, you should be called Peter Cephas. So he gives you a good example of what John's doing. People can argue about whether 21 is actually the parallel to chapter 1. But in addition to framing the gospel as a whole, John frames each individual sequence of his gospel. Two examples will suffice. He gives Cana as his example. This is where page 10 picks up. So you've got this. At the top of page 10 in your Ellis Xerox.

[07:22]

Note how verses 11 to 12 of chapter 2 repeat names and places in verses 1 to 2. If you look at John 2, you'll see that it's about Jesus and his disciples and his mother. And then that's picked up again in verse 12. And in the middle is the miracle of Cana, the wedding feast of Cana. And then in 20, 1 to 18, the sequence begins and ends with the full name of Mary Magdalene. Now, it so happens that those two passages that he cited there are chiastic parallels themselves. In other words, the Cana episode matches the Mary Magdalene episode. In my humble opinion, at least. Yeah, he brings it up, too. More than anything else, inclusions clearly indicate beginnings and endings, and thus

[08:31]

help the exegete to divide the gospel into distinct parts, sequences, and sections. Well, when it gets to chiasm, they do more than this. Okay, then he talks about this division into chapters, which may surprise you, but that only happened in the 12th century. So John didn't know about those chapters, which all of our Bibles divide him into. And was done with complete disregard for John's use of inclusions to divide the gospel into individual parts. But it's a funny thing that when he tries to re-divide the gospel, he ends up with 21 pieces once again. But instead of being chapters, they're what he calls sequences, and what I'll call episodes. There's 21 plus the prologue, which is not part of the narrative. So it's not part of his chiastic pattern. Okay, now he starts to talk about chiasm on page 10. And we talked about chiasm last time. We've already treated the chiasm of the prologue, so I won't go through the elementary part of this, okay? But just his contention about John's gospel.

[09:33]

In John's gospel, the author uses the five-member chiasm in every part, sequence, and section. So that's A, B, C, B', A', a five-member chiasm. In other places in the New Testament, you'll find a seven-member chiasm. And sometimes you'll probably even find a three-member chiasm. Paul, in places, has got a seven-member chiasm. The book of Revelation, I think, loves sevens, and I think it has a seven-member chiasm in some of its parts, but not the structure of the book as a whole. If you want references on those things, there's a note on those other occurrences of chiasm in the New Testament and elsewhere. There's a big note in Ellis that refers you to them. I can find that for you if you're interested. Now he takes one example, which is the wedding feast of Canaan. And he treats it, of course, more fully when he gets to what he calls sequence... Is it sequence two? Yeah. And that's on pages 40 to 44 in his book. So he gives it a fuller treatment there.

[10:35]

Here, he does it very quickly. And he puts in boldface type certain words which are the clues to the chiastic form. These words which recur. For instance, in Part A and in Part A', the word Jesus, Canaan in Galilee, the mother of Jesus, the disciples of Jesus. Now those can be clues, but they don't go very deep, do they? Similarly, Part B and B', wine and the servants. Wine and the servants in B'. Now Part C is all by itself. He hasn't got any boldfaced words there because they don't match up with anything. And that's the actual... what Jesus does. What the servants do, actually, is what Jesus does. And then, consequently, the miracle. Now, that's fairly convincing, but then after you get finished, you say, so what? In other words, has it deepened your reading of the Gospel at all?

[11:37]

Or is it just a nice little thing? A nice little design? Curious, those ancients. We'll see about that as we go on. Because if this is really going to be worthwhile, and not just tie the Gospel into a straitjacket, then it's got to deepen your reading of the Gospel. You have to bring you somewhere that you wouldn't have gone otherwise. And that it will do particularly through the device of the center. In other words, there's a pointing, a focusing on the center, which is extremely important. We found that already in the prologue, and I've already pointed it out in the whole of John's Gospel, that central passage, remember, of the sea crossing? Okay, now he talks about the structure of the whole Gospel. I've got a couple of references, I've got a couple of papers here, on the use of chiasm in Mark, Mark's Gospel, which is supposed to be structured that way, with a transfiguration of the center by Gali. And also, in general, in the ancient Near East, if anybody wants to read that. Near East, Middle East.

[12:37]

I can never remember which is which. The Middle East. Father? Yes? Like on his example here, the key to this one sequence of Athena-Galileo, it's obviously not on the primary level that the key is in there, because you look at it and can't really see anything, unless you go below the surface. That's right. At least the way it is here, the way he's developed it right here, it doesn't. Now, if you read his chapter, you'll find there's more to it than that. But he doesn't make capital out of the chiasm. In other words, he brings out a lot of deep stuff in the chapter on Cana, but he doesn't utilize the chiasm very much in doing it. He tells you about the chiasm, then he goes off and makes some symbolic interpretations, which are very deep. But the two are not sufficiently united. And that's a problem throughout. Okay, the problem of the structure of John's Gospel, more in general, I wanted to broaden this a little bit. First of all, I'll read you a few little bits that I took out of Ellis' treatment,

[13:42]

which basically you have to read for yourself. First of all, the question of authorship. Is the Gospel of John the work of one man? That's what Ellis says. Almost all commentators, and this includes Brown, take for granted that there were at least two hands at work, maybe four hands, in the composition of the Gospel, and that the Gospel as it stands now is in a state of great disorder. Now, notice that those two things are connected, because the idea that there's more than one person writing the Gospel means, first of all, you've got something that's been tampered with. Either you had disorderly materials which were then put in better order, or you've got an original text which was perfect and then was put into disorder, tampered with, or not perfectly communicated by somebody else. In any case, what does it do to the Gospel? It impairs the unity of the Gospel. Because it's very hard for you to be convinced, if you believe that, that as you're looking at it, it's a unity of perfection in itself,

[14:45]

that it's perfect in itself. You're going to start fiddling with it. You're going to start taking things away or adding things or conjecturing in order to get it into the right shape. But as itself, it's not going to say that much to you. Boltman is given as the extreme example. Boltman, when I had New Testament back in the seminary, Boltman was the black beast of biblical scholarship. He's given as the extreme example of someone who's taken it upon himself, starting from this viewpoint, that there were different hands in the broth, actually to reconstruct the original Gospel. So he'll take the Gospel apart and put it back together again in a different way, and then tell you that this came from certain unreliable sources, and this is the real stuff, and so on. There's enormous scope there for creating your own Gospel. Which he did, you know, on a philosophical principle. They've been doing that for 150 years, you know.

[15:46]

Okay, so he gives you various hypotheses about the authorship and so on, and concludes by quoting somebody, No one has yet demonstrated convincingly that the Gospel has been disarranged. In other words, that it's not in its pristine or perfect form. Let me give you a typical proposal for the structure of John. This comes from Brown, who has, of course, gone through a lot of hypotheses about the structure of John, and this is the one that he adopts. If I can find some... Here it is. This is in Brown's introduction, in his first volume, the Roman numerals are 138. Roman numerals are 138. Oh, good. One. Prologue.

[16:49]

One. 1 to 18. Two. Book of Signs. And this is pretty widely accepted. The chapters 1 to 11, or sometimes 1 to 12, of the Book of Signs, in which there are seven signs of Jesus. And that's what it's about. This revelation of Jesus. Three. Book of Gloria. And four. Epilogue. Which is chapter 21. So, the Book of Signs is basically... Well, he's got it from 1 to 19, right after the prologue. 12 to 50. The Book of Gloria goes from the beginning of chapter 13, the washing of the feet, the supper, to the end of chapter 20, and this is chapter 21,

[17:55]

so that takes care of all that. He matches up a prologue and an epilogue, even though they're very different, because this is narrative, and this is that kind of metaphysical poem of John's prologue. But this is what I wanted to point out, this division of the Gospel, basically, into two great sections. A Book of Signs in which the identity, the fullness of Jesus is revealed through the miracles that he does. These signs are miracles. And there are seven of them listed in brown on the next page there. 139. The first one is Cana, the second one is the second sign of Cana, which is the curing of the royal official's son. The third is the curing of the paralytic, the fourth is the multiplication of the loaves, the fifth is walking upon the sea, the sixth is curing a man blind from birth, the seventh is the raising of Lazarus. Which leads immediately to the condemning of Jesus and his own death and resurrection. So there's a crescendo in those signs.

[18:57]

And we'll say a lot about those signs as we go through. Now, I give this as an alternative to Ellis' treatment and to the structure that Will proposed. That's the way the New American Bible is. Yeah. It's pretty well accepted. Dodd accepts it, but he has a different name for this. He calls this the Book of the Passion. Okay? In other words, he sees this as the revelation of Jesus and then the turnabout, and Jesus is moving towards and through his Passion. And from the first moment of the Supper in John 13, it's the immediate prelude to the Passion and everything that follows is the Passion. And then the resurrection hardly affects the structural thing there, perhaps. I think Brown is perhaps on solider ground when he calls it the Book of Glory, because remember that the Cross and the Glory, the Death and the Resurrection are practically one thing for John. And that when Judas goes out at the Supper, Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified.

[19:58]

It's as if his betrayal already, in some way, initiates the glorification. So the Book of the Passion can be called the Book of Glory, and thus it includes also the Resurrection. So that particular title does a little better for it, I think, than God does for the Book of the Passion. Okay, that's just for another version, another very logical structure and well-accepted structure for the Gospel of John for you to keep in mind as we go through our own wild proposals here. But shouldn't it say it's valid from our understanding of it, not from the Middle Eastern understanding of it? Oh yeah, sure. The Middle Easterners wouldn't have quite done it that way. It's a little too rational, a little too neat. So I think in order to understand anything, we have to sort of try to understand where it came out of. We can't, too often in the West, try to get in front of our understanding. Well, we can't help it, it's where we're coming from. But gradually, if we're sensitive enough,

[21:01]

we'll let our own conviction sort of mold themselves around the object and sooner or later something will hit us in the face, like this kiestik. That's all we can do. We have to go with our own methods, our own ideas. Now you have that one page with the whole structure of John as Ellis has proposed it. And it's also in that Xerox copy there of his introduction. He's taking the Gospel as it stands with no displacements or rearrangements. He takes out the passage of the adulterous woman in John 8, which almost all of the scholars admit came from somewhere else and doesn't belong to the original narrative. Otherwise he hardly tampers with it at all. He insists that there are two alternatives. Either you follow the ordinary laws of narrative or you accept the laws of kiestik parallelism.

[22:03]

Maybe somebody can think of a third one of that. But there have been other schemes also. People have made liturgical structures for John's Gospel based on the Feast, Tabernacles, Passover, etc., even Sabbath. They've done various kinds of things. Or structured it upon the seven signs and found an eighth sign in the Resurrection and so on. But we're considering these two. And we'll find that these two actually represent the two great lines. We have to do a double reading of John. I've insisted on that before. A narrative reading, and at each point in the narrative, this kind of centric reading in which the whole thing emerges right from that point. At each point you're on a path and at each point the thing is opening up like a flower from this point into its fullness. It's the two paths that we find in John 21 when Jesus says to Peter, follow me. And when he says about John, what is it if he shall remain here until I come? To remain is to remain in an interior sense with John at the center and therefore in the presence of the fullness at any point along the path.

