The origin of the Bible’s chapters and verses

The origin of the Bible’s chapters and verses January 10, 2017

photo-1470859624578-4bb57890378a_optImagine trying to look something up in the Bible if it didn’t have chapters and verses.  But the Bible didn’t come with them.  They were added to make the Scriptures more accessible.  We have two men from two different centuries to thank for these innovations.

Mark Wood at Christianity Today tells the tale, excerpted and linked after the jump.

From Mark Wood,  Who Divided The Bible Into Chapters And Verses? | Christian News on Christian Today:

Anyone who knows about Magna Carta and King John has probably heard of Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury who brokered peace between the king and his rebellious barons and made the Great Charter possible.

But Stephen Langton has a far greater claim to fame. We take advantage of his deep biblical learning every time we open our Bibles, because he was the one who came up with the chapter divisions we take for granted.

Before Langton (1150-1228), several people had tried to divide the longer books of the Bible into more manageable chunks. But his version was the one that stuck and is the basis of the chapters we use today. . . .

What about the verse divisions? They came a lot later. Italian Dominican scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541) divided the New Testament into verses, but they were a lot longer than the ones we have today and didn’t catch on. The credit for our system today goes to a French scholar, Robert Estienne (1503-59), also known as Robertus Stephanus (Estienne or Etienne is French for Stephen). He created a verse numbering system in his 1551 Greek New Testament and in his 1553 French Bible. The numbers were printed in the margins, but in 1555 he produced a Vulgate (in Latin) which integrated them into the text. Estienne was a learned man, but his working conditions were sometimes not ideal: on one occasion he divided the New Testament into verses as he rode from Paris to Lyons to meet a printer’s deadline – in the rain.

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