Were the Glagolitic letter names composed as a connected devotional text, or do they read as one only in retrospect?

The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.