[23:04]

Which is very much east and west, those two ways. Okay, his summary of this chiastic thing, Gerhard's proposal, I'm just taking a few words of this. The uniqueness of John's structure, according to the Gerhard hypothesis, this is the Jesuit who wrote the thesis and then disappeared. I don't know why he never published that by himself. Maybe he was sent to Bangladesh or somewhere, I don't know. It is not simply that the gospel as a whole is constructed according to the laws of chiastic parallelism, but that each of the five major parts and each of the 21 individual sequences of the gospel is constructed according to the laws of chiastic parallelism. So, it's wheels within wheels within wheels. The material of the parallels. As we shall see, John creates his parallelisms most often by repeating either the same words or the same content, that is, concepts, ideas. Occasionally, he creates parallelisms by means of antithetic parallelism, by contrasting a negative with a positive

[24:08]

or a positive with a negative situation or concept. For instance, if he'd used the water and the wine as a chiastic parallel, that would be a negative one. Or law and grace, or something like that. On rare occasions, he not only parallels words and content, that is, concepts, but even the literary form of a sequence. Now, I don't want to be too critical about this and tear it apart before we've even built it up, but we can ask ourselves questions about this. Are there other and perhaps deeper forms of chiastic parallelism in John than the ones that he points out and the ones that he brings out? Symbols, themes, and relationships which are not simply one-to-one but require bringing out of the implicit. In other words, does the parallelism, is it really intended to force you to a deeper reading so that you find the other half or find the fullness of the other half? You bring it out of the earth to force us to look deeper, rather than stopping us with a final form. See, the trouble with these perfect little forms is

[25:08]

you say, ah, that's it, I've got it, and then you go off with nothing in your hands because it hasn't given you any additional knowledge. It's just a nice little tune, a nice little refrain. Well, that's not enough. The problem with a closure, see, a symmetry, is you say, I've got it. There's the answer. That's what this is about. And then off you go with nothing. So it's got to bring us deeper and deeper towards the center of this Gospel, towards its fullness. And the first question is this obvious one. Is there sometimes a reading of parallels into the Gospel? Don't they sometimes seem forced and marginal, of little significance? That's true for me sometimes. And when you take a great mass of text on one side, on one side you've got about three chapters, and on the other side you've got this little text here, which is about three verses. Now you can pick out your words here, and in that vast meadow of those other three chapters you can find whatever you want. There's an analogy between

[26:08]

this method of theistic parallelism and what we call this doubling method that John uses. John likes to double things up and to bring out one thing by means of another, to show the meaning of two things by contrasting one with the other. So the parallelism thing and the chiasm is similar, analogous, and we'll find the two working together. Those seem like standard literary techniques, parallelism, contrast. Yes, they are. So theistic technique has to stand up, let's say, beyond that. He's only pointing out that the chiastic thing uses these methods. Parallelism, for instance, it's all over in the Psalms and Hebrew poetry. Are you going to go through one and give us an example and show the added dimensions? Yes, we'll get to that. We've got a further step after Ellis' thing. The basis of the new division

[27:11]

that is supplanting the division of the chapters, why he divides it into sequences, the basis is a unity of place or time or theme or situation. Of course, you can make different choices here. Let's look at this diagram of his, which is actually on two pages. I've compressed it onto one page here. Notice the five parts. One paralleling the five, two paralleling four, and three all by itself. And three being very brief. Only those four or five verses in chapter six. Sequence one in chapter one parallels the sequence at the lake. That's fairly convincing. I've had a lot of trouble with that, deciding whether chapter 21 is actually part of the chiasm or not. It's pretty convincing the way he presents it here. Even though those things may not seem to go very deep at first sight. But remember

[28:13]

also that you're at the Jordan, you're at the lake, there's a kind of symmetry there. And at the center of the gospel, you've got this lake crossing. Water at the beginning, you're at the shore of the Jordan. You're at one shore of the Jordan in the beginning with John the Baptist. At the end of the gospel, you're at another shore. The fact that it's a lake is secondary. With Jesus on the shore. From John the Baptist to Jesus. And in the center of the gospel, the way the chiasm presents it, you've got the crossing of a body of water. So that holds up pretty well. Second one and the twentieth sequence. Mary at Cana and Mary at the tomb. Even though John doesn't use the name Mary for the mother of Jesus there. Strangely. Woman, what have you to do with me? Nuptial situation. Water to wine. Woman, why are you weeping? A question of Jesus. Nuptial language from the Song of Songs. And Mary is weeping. Her tears and the water

[29:14]

ring a kind of parallel there. Which we'll get into more later. Now this is a very strong one. It's very significant this year. We'll find that there's more to it than what we brought up. The third one. Destroy this temple. Jesus' body. The cleansing of the temple in chapter three of John. And the whole of chapters 18 and 19 which are the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion and the burial of Jesus. Now that's one of those cases where you've got a vast disproportion between the size of the two texts. But actually that's quite convincing. That holds up I believe. That replacement of the Old Testament temple by the new temple and the destruction of the body of Jesus and then the body of Jesus to be raised up. And that significance of the body of Jesus. Everything somehow converges there. Sequence 4 and sequence 18 may not be quite so convincing to you at first. Especially because he's got how many chapters?

