Chapter and Verse

A discussion came up in my Sunday School class yesterday and I thought it might be worth posting here. The conversation was around how sometimes verse shifts don’t make sense. Punctuation and paragraph shifts are another problem altogether and have to do with translators. As a result there are many different ways of starting new paragraphs or even of punctuating sentences. A good example of this is in the familiar Isaiah 40:3 passage where the ASV, NIV, NAS, and ESV state something like:

A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare…

Whereas the Geneva, KJV, and state it differently by the use of other punctuation:

A voice cries in the wilderness: “Prepare…

The original manuscripts did not have punctuation. Punctuation was supplied later and is obviously still open to change. Chapters and verses however, were nailed down just after the Reformation as a result of the following.

Stephen Langdon, a Paris professor and later the Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Bible into chapters for the first time ever in 1205AD in a Latin edition of the Bible. The Jews first used his divisions in 1330 for a Hebrew OT manuscript and in a printed version in 1516 (a year before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg castle door). In the 1400s his divisions were used in Greek versions of the Bible.

A Paris printer of books named Robert Stephanus was the first one to divide those chapters into numbered verses. There were already dividers, a small indicator called a soph passuq, in the Hebrew Bible. But these were symbols, each identical with the next, not numbers that are easily differentiated and therefore referenced. Stephanus used those Hebrew dividers to make numbered verses of the OT and then made his own numbered verses of the NT. He did the latter by horseback as he traveled. You may well imagine that this bumpy ride added to a sometimes poor versification. It would be like an interstate motorist going between text and windshield; his focus would not be the best. Stephanus’ versified NT was first published in Latin in 1551.

Though sometimes jerky, his verse system was used in 1565 in printing the Textus Recepticus, the Greek text of the NT that was the basis for Luther’s German Bible and Tyndale’s English Bible as well as the later KJV and any other Reformation era translations. As a result, Stephanus’ verse structure became permanent, awkward as it sometimes is.