Something really interesting came my way. The first bit relates to the amazing middle verse in the Bible we have today. The problem is that the present form of the Bible, espaically the New Testament, in its current chapters and verses was not published until 1555. More interesting, was the story how the verse separation was achieved. I recall our Church History lecturer telling us the story. Robert Estienne (he is better known in the English transliteration, Robert Stephens) was riding from Paris to Lyons “on horseback” whereupon he undertook this mamoth task. That is why, he suggested that sometimes the first one or two verses of the following chapter should have been at the end of the previous one, as the horse jumped a bit as Robert Estienne put his separated pencil mark on the flowing text. Well that’s the story. Now, redactionists are suggesting that the story of him riding between Paris and Lyons was true enough, but that he marked the separations at night time while staying over in travellers inns (the modern day motel). What aboring substitute of a story. So the second part of this Email details how the development of the Bible’s separation into chapters and verses took hold. I asked the current church history lecturer from Morling Theological College to dig this out for me, which Graeme graciously did. Enjoy!

1. Part 1 of Email which came to me this week. Thought you might find this interesting. What is the shortest chapter in the Bible? Answer – Psalms 117 What is the longest chapter in the Bible? Answer – Psalms 119 Which chapter is in the center of the Bible? Answer – Psalms 118

Fact: There are 594 chapters before Psalms 118 Fact: There are 594 chapters after Psalms 118

Add these numbers up and you get 1188

What is the center verse in the Bible? Answer – Psalms 118:8 Does this verse say something significant about God’s perfect will for our lives?

The next time someone says they would like to find God’s perfect will for their lives and that they want to be in the center of His will, just send them to the center of His Word!

Psalms 118:8 (NKJV) “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.”

Now isn’t that odd how this worked out (or was God in the center of it)?

2. Part 2 of Email which came to me yesterday

From The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908-1912), volume 2, pages 113-14

III. Chapter and Verse Divisions

The purpose of the present division into chapters and verses was to facilitate reference. These divisions sometimes, but not generally, ignore logical and natural divisions.

1. Chapter Divisions

Common opinion concerning chapter divisions attributes them to Cardinal Hugo of Saint Cher for use in his concordance to the Latin Vulgate (c. 1240, first printed, with modification, at Bologna, 1479). This opinion rests on the direct testimony of Gilbert Genebrard (d. 1597), that “the scholastics who with Cardinal Hugo were authors of the concordance” made the division. Quetif and Echard, a century and a half later than Genebrard, ascribe to Hugo only the subdivision of the chapters presently to be mentioned. The better opinion is, that Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1228), made the chapter division to facilitate citation. Before the invention of printing it had already passed from Latin manuscripts to those of other tongues, and after the invention of printing it became general. It has undergone slight variations from the beginning to the present day. Many early printed Bibles, especially Greek Testaments, besides these chapters retain also the old breves or titloi noted in the margin. (see above, II, 1, § 5). The chapters were at first subdivided into seven portions (not paragraphs), marked in the margin by the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, reference being made by the chapter number and the letter under which the passage occurred. In the shorter Psalms, however, the division did not always extend to seven. In Psa. cxix it seems not to have been used at all. This division (except in the Psalms) was modified by Conrad of Halberstadt (c. 1290), who reduced the divisions of the shorter chapters from seven to four; so that the letters were always either A-G or A-D. This subdivision continued long after the introduction of the present verses, but in the seventeenth century was much modified, some chapters having more than four, and less than seven, subdivisions.

2. Verse Divisions, Old Testament

The present verses differ in origin for the Old Testament, New Testament; and Apocrypha. In the canonical Old Testament they appear in the oldest known manuscripts (see above, I, 1, § 7, 2, § 2), though they were not used for citation by the Jews till the fifteenth century. The earlier printed Hebrew Bibles marked each fifth verse only with its Hebrew numeral. Arabic numerals were first added for the intervening verses by Joseph Athias, at Amsterdam, 1661, at the suggestion of Jan Leusden. The first portion of the Bible printed with the Masoretic verses numbered was the Psalterium Quincuplex of Faber Stapulensis, printed at Paris by Henry Stephens in 1509. In 1528 Sanctes Pagninus published at Lyons a new Latin version of the whole Bible with the Masoretic verses marked and numbered. He also divided the Apocrypha and New Testament into numbered verses; but these were three or four times as long as the present ones.

3. Verse Divisions, New Testament

The present New Testament verses were introduced by Robert Stephens in his Greco-Latin Testament of 1551 (see above, II, 2, § 2). Stephens says in his preface that the division is made to follow the most ancient Greek and Latin copies. But it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find any Greek or Latin manuscripts whose divisions coincide very nearly with Stephens’s verses. Doubtless he made this division with reference to his concordance to the Vulgate, then preparing, published in 1555. This Latin concordance, like former ones, contains references to the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and also to the numbers of the verses of each chapter “after the Hebrew method” of division. This latter, the preface states, has special reference to an operi pulcherrimo et proeclarissimo which he is now printing, which must mean his splendid Bible of 1556-57, 3 vols., containing the Vulgate, Pagninus, and the first edition of Beza’s Latin New Testament. Meanwhile, for present convenience, he is issuing a more modest Bible (Vulgate), with the verses marked and numbered. This latter was his Vulgate of 1555 (Geneva)–the first whole Bible divided into the present verses, and the first in which they were introduced into the Apocrypha. The text is continuous, not having the verses in separate paragraphs, like the New Testament of 1551, but separated by a ∥ and the verse-number. The verse-division differs in only a very few places from that of 1551; and a comparison shows that the concordance agrees rather with the division of 1551 than with that of 1555. The statement so often made that the division was made “on horseback” while on a journey from Paris to Lyons must be qualified. His son asserts that the work was done while on the journey, but the inference most natural and best supported is that the task was accomplished while resting at the inns along the road.