[30:17]

13, 14, 15, 16, 17 on the right side. And he's only got one little episode there of Nicodemus and Jesus on the left side. So that's pretty good hunting in all those chapters. You could find whatever you wanted. But I think there is a true parallel there. And the fact is that you're getting a greater and greater volume of text in those latter parts, matched up with a small volume of text in the early parts. Sequence 5 and sequence 17. That perhaps isn't too convincing at the outset. We'll see later whether it makes much sense to us. Then we move to part 2 and part 4. The Samaritan woman in sequence 6 is John 4 and Jesus is the Messiah. Sequence 16. Bethany women and Jesus is the Messiah. Now, this is curious, isn't it? Here we have another pair featuring Jesus and a woman, or Jesus and women. Now, this suggests that there may be more to this than Ellis has brought out. Here we have

[31:18]

one pair up above sequence 2 and sequence 20. Now we have sequence in part 1 and 2, part 1 and 5 rather. Here we have sequence 6 and sequence 16 in parts 2 and 4. Both basically with the same correspondences. So it's suggesting that there's also a relationship between 6 and 2 and between 20 and 16. And that perhaps instead of just two lines, two axes here, relating those two, that we've got a ring. A kind of feminine ring around the center of the gospel in some way. And this is the key to the other interpretation that we're going to suggest, the mandalic or quaternary or cross-form interpretation. In other words, there's more to it than just these chiastic parallels between 2 and 20 and 6 and 16. Because there's a chiasm between those two chiasms, in some way. Even though they don't match up quite here in their position.

[32:18]

When something is as strong as that, it's worth pushing things around a bit. It's interesting that you say that, because when I was looking at this first page here, between you can see the chiasm between A and A' but you're not mentioning the fact that between A and B, Jesus is mentioned in both places. And Mother is mentioned in both places. So why not draw a parallel there? Maybe you could. You've got to weigh the whole thing very carefully before you decide. Maybe you could. But, actually, what this is saying is that ultimately you've got to get deeper than those kind of superficial parallels. You've got to get deeper than those verbal parallels. The words are not enough. You've got to get to the meaning of the episode. And you've got to say that the meaning of this episode is related to the meaning of the whole of that other episode. That these two things as a whole are parallel. And not just these words. Not just these little superficial things, which may or may not hold water.

[33:20]

What it's really forcing us to do is to get the meaning of both of those episodes and then make them parallel. And then you've got something. Then you've really got something. Because what you're then getting is the fundamental shape of the Gospel in terms of meaning, in terms of deep symbolism, and what it's ultimately trying to say. And the relationship of that, of those parallels, those resonances and resemblances, to the center of the Gospel itself. So that really pulls the whole thing together. Whereas these verbal parallels are always questionable, very often questionable. And simply don't take you far enough. You go off without enough when you finish. They should always focus into depth and ultimately back to the center of the figure. So, okay, we'll come back to this next time. That's going to be our big thing in this next class. Okay, sequence 7 and 15. I mean the four Jesus woman episodes. There's one more episode between Jesus and woman.

[34:22]

Remember where it is? Or women. It's on the cross. On the cross. There's Jesus, there's three women, and there's the beloved disciple, John, we presume. And all the women are named Mary. And all kinds of things happen there, of course, at that moment on the cross. Sequence 7. Samaritan men here believe and profess you are the Savior of the world. Sequence 15. Jesus declares, my sheep, hear my voice, they shall never perish. Well, could be. Sequence 8. A pagan official does not see but believes. Sequence 14. The Pharisees refuse to see and believe. Well, that's too easy to find parallels like that. But it may be. We'll have to go further and deeper to find out. Sequence 9 and 13. At the feast, Jesus cures a paralytic and makes himself equal to the Father. 13. At the feast, what is this feast? This is the feast of tabernacles, remember? When Jesus cries

[35:23]

out, anyone who thirsts come to me. Jesus refers to the cure of the paralytic and makes himself equal to the Father. Well, maybe, but look at the long stretch of text you've got in sequence 13 there. Sequence 10. Multiplication of the loaves near the Passover. And sequence 12. The loaves are explained as the Eucharist near the Passover. Now, here we're almost in the same section. Both of these are in chapter 6 of John. So, here we've got the two portions, the two episodes, which are immediately adjoining or enclosing the center of the Gospel, and they're both about bread. So, there is a real parallel here. And it's an asymmetrical parallel, because in the first one, Jesus doesn't say much. He just does. He multiplies the bread. And the second part is nothing but words. It's discourse. It's not action. And there's a transition between the first and the second, which moves around this central passage of episode of sequence 11, which is part 3.

[36:23]

Jesus walks on the sea, declares, I am he, or really, I am, remember? Which makes just a splendid center for the Gospel. Just marvelous. Couldn't do better than that. Or a center for the whole Gospel, those words. He declares, I am, and brings the new Israel to the other shore of the sea. And next time we'll see our other meaning, our creation meaning, in addition to the exodus meaning here for that passage. Note the titles that he puts on these various sections. Part 1, Witness and Discipleship. And you move into part 2, and that's the response. In other words, Jesus is getting rejected, and then some people are believing. Part 3, the new exodus. And then part 4 and part 5 match up with the first part. But the trouble with that is, it doesn't give you much development, does it? I mean, obviously something is moving forward in the Gospel. Something is deepening in the Gospel, okay? There's a crescendo. So you're not going back to the beginning instead of ending up where you started with Witness and Discipleship, something like that.

