Structure of 1 John

In a 1956 JBL article on John’s gospel, one Pierson Parker makes the intriguing statement that 1 John makes almost as much sense read backward as it does read forward. This is evidence that the letter’s contents are “disconnected” and that the letter reads like “an old man’s anxious exhortations to his flock.” Perhaps it’s evidence of something else, not an old man’s anxiety, but his cunning, his deliberate construction of a letter that reads forwards, backwards, and from the middle. Certainly, as John Breck has shown, some sentences of 1 John can be read in multiple ways, each coherent, each bringing out some fresh aspect of John’s message. Why not the whole letter?