Piotr Blumczyński

Uniwersytet Wrocławski

Referential Convenience vs. Interpretative Hindrance

1. Introduction
It may hardly be deemed accidental that no early manuscript of the New Testament known
to us was written on a scroll. This is particularly striking against the fact that it was the cus-
tomary format for the publication of literary works in the Graeco-Roman world. Jewish
scripture, the Tanakh, has always been written on papyrus or parchment scrolls which
to this day remain “the central symbol of synagogue worship” (Sawyer 1999: 56). By con-
trast, Christians since the earliest days seem to have preferred the codex, a leaf-form of
the book, for the transmission of their sacred writings, as evidenced by the fact that “all
Christian manuscripts of the Bible, whether of the Old Testament or the New Testament,
attributable to the second or the earlier third century, are codices, all written on papyrus”
(Roberts 1970: 57). To account for this predilection, biblical scholars typically point to sev-
eral factors, such as the lower cost of the production of a codex (since both sides of the page
could be written on), its capacity to contain multiple books (e.g. the four Gospels and
the Acts which otherwise had to be published each in a separate scroll), and greater conven-
ience for the traveler and the missionary (Metzger 1992: 6; Roberts 1970: 58ff; Świderkówna
2000: 129f). In addition, some ideological sensitivities may have been involved as Chris-
tians sought to distinguish themselves from Jews (Sawyer 1999: 56). However, one very
obvious advantage of the codex form over the roll form was the referential convenience:
the numbered pages facilitated quick and easy consultation of specific passages (Metzger
1992: 6). For Christianity — essentially a “religion of the Book” — this quality proved to be
of major significance.

2. Early divisions
The adoption of the format of the codex, convenient as it was, did not address the need for
a more precise reference. The Christian theological and cultural identity, trapped between
Judaism on the one hand and paganism of the other, called for a very strong and precise
reliance on its sacred writings. Even though the biblical texts were originally composed as
self-contained literary units, e.g. narratives, theological expositions or hortatory epistles,
the need to break them down into shorter sections was urgently and universally felt by nu-

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merous scribes and editors who spontaneously invented their own divisions. As a result,
the extant manuscripts of the New Testament show traces of various independent parti-
tioning systems. The oldest is probably the system of Codex Vaticanus of the 4th century,
which introduces a form of chapter divisions (kephalaia) indicated in the margin. Ac-
cording to this capitulation, there are 170 kephalaia in the Gospel of Matthew, 62 in Mark,
152 in Luke, and 50 in John, all of them of unequal length. In the slightly younger Codex
Alexandrinus of the 5th century the numbers of the kephalaia in the respective Gospels are
68, 48, 83, and 18 (Metzger 1981: 41). This discrepancy results from the divisions being
based on perceived sense units rather than on some objective criteria (as was the case with
the Jewish masora, the early medieval system ensuring the exact preservation of the Tan-
akh text, based — among other formal features—on the number of characters and words
in every line as well as their numerical value). Moreover, the various systems were some-
times applied in a parallel fashion, as in Codex Vaticanus which has two sets of chapter
divisions for Pauline letters, an old and a new one (Metzger 1992: 23). An equally ancient
device aimed at helping the reader were the titloi, brief headings summarizing the content
of the following passage.1 Even then, however, the page of an ancient manuscript was very
different to what the contemporary reader of the Bible is used to. The earliest extant wit-
nesses, including Codex Vaticanus, are recorded in scriptio continua (i.e. the unicial script
with no word or sentence boundaries) and the punctuation is extremely scarce; probably
the only familiar characteristic is the division into columns.
A very ingenious system was devised in the early 4th century by Eusebius, the bishop of
Caesarea, who improved the earlier harmonies of the four Gospels by dividing the text into
relatively short numbered sections and then by incorporating the corresponding numbers
into ten harmonizing tables. “These ten tables contained, first, the passages common to all
four Evangelists; then (in three tables) what three have in common; then (in four), what
the Evangelists have in parallel statements; and in the last were placed those passages which
were peculiar to each of the four” (Horne 1856: 31; cf. Aland and Aland 1989: 252; Metzger
1992: 24–25). The “Eusebian canons,” as they had been called, were adopted broadly by later
copyists in the form of numerical tables placed at the beginning of the books, providing
a point of reference in the segmentation of the text of the Gospels. Nevertheless, the sec-
tion divisions in the remainder of New Testament, with some exceptions, did not become
standardized for about a thousand years.