[37:25]

Something is being concluded in this Gospel. It rolls forward, and you sense a tremendous crescendo as John's Gospel moves forward. It's moving towards a conclusion. It's not simply going back and closing a ring, which these titles would suggest. So it's not quite as neat, not quite as tidy, and as calm as that. It's much more powerful. Okay, the finer structure. The chiasm within the five great parts. Now, he's already pointed that out. Notice how you can't kind of impose a rigid straightjacket on the narrative with this chiastic method if you push it too far, because if you make the grid too tight, then nothing can move. And no other principle interpretation can take you deeper than the chiasm does. And you really need a deeper significance than the chiasm itself gives you. What principle? Symbolic. Largely symbolic principles. And therefore we look for a symbolic parallel rather than a verbal parallel or a conceptual parallel. I'll just read you what I wrote

[38:35]

about this business of the titles, the themes that he's got there about the Witness and Disciples in Response. This expresses the limitation of his viewpoint. It sounds like a rather Protestant view of John, which does not give the thematic core of John credit for being any deeper than that of the other evangelists. There's nothing there you wouldn't find in Matthew, Mark and Luke. That is, the theological axis in the light of which they have consciously composed their narratives. Kermadee is much more insightful and his notion of literary method is consistently more deep and subtle than that of Ellis, but seems to see the literary methods of John in a rather off-the-shelf and mechanical way. Okay, here's this tool of this device of chiasm which he takes off the shelf and uses in his gospel, but somehow which means that Ellis has too little sense of the unitive vision of John on two levels. It's a question of this unitive vision of John. How are you going to read John? First, theologically. If you read Kermadee on being and becoming in the prologue and in the gospel and the Mystery of the Logos,

[39:36]

Ellis does not see John's theology in a unitive or metaphysical or mystical perspective, and hence does not see it as it is, uniquely, a unitive sapiential theology. Secondly, in his literary composition, Ellis is content with too superficial a unity. The chiastic grid does not sufficiently pull the gospel together around the theological center and transform each episode in the light of that center. And yet the chiastic thing is really there, I believe. It may not be there in the thorough, absolute way that Ellis has it there, quite, you know, matching every point of this grid, but I believe it is there. He gives you a section on what he calls the rewards of parallelism, the things that it accomplishes, and it's quite convincing. However, it clears up a lot of puzzles about John's gospel, a lot of problems about John's gospel, things that seem to be out of place, things that seem to be missing, connections that seem to be off, and so on. It explains why things aren't where they are. They are where they are because of parallelism,

[40:38]

because John wanted to parallel them. Examples would be the cleansing of the temple, which is at the end of the gospel in the other gospels, right? Not right at the end, but before the passion of Jesus. In John it's at the beginning. Now why is that? It's because John wanted to parallel it with the passion of Jesus. Well, that's a pretty good answer. But then that sends you further into asking, well, what is this parallel? What is the symbolic significance of the temple and of the body of Jesus? Where is this taking us? And what are all the ramifications of that? What does that mean about Jewish religion? And Christian religion? And worship? All those things. And maybe even social structures. Okay, I'm not going to summarize those rewards, but then he tells you how to catch a chiasm on page 17. These three steps. Make a preview of what

[41:41]

appears to be a unit. Make a study of its components or what look to be its components. Review the unit with all parallels in mind and then apply the following criteria. Is there a change of time, place, subject matter, speakers that sets this piece off from its context? Is there a balance of parts? Part one with part five, two with part four, etc. There better be, otherwise. Is there any inclusion or conclusion by way of names, places, ideas, keywords? At least that more superficial criteria he puts last about those inclusions with words and names and things. And then the reasons why John arranged his gospel in a chiastic way. Now, when you say, well, what about the rewards of parallelism? What's the difference between the purpose of John and the rewards of parallelism? A lot of those rewards are dealing with our problems. What he calls the rewards of parallelism are clearing up our messes. The fact that we think that the gospel was distorted or displaced or poorly communicated or disarranged or whatever. But this is talking about John's purposes. First of all, from memorizing. If you've got a symmetrical form, it's easy to memorize things.

[42:42]

We'll find, when we get finished proposing this other thing, that you can fairly quickly memorize where the structure of John's gospel and where each episode is. You may forget where the words go and so on, where a particular quotation comes from. But you can memorize the order of the particular episodes. But just try to do that without a symmetrical form. Just try to do it without some kind of mental structure. Which I find is very difficult. For most people. Secondly, in order that the corresponding parts might help to intemperate one another. That's extremely important. That's a movement into depth. Thirdly, in order to give to his grand theme a suitable artistic form in the same way that Virgil calls it I think it's true, but you don't want to press it too far on that level. Because unless a suitable artistic form for this grand opus also leads to meaning, to understanding, it's not going far. The symmetry and the unity of the grand artistic form should point to a symmetry and a unity of, what meaning? A theological symmetry and unity. Anything that remains purely on the artistic level here is going to leave us unsatisfied. Because we have this conviction as we go through John

[43:45]

of the enormous depth of John. That he's really talking from the center. So anything purely literary will strike us as superficial in the end. Fourth, in order to present his work to the world in the same parallel literary pattern I wouldn't press that one too far either. Because John has got a very strong purpose. He knows what he wants to do. And he's not just wanting to clothe himself in some traditional garb. He's got a very strong idea of what he's out to do here. Okay. Any questions about... Remember, it's always a five-part chiasm in John according to Ellis. Any questions or remarks about that? Yeah. I've been kind of humming away at that.

