c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Were you fascinated by the poetic riddles, arithmetic puzzles and other enigmas in “The Da Vinci Code,” the mystery novel by Dan Brown that has spent more than a year atop the best-seller lists?

Many Bible-literate readers, despite enjoying the word puzzles, were disappointed by the speculative lore about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being married. Little do they know that the Bible itself has countless examples of coded writing waiting to be discovered.

Biblical scholars have for years cited these literary patterns seen in sentences, long sections and whole texts that were composed in ancient times for a reading elite and attentive audiences. Virtually unrecognized today because it is a neglected art, the technique deserves greater exposure because of the insights it gives into Scripture _ at the very least to reveal why some sections seem so wordy and repetitious.

The writing technique is called chiasmus, or chiasm, and is most visible in sentences like Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human that person’s blood shall be shed.” An aphorism in the Gospels has the same catchy phrasing: “So the last shall be first, and the first last.” In fact, that cryptic saying credited to Jesus reflects the principle of chiasms _ key words and themes employed in the first half of a piece of writing then appear in the reverse order in the second half.

Virtually no one writes that way today. The closest analogy is to word puzzle fans playing with palindromes. RADAR and DEIFIED are one-word palindromes. It’s hard to speak palindromese, but the first man may have greeted Eve thus: “Madam, I’m Adam.” Published collections of sentence palindromes include a book by Michael Donner, “I Love Me, Vol. I.”

Chiastic word patterns in biblical literature could be called “palindromes in prose.” The device certainly showed one’s cleverness, but its practical side was helping readers to detect literary structure. Hebrew and Greek texts had no spaces between words, no punctuation, no paragraphs or subtitles. But when matching catchwords and themes appeared on either side of a midpoint, readers were handed memory aids for later recitation.

“If you were illiterate and listened for chiasms, you knew when something began and ended,” said Bruce Malina of Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. Malina is noted for his sociological analysis of the New Testament, but in two social science commentaries that he co-authored on John and Revelation, Malina also offered his solutions to chiastic arrangements in those texts.

Malina’s interest in chiasms began in Catholic graduate studies in which students were taught to look first for a biblical book’s literary forms. In the Hebrew Bible that can include poetry, puns and acrostics, among other devices. Chiastic designs are evident from the garden of Eden and tower of Babel stories in Genesis to examples in psalms, prophetic writings and in whole books like Job. Chiasms are written “very much like the simple structure of Middle Eastern music, which builds up to a middle point and then reverses itself,” Malina said.

The midpoints are often high points in accounts written chiastically such as the erotic Song of Solomon and the introductory 12 chapters of Isaiah, wrote David A. Dorsey of Evangelical School of Theology in Myerstown, Pa., in “The Literary Structure of the Old Testament.” The Song’s wedding of the lovers is “the majestic centerpiece,” he said. In Isaiah, the prophet’s call by God comes not at the start but in chapter 6, the chiastic midpoint of the opening chapters, Dorsey said.

New Testament chiasms have centers that may be narrative turning points. In the prologue of the Gospel of Mark (1:1-14), commonly seen as a chiasm, Jesus is baptized at the midpoint. Catchwords at the start and end of that introduction include gospel/good news, Jesus, God, John, wilderness, and messenger/angels (the same word in Greek).

Letters by the apostle Paul contain large and small chiasms, judging by many examples given in academic studies. Chiasms are displayed today by assigning letters alphabetically forward and backward as in this ABCBA outline for two verses in the Letter to the Romans (10:9-10):

A If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord

B and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,

C you will be saved.

B’ For a person believes with the heart and is justified,

A’ and confesses with the mouth and is saved.

Parts of Paul’s letters and most of the Gospel of John are noticeably repetitious.

Frequently recurring words and phrases are a tipoff that the author is writing chiastically, says Orthodox priest-professor John Breck, author of “The Shape of Biblical Language.” John “did not write narrative per se,” Breck wrote. “He composed his work chiastically, using repetition to reinforce key elements of his message.”

Chiastic detection is not a precise art. Even scholars with an eye for chiastic structures disagree on details. Some proposed chiasms offer steps linked by “themes” that are criticized as too subjective, leading University of Toronto scholar John Kloppenborg once to comment mockingly that chiasm pursuits are “fun for the whole family.”

One critic, David E. Aune, professor of New Testament at Notre Dame, wrote favorably of short chiasms but raised questions about long ones in his newly published Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and Rhetoric.

“I’m skeptical about macro-chiastic patterns which I think are largely imaginary,” Aune said in an interview. “Chiasmus is not part of ancient rhetorical theory, which is somewhat problematic for aficionados of chiasmus.”

Chiasm enthusiast John W. Welch of Brigham Young University has suggested that chiasms went under different names in antiquity. But Welch also countered in a book on chiasms he edited nearly 25 years ago that interpreters’ refusal to see well-crafted chiasms amounted to a modern conceit that ancients were not so “sophisticated.”

In his “The Rhetoric of the Gospel,” C. Clifton Black of Princeton Theological Seminary wrote that parts of Mark’s well-known apocalyptic chapter 13 “probably would have jarred most classical rhetoricians,” especially its grammatical roughness. However, Black praised Mark for dozens of sophisticated rhetorical devices in the chapter and said that the audience contact was held “by a chiastic, coherent and climactic narration.”

(John Dart is author of “Decoding Mark” (Trinity Press International), a study of chiasm in the Gospel of Mark, and news editor of The Christian Century.)