3. Chapters and verses

The chapter divisions as we know them today are owed to two churchmen of the 13th
century: cardinal Hughes de St. Cher and Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury.
The former, while working on his concordance of the Vulgate, partitioned the text into
chapters and subdivided each of them into seven short portions, designated A, B, C, D, E,
F, and G in the margin. However, it was Langton’s earlier and simpler system that ultimately
prevailed and found its way into a number of manuscripts of the Bible in various languages,
even before the invention of print. This division with minor amendments is still in use
today (Specht 1997: 603).

1
For a complete list of ‘helps for readers’ found in the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, see:
Metzger 1992: 21–32.

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The first attempts to provide verse divisions and numbering, though not in the modern
form, seem to have appeared in Latin texts. In 1528 or 1529 the Dominican monk Sanc-
tus Panginus published his new Latin translation of the whole Bible, “in which he had
numbered the verses of the Old Testament; he also introduced certain numbered verses
into the New Testament; these were however much longer than ours” (Horne 1856: 34).
Almost three decades later, a Parisian classical scholar, linguist and printer, Robert Es-
tienne (in the Latinized form: Stephanus) published in Geneva the entire Vulgate with
chapter and verse divisions. In the Old Testament, Stephanus followed Panginus’ divisions;
in the New Testament, however, he significantly increased the number of verses by isolating
shorter units (e.g. his version of the Gospel of Matthew contained 1071 verses as opposed
to 577 suggested by Panginus) (Specht 1997: 603). Consequently, the shortest verse of
the Bible, John 11:35, contains only three words in Greek (edakrusen ho Iēsous) and two
in English (“Jesus wept”).
A number of authors offer a somewhat anecdotal account of the circumstances in which
Stephanus’ versification originated. He supposedly marked the verse breaks while riding
on horseback from Paris to Lyons, which may provide an explanation for some of the “in-
felicitous divisions [that] arose from the jogging on the horse that bumped his pen into
the wrong places” (Metzger 1992: 104). Whether the story is in some part true or (which
seems more likely) “the task was accomplished while resting at the inns along the road”
(Metzger 1992: 104) is of secondary importance; what matters is that the printer’s meticu-
lousness produced a system enabling a quick and unequivocal identification of individual
passages, sentences, and words, highly useful to grammarians, lexicographers, exegetes,
and commentators. In some respects the lives of biblical scholars and students — let alone
the authors of lexicons, concordances, and (recently) Bible software — have become re-
markably easier.
***
In spite of the indisputable referential convenience secured by standardized versification,
the divisions introduced into the text have also caused numerous problems, some of them
apparently outweighing the advantages. The objections raised against it generally fall into
two principal categories related to literary and theological factors, respectively. Let us con-
sider them in some detail.

4. Literary objections
Much like the adoption of the codex form more than a thousand years before, the al-
most universal application of detailed text divisions in the 16th century may only be prop-
erly understood against the historical background and its specific needs. Throughout
Europe, the Reformation had spread an unprecedented interest in the vernacular Bible,
whose private reading became increasingly popular, reflecting the Protestant emphasis on
a more individualized religious experience. In England the Bible, rather than being placed
in the church (as was the case with the [literally] Great Bible of 1539, explicitly entrusted
with this mission by the title page inscription: “This is the Byble apoynted to the use of
the churches” [Metzger 2001: 62]), quickly made its way into the hands of families and
individuals. The kind of readership largely dictated the format: the Bibles were to be small,
light-weight, convenient, and affordable. At the same time, the strong Protestant attach-

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ment to the Scripture required that it be studied rather than read, which naturally shifted
the interpretative focus to the smallest units of the text: the reader was being “directed
to texts rather than to the text” (Norton 2000: 81). As a result, the Geneva Bible of 1560,
by far the most popular English Bible before the King James Version of 1611, not only used
the roman type (in place of the heavy, black-letter type) and contained a variety of helps
such as maps, tables, woodcuts, chapter summaries, pronunciation aids, and copious notes
but also was the first English Bible with numbered verses, “which became the basis of all
versification in later English Bibles” (Metzger 2001: 65).
From the literary point of view, this was a disaster, particularly that every verse began on
a new line, as if it always started a new sentence. David Norton in his History of the English
Bible as Literature (2000: 82) observes that this organization marks “a very significant move
from a literary Bible, for it carries the visual interruption of the text to an extreme. Thus
the first obvious drawback of versification was the loss of the literary form of the origi-
nal text. Richard Moulton fittingly observes in the preface to his Modern Reader’s Bible
(1907):
We are all agreed to speak of the Bible as a supremely great literature. Yet, when we open our ordi-
nary versions, we look in vain for the lyrics, epics, dramas, essays, sonnets, treatises, which make
the other great literatures of the world. Instead of these, the eye catches nothing but a monotonous
uniformity of numbered sentences, more suggestive of an itemized legal instrument than of what
we understand as literature (Moulton 1907: v in Smith 2007: 16).

The divisions dictated by convenience not only destroyed any visual distinction between
poetry and prose and homogenized the diversified biblical genres, but also affected the per-
ception of the sense expressed by the author. As one critic put it, “they not only disguise
literary form, they distort literary structure” (Smith 2007: 17). Sometimes the divisions
mask the existence of higher levels of literary organization, above the chapter level, result-
ing in structural and interpretative confusion.
As examples, where the chapter-breaks interfere with the connection and the sense, we may notice
Genesis 1 and 2, where the Introduction (1:1–2:4) is broken up, and the commencement of the first
of the Eleven Divisions (or “Generations”) is hidden. This wrong break has led to serious confu-
sion. Instead of seeing in 1:1-2:3 a separate Summary of Creation in the form of an Introduction,
many think they see two distinct creations, while others see a discrepancy between two accounts
of the same creation (Bullinger 2004: 35).

Similarly, it has recently been argued that the material in Matthew is carefully and methodi-
cally organized by genre, a fact entirely concealed by the existing chapter division system:
After the opening genealogy (…) the main narrative, which tells the story of Jesus’ life, is repeatedly
punctuated by long discourses … Five of these discourses are specifically organized by an open-
ing formula, “when Jesus had finished saying these things” (…). Each of these discourses takes up
a theme, introduced in the previous narrative (…). According to this interpretation, at its highest
level, Matthew would have a core made up of five narrative-discourse pairs surrounded by intro-
ductory and concluding material … There is no way, however, or to recognize this gospel’s contents
in light of it by approaching Matthew as a book with 28 “chapters” (…). [L]arger units in the book
are being broken up and obscured by the chapters themselves (Smith 2007: 23f).

The largely arbitrary section breaks create even greater obscurity when applied to New
Testament epistles whose elaborate structure was chiefly determined by the default man-

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ner of oral delivery (as opposed to private reading). One example is Paul’s First Epistle
to the Corinthians, whose fine rhetoric organization, both linear and chiastic (Lorek 2006:
47ff ), can by no means be deduced from the existing chapter divisions. A particularly glar-
ing instance of infelicitous breaks is found between chapters 10 and 11, quoted below
within the immediate co-text.
10:32 Give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God; 10:33 just as I also
please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of the many, that they may
be saved.
11:1 Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ. 11:2 Now I praise you because you remember
me in everything, and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you (1 Corinthians
10: 32–11:2, New American Standard).

It seems quite clear that the opening verse of chapter 11 logically belongs to the preceding
chapter as the conclusion of the thought on imitation (“Give no offence (…) just as I also
please all men (…)”) while 11:2 introduces a new thought, as indicated by the connective
“now” (Greek de).
Examples of misleading, confusing or otherwise unreasonable verse breaks abound
and may be pinpointed on almost every page. Some of them simply interrupt the train of
thought:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,||Meekness,
temperance: against such there is no law (Galatians 5:22–23, King James Version);

at other times they conceal an obvious contrast (here introduced by “nevertheless” in verse 12):
9:11 If we sowed spiritual things in you, is it too much if we should reap material things from you?
9:12 If others share the right over you, do we not more? Nevertheless, we did not use this right,
but we endure all things, that we may cause no hindrance to the gospel of Christ (1 Corinthians
9:11-12; New American Standard);

or suggest an antithesis where there is none (as if verses 6 and 7 spoke of two different
activities rather than complementary aspects of one attitude):
2:5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 2:6 who, although He existed
in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 2:7 but emptied Him-
self, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:5–7,
New American Standard).

This last example also demonstrates that literary and logical considerations may easily
overlap with theological sensitivities (since a certain exegesis of this relatively short passage
gave rise to the elaborate Christological doctrine of the kenosis). Let us then consider some
theological objections against section divisions.