[44:45]

It is possible to create a symmetrical structure, a chiastic structure in a work just by pushing words around and making them match up which doesn't contribute to the understanding of it. And sometimes Ellis' chiastic analysis leaves you with a feeling that the chiasm, the structure, is not giving enough meaning. It's arbitrary. Here are these words which parallel one another create a nice shape, but it's just a decoration in the end. It's only ornamental. Unless the parallels themselves, the chiasm itself, somehow draws you to greater meaning, to deeper meaning, to greater unity for the gospel. A unity which is not only on the basis of form, but on the basis of meaning. One thing is a formal unity. The word disciple here matches the word disciple here. That in chapter one you have these disciples named Peter, the rock, and so on. And in chapter 21 you have this commission given to Peter and you have the same disciples. That's a formal unity, which is pretty. But what we want is a theological unity. That each of those things somehow, and their symmetry, their relationship to one another, somehow point to something deeper, to a deeper unity in reality,

[45:47]

and not only in the literature. It's from words to things, from words to reality. Does the symmetry of the words, does the symmetry of the work of the letter point to an actual symmetry in the reality, or is it only ornamental? Right. So what you're saying is that on the superficial level of the doing, it's only if you've got that that you can either point it to an underneath of there. That's right. Examples would be those word parallels that he's got there. When he says that Jesus healed the paralytic and says that he's taught the Messiah or something like that. And he finds the same thing in the later chapters. But he can say so much. But when he parallels Cana with Mary and Jesus at the wedding of Cana, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the garden, there is a parallel which leads to a tremendous theological depth that points to the heart of John's gospel. As we'll find out, we've got to kind of enter into it in order to find that out. Yeah, like with the paralytic, how he said this

[46:47]

miracle miracle, and then you've got the paralytic, the blind man that cures his leprosy. All of his leprosy can't be dealt with. It's a witness of the whole gospel. And yet, it's a little thing that points you to the parallels to go deeper. That's what it should do. Then it's working when it does that. And often it does when it does that, but not all the time. Perhaps you can say where else there is a sort of parallel where he seems to be playing a little bit or choosing him a little bit too much to fit his own particular theories or influences. We're talking about Jesus and his body destroyed in the past, but he's not talking about the women who are there. And as you mentioned, the women, that plays a very important role in a different way than it seems to overlook it. Well, I think he's okay there because the basic parallel that determines the chiastic structure there, I think, is between the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jesus' body. So, insofar as the chiasm is there, he's right. And at another point, he may bring out the significance

[47:48]

of the women there. But the significance of the women is not directly connected to the chiasm at that point. To this chiastic parallel anyway, between sequence 3 and sequence 19. Because you can't... in other words, the chiasm doesn't carry all the meaning. I'd say that there are two main elements here besides just obvious words. One is the obvious verbal exposition. When Jesus says, I am the light of the world, well, there you are. But that's also symbolic. And the second great communicator of meaning is the symbolic system of John. Light, water, woman, man, bread, and all the other symbols that John uses. That's a unified organism. It's like a body, which all works together in order to communicate meaning. And to diffuse the meaning of the core of the gospel, which is the incarnate word, into every part of the narrative. It humanizes. It brings it into human life. And then the structure. So, word, symbol, and structure. Those three ways of communicating meaning. And we're going to put our emphasis on the symbol

[48:50]

and the structure, and how the two complement one another. In that light, there's a lot of other stuff I wanted to do today, but obviously it's foolish to do what we don't have time. I want to say something about Canaan and the Prologue. It will fit a little bit into what we've just been talking about. These means of communicating meaning. Because in Prologue, you've got the verbal exposition, you've got concepts, you've got just words which seem like abstractions. But instead of being just verbal abstractions, they're like cakes, which are concave, which are bulging with the fullness of meaning. These words in the Prologue. Canaan and the Prologue. Between these two points is described what I call the Johannine axis, and the fullness of meaning of the word became flourish. What happens at Canaan is this wedding concludes this first cycle of narrative, this first week, and the movement from John the Baptist to the manifestation of the fullness, the glory that is in Jesus. Remember at Canaan, John says, and he manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him for the first time.

[49:50]

What happens at Canaan is the unitive revelation and self-communication of the Prologue is incarnated in a symbolic narrative, which plunges into the center of human life. So in the Prologue, you've got words, and here you've got people, you've got human reality, you've got a wedding, you've got man and woman, you've got wine, you've got celebration, you've got eating and drinking, you've got the whole human thing right there at Canaan. A kind of fullness, which matches the fullness of the Prologue. But the fullness of the Prologue is like the fullness of the Logos, the fullness of the Word, which is with the Father. And still, in a sense, inhuman. Still, in a sense, not yet incarnate. So what Canaan represents is like the incarnation of the Prologue, or the expression of the same truth, the same fullness, the same process, the same happening, event, whatever you want to call it, that's in the Prologue, same drama, if you like, but not in words of the Word, but in things of the Word, and these things of the Word are human life, are concrete human flesh and

