“How The Bible Got Its Verses”

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Bible verses were added to the Bible by a French printer, Robert Estienne, for his Greco-Latin Testament, which was first published in Paris in 1551. The book was printed under the Latin version of Estienne’s name, Stephanus. “Stephanus” is often anglicized to “Stephens,” so that history also knows him as Robert Stephens. The notable fact about Stephens is that he divided the Greek New Testament into 7959 verse paragraphs.

And as is usually the case in such matters, there is a widely told legend about this division into verses, and there is also the less colorful version, which is probably closer to the truth.

The legend is that Stephens did all of the division into verses while riding on horseback between Paris and Lyon. According to Stephens’ son, the real story wasn’t quite so dramatic. He reported that his father didn’t do the work on horseback, but in the evenings, at inns along the road.

In either case, the location of the work goes a long way to explaining the result. Whether we can blame the choices about verse divisions on many bumpy miles on horseback or too many glasses of wine in front of the fire at wayside inns, some of the divisions into verses make no logical sense, and some are downright illogical.

But sad to say, we’re stuck with them. Stephens followed the 1551 Greek and Latin New Testament with the Latin Vulgate of 1555, in which he divided the entire Bible into verses. These two editions–prodigious undertakings–created our current division of verses.

This division into Bible verses was by no means the first division of the Bible, but it was the last, and set in stone the current division of the Bible into chapters and verses.

Before Stephens, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Latin Vulgate into our current chapter divisions in 1228.

And before this, there were innumerable systems of divisions of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek versions. The whole story is tremendously complicated, far beyond my capacity to outline simply here.

The relevant point is that the Bible we know is divided into chapters and verses, in ways that often make no logical sense. This means that our Bible-verse oriented approach to the Bible is also very often illogical.

I return to the idea of my last post, “Meet Your Enemy: The Bible Verse.”  Too many battles about the Bible are based on discrete Bible verses that were so badly divided that the real point of a story was lost.

The story of the poor widow who gave away everything she had to live on is one of the most obvious examples I know of a chapter and verse division that turns one story into two disconnected parts.

In both Mark and Luke, Jesus speaks about the scribes “who devour widow’s houses” immediately before he makes the comment about the widow who gave away all she had to live on. Anyone who reads these comments without chapter and verse division can recognize easily that they belong together. The clear implication is that the widow is poor because of scribes who “devoured” her house.

But chapter and verse divisions obscure this connection. At least both pieces of the story are in the same chapter in Mark (Mark 12:38-44.)  In Luke, they are separated into two chapters (Luke 20:45-47; 21:1-4.)

When the scribes who devour houses are treated as a topic that has nothing to do with the poor widow with two tiny coins, the real point of the story is lost. Jesus was not telling poor people to give away everything they have. He was condemning the abusive practices of the religious leadership. (For a more complete discussion of this story, see Going Broke With Jesus, Chapter 12.)

The only remedy for such misinterpretation is to read whole books and whole stories, not the badly divided fragments of books and stories called Bible verses.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson