In his masterful work, De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine of Hippo writes:

I would have learned men to know that the authors of our Scriptures use all those forms of expression which grammarians call by the Greek name tropes, and use them more freely and in greater variety than people who are unacquainted with the Scriptures, and have learned these figures of speech from other writings, can imagine or believe. Nevertheless those who know these tropes recognize them in Scripture, and are very much assisted by their knowledge of them in understanding Scripture.¹

Though he does not provide an exhaustive list of these tropes,² one that Augustine surely has in mind is chiasmus (or chiasm).³ Named for the in-and-out pattern of the Greek letter from which its name derives, this rhetorical device is quintessentially marked by balance and inversion, which guide the reader to a central point of emphasis before leading him out by a parallel path. As Mary Douglas explains, “[Chiasmus] is a construction of parallelism that must open a theme, develop it, and round it off by bringing the conclusion back to the beginning.”⁴ In this way, the mode of presentation itself—and not just the central point—is instructive.

We know that chiasmus was “pervasive in antiquity,”⁵ and biblical scholarship has shown that chiasmus is remarkably common in Scripture as well.⁶ Nevertheless, chiasmus is not without its critics, some of whom suggest that finding a chiasm says more about an interpreter’s ingenuity than a biblical author’s intentionality. While I am sympathetic with such critiques in instances where linguistic correspondence and thematic resonance is sparse, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that biblical authors frequently employed this trope in their works.⁷

John the apostle is one such author.⁸ The prologue (1:1–18) is all but universally recognized as chiastic in structure. Whole chapters of John’s works are also arranged chiastically (e.g., 1 John 4). Even larger sections, like the Upper Room Discourse, appear to be chiastic.

Given John’s penchant for this trope, we have good grounds to read his Gospel expectantly, looking for cross-shaped patterns under stones that yet lay unturned. Perhaps I should not have been surprised, therefore, when a friend recently asked me whether John’s use of the phrase “eternal life” (zōē aiōnion) might be a chiasm.⁹ On closer inspection, I found the following parallels:

A. “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  (3:13–16)

B. “He whom God has sent utters the words of God… The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand… Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life…” (3:34–36)

C. “If you knew the gift of God, and who is it that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” … “Everyone who drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty… The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (4:10–14)

D. “Lift up your eyes and see the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life.” (4:35–36)

E. “The Son gives life to whom he will… Whoever hears (akouōn) my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life… the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” (5:22–24)

F. “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me. Yet you refuse to come (erchomai) to me” (5:39–40)

G. “Work for the food that endures to eternal life.” (6:27)

H. So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? … Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness…” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (6:30–33). “Everyone who looks on the Son should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (6:38–41). “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (6:47–50)

G’. “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” (6:54)

F’. Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go (aperchomai)? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (6:67–69)

E’. “My sheep hear (akousin) my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life…” (10:27–28)

D’. “Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (12:24-25)

C’. “I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father told me” (12:49–50).

B’. “Father… glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given… And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent (17:1–3)

A’. John 18–21.

At the center of this chiasmus we see the central features of eternal life: it is accomplished by the Son who came down from heaven, it is offered to those who dwell in the wilderness east of Eden, and it is received by all who look on the Son who was lifted up in death, so that we too might be raised after death (cf. 3:13–16, 6:33–49).¹⁰

Yet part of the way that a chiasm communicates meaning is the mutual interpretation we are enabled to see when we read the parallel statements (or pericopes) in light of each other.¹¹ Working out from the center, for example, we see that the “work” we must do to receive the Son that God gives is a kind of faith that is equated with eating (cf. 6:27–29, 6:54). One could hardly be blamed for hearing echoes of Eden here, except that this time we must eat in faith to receive the life God gives (cf. Gen. 2:15–17).

Indeed, to receive this spiritual food entails going to the one who is the source of eternal life (6:68), such that the refusal go to Him is to refuse life itself (5:39–40; cf. John 1:5, 9–13). All those who come to him hearken to his voice, becoming his sheep in this lifetime (10:28) and his resurrected brothers in the next (5:22–24; cf. Rom. 8:29, 36–39).

And these words are meant for all who will believe in the Son through our words (cf. 17:20). This is why our Lord teaches us not only to see the world as a field ripe for the harvest of eternal life (4:35–36) but to see every life as a mini-field, a person-sized plot of earth containing a grain of wheat that must die in order to bear the fruit of life (12:24–25; cf. 1 Cor. 15:36–37).

Even the most exegetically difficult point of the chiasm would seem to offer some interesting insights. For example, Jesus’s conversation with the woman at the well concerning the living water necessary for life (4:10–14) emphasizes Jesus’s speaking and giving. So also does Jesus’s summary of his own ministry (12:44–50), which is immediately followed by the washing of the disciples’ feet (13:5) in the context of being washed (13:8; cf. Titus 3:6)—the last mention of water in John’s Gospel until the cross (19:34).