[50:52]

blood existence, and particularly man, woman, sexuality, feast, celebration, wine. So, it's a complete dramatic incarnation of the reality of the Prologue, from fullness to fullness, but in two different terms, from word to symbolic system. Now, it's done with a certain perfection in Canaan. Canaan expresses the fullness of the Gospel in some way. The presence of the Mother of Jesus there, and the symbol of the wedding, and of the wedding banquet, that's a eschatological symbol, that's a symbol for the Kingdom, that somehow expresses fullness. So, from Prologue to Canaan, that's what you're doing, and in the middle you've got John the Baptist, this kind of intermediate figure who represents Moses, represents law, represents human religion, represents everything short of a new creation, a new creation which the Prologue talks about in the abstract, as it were, in which Canaan represents in its fullness, as marriage and as wine. By the center of human life, I mean sexuality,

[51:54]

eating and drinking and celebration, and particularly woman, the feminine. This is John's deep, deep revelation. Can it be said that Canaan is the Prologue of John in feminine language? That is, first of all, in a language of human life, human history. Secondly, in a concrete and symbolic, rather than an abstract and conceptually metaphysical language. Thirdly, in the world of family, hospitality, sexuality and marriage. This world I would describe as feminine in comparison to the public world, which we'll find Jesus entering into in the temple, right? When he goes into Jerusalem, goes into the temple and starts raising heck and throwing out these money changes and so on. And immediately starts this battle, this sort of masculine structure, continues the prophetic struggle of John, the prophetic confrontation and drama of John the Baptist, continues it. Now those are two different worlds. Canaan, that feminine world, as it were, and the inner world of human life, which is the world of family, of love, of relationship, of generation,

[52:55]

of celebration, and that external dramatic public world of confrontation, the political religious world, the world of public worship of the Jews, and of blood sacrifice, the temple, everything that means. This world I would describe as feminine in comparison to the public world, which we shall encounter directly in the temple and in most of Jesus' work of ministry. Fourthly, the feminine language in the symbolic terms of woman and of wine, which are correlative terms in John, I believe, just as woman and the nard, the ointment, which Mary pours out on Jesus' feet, just as woman and the living water, which Jesus promises when he talks to the Samaritan woman, both signifying fullness, beatitude, imminent realization, and union, both woman and wine in John. The progression from Moses' Exodus law to Jesus' incarnation, imminence, union, grace, and truth in the prologue then is presented once again in this narrative sequence, starting with John the Baptist at the Jordan and concluding

[53:57]

with a sign of making the wine at the Cana wedding. Grace and truth. The woman, that is Mary, who wants to anticipate the hour of union out of compassion, perhaps woman, this woman, this feminine, let me be already. These people need me to bless their poor lives with glory. Grace anticipates truth, persuades truth, brings truth into its own gracious truth beyond the mind of man. So that's what Cana is symbolizing. When John, in the prologue, talks about grace and truth becoming through Jesus, and grace somehow preceding truth, it's like Mary anticipating Jesus' coming, and Jesus at the wedding. Grace, the wine which springs up here, pours out, renews the joy of humankind here, creates an innocence, absolves, and from the beginning the source purifies the springs and streams of human joy. Speaks the unspeakable word which

[54:59]

spreads and smiles within. The feast subtly communicates the wedding at Cana. In other words, the wedding is between two, but the feast and the wine mean this union of the wedding communicated to all. It's an open wedding. It's a wedding itself to which people are invited. The wine which Jesus makes at the feast symbolically brings this open wedding to its fulfillment. The divine wedding is something that is poured out, available to all. The sacraments will be the conveyors of this grace. The symbol of water in John's gospel will carry this meaning everywhere. The unitive beginning accessible at each point in the narrative. Okay, that's enough about that. I don't want to overburden you. We'll talk more about these episodes when we come back and treat them according to the seven days of creation a little later. I'd like to point out to you, though,

[56:01]

for reflection, that contrast between Cana and the cleansing of the temple. Because I think there you have the two great lines of John's gospel laid out. You can call it the feminine line of union, the unitive revelation of Jesus, in which the divine is poured into the human, becomes incarnate in the human, and gathers the whole cosmos, the whole universe around itself into unity once again. That's what the new creation is. That's one side, which is symbolized in its fullness at Cana already. The other side is the confrontation and the resistance, the whole dualistic drama of John's gospel, in which the very revelation of who and what Jesus is arouses opposition, hardens hearts, causes the darkness to lay plots against the light, and finally to quench the light, to kill Jesus. And those two converge at the cross in some way. In other words, the second one is necessary to the fullness of the first one. In order that the wine really be poured out, in order that this divine imminence be able

[57:04]

to pour into humanity and create the world anew, Jesus has to go to the cross. In other words, this other drama, this masculine drama as we've called it, has to run its course and bring him to his hour, which is the hour of confrontation, the hour of crisis and of death on the cross, but also the hour of glorification, the hour of the pouring out. Because glory here means the pouring out of this divinity into humanity, means the new creation. So those two lines are already set out in the first two chapters of John's Gospel. This drama of light and darkness is what's opening up when Jesus cleanses the temple. And when they come together again, they come together in the body of Jesus, in the body of Jesus, the pierced body of Jesus, the Lamb upon the cross, which is a body which is giving birth, so it's in, as it were, a feminine position, and out of it

[58:04]

pour the blood and the water, which have always been seen by the fathers as the symbols of the Church, just as Eve came from the side of Adam. So it's a moment of, somehow, of the meeting of masculine and feminine in the harshness of this killing and of the piercing of the body of Jesus, in which somehow this feminine imminence pours out symbolically, which is what John's Gospel is about, to tell you what's inside of you, to tell you what's inside of you, recreating the world from inside of you, which is the creative word, which has somehow, however, been turned into liquid, been turned into wine, been turned into something which can dwell in you as in a vessel. Okay, that's enough. On the symbolism of the masculine and feminine, I guess we're seeing that John wants to have a real intention of having this symbolism. Absolutely. Was there a philosopher at that time that went that far to see

