What is your favorite verse in the Bible? Can you cite the verse or easily find it among the more than 770,000 words of the text? 2 If someone were to reference the phrase, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” where would you find it in all those pages? 3 You can find it by using all the chapter and verse numbers placed throughout the text. Most books, articles, blogs, newspapers, and other written materials are not published in the same format as the Bible. While some written compositions include chapter divisions, can you think of any other book that includes verse numbers throughout? 4Perhaps the closest examples we have might be legal documents, outlined manuals, plays, or some poetry. For the most part, however, books – and especially letters – do not contain verse numbers for all the lines of text in the composition. And, neither did the Bible books and letters when they were first written! 5 The inspired penmen of the Scriptures did not write their words down with numbered verses (like the annoyingly way I have been doing with this paragraph!).
When did chapter and verses numbers in the Bible first appear and why? The practice of dividing the Bible into sections originated as early as the 4th century, when scribes began creating chapter-like divisions in their handwritten copies. In the early 13th century, the chapter numbers that we are familiar with today first appeared. A Catholic Cardinal and theologian, named Stephen Langton, is believed to be the one who organized the Bible into its standardized chapter format while he was making Latin copies of the text. The format was adopted in most subsequent copies to follow.
It was some three centuries later – and a little more than one hundred years after the invention of the printing press in 1440 – that Bible verses with numbers first appeared. A French printer, linguist, and classical scholar, named Robert Stephanus (or, Estienne) published a Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament in 1551 known as the “Textus Receptus,” which means “the received text” (1 Thess 2:13). This was the first publication of the Bible to have its chapters divided into individual verses with numbers. From this resource, chapter and verse divisions made their first appearance into English versions with the publication of the Geneva Bible of 1560. The practice has continued with all successive translation versions.
So, how did Stephanus determine where to place the verse divisions? With the Old Testament, the text had already become quite standardized beforehand. The Jews had developed the practice of reading short stretches of Scripture aloud in the synagogues that included pauses at regular intervals in order to accommodate Aramaic translation, since most Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. The pauses were marked in their manuscripts with a soph pasuq (:). Stephanus simply adapted these into his publications.
With the New Testament, his son, Henri, recounts that his father developed the divisions while on “horse back”! It’s believed this meant he did his work while he was traveling. Yet, in any case, it doesn’t take long for one to observe that his placements were done extremely haphazardly. Many verse divisions are problematic, causing confusion concerning the context, or interrupts the flow of thought. Yet, despite all the arbitrary locations, we can still thank Stephanus for making it easy to navigate the pages of the Bible.
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