Penultimately, we see a connection between knowing and believing. Specifically, the kind of belief that saves (3:34–36) entails true knowledge of the Son sent by the Father with the authority to give life (17:1–3). Conversely, the kind of knowledge that saves (cf. Hos. 4:6; Rom. 10:3) is the kind that believes (trusts) the Son who has been sent from God.

All this brings us to the beginning (and ending) of the chiasm. The journey to the center begins with the descent of the Son, who would be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, so that all who believe/look on (cf. 6:40) him might have eternal life (3:13–16). Yet where we might expect a verse or two at the end of John’s Gospel to complete the chiasmus, we find nothing of the sort. Indeed, “eternal life” as such is not mentioned again after John 17:3.

But we do see Jesus acting to effect the reality of the promises he has spoken throughout. Note, for example, that every stage of the chiasm involves direct speech from Christ or a conversation with Christ. Yet here, at the end of the Gospel, Christ’s speaking gives way to Christ’s dying, and to rising, so that our believing is not in vain and our being sent is not without fruit.

Hence we should not at all be surprised to find all of the key terms of the chiasmus—giving, sending, authority/reigning, listening, believing—appear at the end of the Gospel, which culminates in the death of the Bread of Life, who came down from heaven to be laid in a tomb (19:38–42)—that is, “the lower regions of the earth, for he who descended is the one who also he who ascended” (Eph. 4:9–10). But he rises from the dead (20:9) and gives the Spirit to his disciples (20:22). Then he sends them as he was sent (20:21), calling all to believe in the Son of God, for “by believing you may have (eternal!) life in his name” (20:31).

I grant that this is an atypical chiasmus. Yet so much lexical and thematic correspondence at key points makes it abundantly likely that the eternal life theme in John’s Gospel is chiastic, and I suspect that my observations here would not surprise John in the least. Then again, even if he would be surprised, Augustine is ready with counsel: “The author perhaps saw that this very meaning lay in the words which we are trying to interpret; and assuredly the Holy Spirit, who through him spoke these words, foresaw that this interpretation would occur to the reader, nay, made provision that it should occur to him, seeing that it too is founded on truth.”¹²

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Doug Ponder is professor of biblical studies at Grimké Seminary. He also serves as a teaching pastor at Remnant Church in Richmond, VA, where he lives with his wife and their four sons.

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1. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine III.29.40 (NPNF 1/1:567). ↩︎
2. He straightforwardly says, “This is not the place to [tropes] to the illiterate, lest it might seem that I was teaching grammar.” ↩︎
3. William A. Stephany has argued that the thematic structure of Augustine’s Confessions is chiastic. See William A. Stephany “Thematic Structure in Augustine’s Confessions,” Augustinian Studies 20 (1989):129 – 142. See also Augustinian Chiasm, where Peter Leithart highlights Edmund Hill’s observation that de Trinitate also has a chiastic structure. ↩︎
4. Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010), x. She prefers the term “ring structure” to chiasmus, but the referent is the same. ↩︎
5. See John W. Welch, Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute Publications, 1998). ↩︎
6. See also Wayne Brouwer, “Understanding Chiasm and Assessing Macro-Chiasm as a Tool of Biblical Interpretation,” Calvin Theological Journal 53 (2018): 99–127, and Victor M. Wilson, Divine Symmetries: The Art of Biblical Rhetoric (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997). ↩︎
7. See Chiasm of Five Words, Chiasm in Isaiah 10, Chiasm in Isaiah 22, Chiasms of Prayer (2 Chronicles 6:14–21), Chiasm of Joy (1 Chronicles 29:1–9), Chiasm in Matthew 26, Chiasm in Luke 3:1–7:35, Chiasm of Luke’s Crucifixion Account, Chiasm in Romans 3:19–31, Chiasm in Romans 10, Chiasm of James. ↩︎
8. Indeed, when I first pitched the idea for this article to a colleague, he half-jokingly remarked, “If you told me that you found a chiasm in John, I would believe you without even seeing the evidence.” ↩︎
9. Without Foster Toft’s suggestion, I would not have investigated the matter further. ↩︎
10. Note too the wilderness/garden contrast, which is alluded to in John 18:1–2, where our Lord crosses over a river to (re)enter the garden, where he will face off with a Satanically-possessed Judas (13:2). ↩︎
11. Similarly, James Hamilton writes, “The synergy created between corresponding units in a chiastic structure is one of the most important exegetical payoffs of a chiasm.” See Hamilton, Typology: Understanding the Bible’s Promise-Shaped Patterns (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2022). ↩︎
12. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine III.27.38 (NPNF 1/1:567). (It was only fitting to conclude with Augustine. Let the reader understand.) ↩︎