[59:06]

the masculine and feminine? The Gnostics tend to get into that. And so it's not really I mean, you can consider that he might have had this type of information No, I think it's his penetration of the Biblical reality and his own experience. Two things. His experience of Jesus and of what is poured out from Jesus. His experience of the Holy Spirit. His experience of the new creation. And the Biblical background, the Old Testament background. Could allow him, without the influence of a spy? That's right. I think so. And this is John's genius. I mean, just like Dante. Dante has got a genius to something like this, but this is John's surpassing genius to have gone through this. Because ultimately, I think, the language of Scripture is masculine and feminine. Those are the ultimate words, as it were, which spring from the Word. The way that God made the creation. And that's therefore the deepest language of Scripture. And John's got it.

[60:08]

Like nobody else. The Song of Songs in the Old Testament has it. But John with the Incarnation, John brings it to a much greater depth. A kind of ultimate depth. It always seems to me, it's like when Brother John Martin really thinks like he could. Yes. He certainly thinks in the Biblical sense. I think the attempt to shed the skin of this girl, he does it not at all. No, because the Greeks could never see that this Incarnation, which is carried right into the sexual world, which is carried right to the depth of this wedding feast of Cana and the human reality at its roots. The Greeks couldn't accept that. Because they had split the mind, split this marvelous spiritual intellect from the body. The body could never come to the wedding. The body could never come to the feast for them. Nor could woman. Look at Plato. The marvelous unitive philosophy which Plato has, but woman is just about outside of it. With one little exception, I think, is diatom in the Symposium.

[61:09]

Rick is... What Hebrew words now don't mean sexual knowledge. Yes, that's right. It's very different from the Greek, which is a more masculine thing. The Hebrew, with all of the patriarchal quality of the Biblical literature, the Hebrew carries this deep vein of femininity within it, which comes out in its concreteness. And in its holding on to the incarnate reality, the physical reality, the bodily reality, the earthly reality. It never lets that go. It's interesting how much Christianity, though, ended up being influenced by Neoplaton and Mithraic and Manichean attitudes for the gods. That's right. This isn't really in Christian tradition, active Christian tradition, much at all. And that's where we lose the power of Christianity. That's when Christianity withers and shrivels, when it gets away from that. The fact that absolutely everything is called to the wedding. Everything is brought into this. That's the joy of the gospel. The freedom and the swing of the gospel is there. And we lose it whenever we start splitting things

[62:13]

and getting things into tidy order. And to do that, we necessarily have both to break the unity and to exclude something. John goes back to, in Biblical sense, to the first man and what would come afterwards, God's creation. Definitely. That's what he's about. The unitive, I mean, that whole unitive from Adam and Eve. Definitely. That's exactly where he goes back and that's where you find yourself in John 20. As a matter of fact, the wedding feast of Cana is already Adam and Eve in the garden. In other words, it's going back, as it were, to those first two who sprang from the original unity and who carried the original unity with them as long as they were in the garden. The garden was still the place of the unitive. Remember? They didn't know the shadow of shame and fear and separation yet. They were still somehow one in that unitive until the first century when the whole thing exploded and they were outside the garden. So what John is doing is bringing you back to the garden in which male

[63:14]

and female are once again together in the unitive. And so he's able to cut through all of the shame and all of the fear and everything of our subsequent creation. Mankind and creator. Definitely. But it doesn't that's true, but it doesn't go beyond it. It doesn't go beyond it. In other words, the union of let's say the masculine and the feminine is not simply a symbol and merely a symbol for the union of God and creation. It's not just that. It's there in its own right. In other words, you don't have a level of ultimate meaning in which God as bridegroom or Christ as bridegroom is joining the creation to himself and therefore sort of taking you beyond all the symbols. The symbols remain in that sense just as our own bodies remain, just as our own human reality remains. They're not abolished by that other level of meaning. No, but which is higher. Which goes, you know,

[64:14]

which is above. There's no doubt about that, but the fact is that God is not that interested in being above in that sense. And that's precisely what it's about. Grace is about union. It's about equality. And that's what John is teaching. He's not interested in hierarchy. I'm not talking about in a, let's say, egocentric manner. I'm talking about I think, in an ultimate manner. In other words, the whole salvation is a human reuniting of mankind again in that same unity that was there in the garden. That's true. That's right. And with one another. Okay, so I don't have any problem with that. Yeah, but I think the fact of being above and beyond and, as

[65:15]

it were, superior and even primal, in a sense, of God is the masculine principle which then, the feminine principle comes to fulfill by I should just say, not violating it. By, as it were, glorifying the very transcendence of God through eminence. By glorifying the, as it were, sovereignty of God through liberality, through the liberality of union. Okay? And it completes the two complete one another. The fact that God is God and nobody approaches God. The other fact is, the feminine fact is that God draws us into himself in a unitive way so that at one point there's no distinction, as the mystics say. Okay. We have to be very careful with that. Such is the glory of God that he can do that. Such is his transcendence that he can unite us perfectly with himself. I call you no longer servants but friends. So what Jesus is revealing at the Last Supper is that. That's what John

[66:16]

is interested in. Plenty of people have talked about the first principle, but John is the only one that's carried that second principle to its fullness. It's in the other Gospels, but John understands it more deeply. Okay, that's enough for today. Okay, that's enough for today.

[66:31]

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