The Johannine Structures and Styles in John 13-17

Although John is allegedly written with simpler expressions and easiervocabulary than other books in the New Testament, it is John that is characterized as one of the most complex books in the Bible regarding its structuresor riddles of the text, causing the readers to struggle in grasping itsways of writing and confusing many scholars with its complexity ofduplications, repetitions, stylistic variations, and seemingly illogical sequencesand complicated structures. Thus, John has long been treated as a primary materialused for historical criticism, which presupposes that John was written andredacted by multiple authors or redactors through a period of times. But, is it right that we see in our ways of reading John? Can the way of seeing that modern scholars who have been trained in the modern andwestern way of education be applied to the ancient writing in ancient ways? How much, and to what degree? This article suggests that we have tounderstand John's way of writing as we read it. Styles are made with phrasalrelations of interaction and structures are created with combination of bigger,larger units in consecutiveness. Most of the scholars who do not pay proper attention to the literaryconstruction of John 13-17 and do not recognize its value present the lineroutline as Beasley-Murray does. But most of the scholars considering theliterary structure in unity consider a chiastic structure due to its repetitions between John 14 and 16. Among them, there are C. Keener, Peter Ellis, and W. Brouwer. The structures and styles presented here are different from the ones which have been suggested earlier. The related data have shown certain coherences of units in groups designed with parallel or chiastic ways of composition, eventually creating the chiastic structures of chs. 13-17 according to a unique, Johannine way of structuring-text. This is the chiastic structure: A (13:-35), B (13:36-38), C (14:1-31), X (15:1-17), C' (15:18-16:31), B'(16:32-33), A' (17:1-26).