In other languages the division appeared first as follows: French, New Testament, Geneva, 1552, Bible, Geneva, 1553 (both R. Stephens); Italian, New Testament, L. Paschale (Geneva?), 1555; Dutch, New Testament, Gellius Ctematius (Gillis van der Erven), Embden, 1556, Bible, Nikolaus Biestkens van Diest, Embden, 1560; English, Genevan New Testament, 1557, Genevan Bible, 1560; German, Luther’s Bible, perhaps Heidelberg, 1568, but certainly Frankfort, 1582.

In Beza’s editions of the Greek Testament (1565-1604) sundry variations were introduced, which were followed by later editors, notably the Elzevirs (1633, etc.); and many minor changes have been made, quite down to the present day.

A very convenient and illuminating “table of ancient and modern divisions of the New Testament,” giving the divisions in the Vatican manuscript, the titloi, the Ammonian kephalaia, the stichoi, remata, and the modern chapters and verses, is given in Scrivener, Introduction, i, 68. The titloi, kephalaia, and tables of the Eusebian canons are available in such editions as Stephens’s Greek Testament of 1550, and Mill’s of 1707, 1710. The Greek Testament by Lloyd (Oxford, 1827) and by Mill (1859) give the Eusebian canons. For a synopsis of variations in manuscripts consult J. M. A. Scholz, Novum Teatamentum Graece, i, Frankfort, 1830, pp. xxviii-xxix.

The Stephanic verses have met with bitter criticism because of the fact that they break the text into fragments, the division often coming in the middle of the sentence, instead of forming it into convenient and logical paragraphs, an arrangement which has seldom found favor. But their utility for reference outweighs their disadvantage. They should never be printed in separate paragraphs (as in the English Authorized Version), but the text should be continuous and the numbers inserted in the margin (as in the Revised Version).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. R. Gregory, Prolegomena, i, 140-182, Leipsic, 1894; the Introductions of Tregelles and Scrivener, ut sup. under II; B. F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort, N. T., Introduction and Appendix. pp. 318 sqq., of Am. edition, New York, 1882; I. H. Hall in Sunday School Times Apr. 2, 1881. Consult also W. Wright, in Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, “Verse,” London, 1845 (the ed. of 1870 is not so good); DCA, ii, 953-967.

http://www.bible-researcher.com/chapter-verse.html

THE VERSE DIVISIONS IN THE HOLY SCRIPTURES

The familiar arrangement of the Bible in chapters and verses was introduced long after the original Scriptures were written, and the first English Bible to have numbered verses was the Geneva Bible of 1560. In the 3rd century Ammonius divided the Gospels into small sections to facilitate comparison of parallel passages, and his system was perfected by Eusebius. At the beginning of the 5th century an

unknown writer divided the Pauline Epistles into chapters, and Euthalius extended this division to the remaining Epistles and Acts.

Euthalius, a deacon of Alexandria, in his edition of the Acts and Epistles, completed about A.D. 462, divided the text into stichoi or lines each containing one clause. This method met with general approval, and was applied by others to the Gospels. This “stichometric” writing was in general use down to the 8th century. It was probably not invented by Euthalius, but was first used by him for the text of the New Testament.

In order to save space the method was given up, and copyists contented themselves with marking the ends of the “stichoi” with points or other signs. This gave rise to the more elaborate punctuation developed in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries.

About A.D. 1248 Cardinal Hugo de Santo Care, while preparing an index to the whole Bible, divided it into its present chapters, subdividing these into several parts by placing the letters A, B, C, D etc. in the margin at equal distances from each other. These divisions were later introduced into many printed editions such as Stephens’ Greek New Testament of 1550, still without verse numbers.

Cardinal Hugo’s divisions were used in many manuscript copies of the Latin Vulgate, and gradually found a place also in later Greek manuscripts written in Western Europe, and in the earliest printed and all later editions of the Greek New Testament.

The divisions made by Hugo with the letters of the alphabet, and those adopted by Pagninus in his Latin Bible of 1528, were inconveniently large, and Robert Estienne (better known to us as Stephens) introduced a system of numbered verse divisions in his Greek New Testament published at Geneva in 1551. For this he used as his model the short verses into which the Hebrew Bible had been divided by Rabbi Nathan in 1508, first printed in Venice in 1524. Henry Stephens, Robert’s father, had introduced verse numbers in his 1509 edition of the Psalms.

Calvin’s 1552 revision of Olivetan’s French New Testament incorporated the verse divisions of Stephens, and the same were also used in the Italian version of Paschale in 1553, in Stephens’ Latin Vulgate published at Geneva in 1555, in the Dutch Bible printed at Emden in 1556, in Beta’s Latin version of 1556, his own translation from the Creek, and in the 3557 Geneva English New Testament of Whittingham, the precursor of the English Geneva Bible of 1560, which included a revision of the New Testament. From these the verse divisions found their way to the Bishop’s Bible of 1568, and thence to the Authorised Version of 1611.

In some instances Beta improved upon the verse divisions of Stephens, and in places where they differ most subsequent versions, and the Elzevir editions of the Creek New Testament in 1624 and 1633, follow Beta.

Trinitarian Bible Society Tyndale House, Dorset Road London, SW19 3NN, England Telephone: 0 181 543 7857 Fax: 0 181 543 6370 e-mail: Website: http://biz.ukonline.co.uk/trinitarian.bible.society/contents.htm