5. Theological objections
In his book Word Studies in the Greek New Testament, Kenneth Wuest quotes A.T. Robert-
son’s famous saying “that the first rule of scripture interpretation is that one should ignore
chapter and verse divisions as one studies the Word” (1980: 173) because they generally
“militate the proper method of scientific exegesis and (…) often cut the trend of thought

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in two and isolate things that should be construed together” (1980: 149). This view seems
fairly representative of biblical scholars in relation to the existing partitioning system.
An example of a theologically sensitive division is the following passage from Mat-
thew:
16:27 “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and will
then recompense every man according to his deeds. 16:28 “Truly I say to you, there are some of
those who are standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His
kingdom.” 17:1 “And six days later Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John his brother,
and brought them up to a high mountain by themselves” (Matthew 16:27–17:1, New American
Standard).

referred to by one commentator in order to illustrate “how chapter divisions may cause
error in the truth” (Hartill 1960:81). The argument goes as follows: “The post-millennialist
will say: ‘You say the kingdom is not here. How about this verse?’ Those men have been
dead a long time, and this verse says they should not taste of death till they see the king-
dom” — to which the author replies, “It does not say they shall not taste of death till He
comes, but until they see. Then chapter 17 goes on, and after six days Jesus takes Peter,
James, and John who had been standing with him (vs. 28 in the sixteenth chapter). They saw
the glory of Christ’s coming and kingdom, and they saw the promise fulfilled, which Christ
had made concerning his coming” (Hartill 1960: 81; cf. Wuest 1980: 173f). The existing
chapter breaks significantly obscure such an interpretation of this passage.
Considering the broad range of theological positions advocated by various Christian
denominations on the basis of the Bible, it seems likely that any section divisions would
be susceptible to criticism from either side, particularly in doctrinally significant passages
— which is to say that from the theological perspective the problem of a satisfactory text
division may well remain unsolved. However, the effect of standardized versification, es-
pecially in the form introduced by the Geneva Bible and later adopted by the King James
Version as well as numerous other translations, in which every verse begins with a capital
letter and a new line, “is not only to destroy the literary (and theological) continuity that
presentation in prose gave, but also to strongly say to the reader that the Bible can and
perhaps should be read in minute fragments” (Norton 2000: 82). Regarding this tendency,
one commentator observes:
Perhaps the most obvious aspect of reading a letter is the one that we ignore most easily when
we read the epistles of the New Testament. All of us, upon receiving a letter from an acquaintance,
proceed to read the letter at one sitting (often we do not even wait to sit down!). Christians, partly
because of the chapter-and-verse divisions in our modern Bibles, seldom take the time to read
through the whole epistle. Indeed, we may feel we deserve a pat on the back if we manage to finish
the entire chapter (Silva 1994: 122f).

This “disintegrative approach” to the Bible has resulted in some ethical simplifications, such
as e.g. the prohibition of any physical contact between men and women practiced in some
conservative Christian communities in fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 7:1 (“it is good for
a man not to touch a woman,” the New American Standard) or the total banning of alcohol
declared by a significant number of American Evangelicals (including the use of grape juice
instead of wine in the Communion) — a practice supported by carefully selected Bible
verses while completely ignoring others (Smith 2007: 31ff ).

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A number of theological aberrations attributable to a particular manner of text divi-

sion should not perhaps be blamed on conscious interpretative malpractice, but — as
it has been rightly argued — “because verses divide the Bible up into little ‘sound bites,’
which are numbered and thus can be located and cited without regard to their context,
they practically invite us to select and arrange them in support of our favorite teachings,
whether or not their context actually supports the meaning we are imputing to them”
(Smith 2007: 34).
Bearing in mind the gravity of some of the objections outlined above, it is little wonder
that they have sometimes been approached with remarkable hostility. The following excerpt
from a review of the Townsend’s Bible as revised by Rev. T.W. Coit, published in 1837-38,
seems quite representative of these feelings:
We attach the greatest value to the services which (…) Dr. Coit has rendered to the cause of Biblical
knowledge and of religion, in breaking up the old arbitrary division of the Scriptures into chapters
and verses, and in restoring the order and divisions of nature and logic — the method, too, which
common sense applied to every other book. There is no important book in the world which would
not suffer materially by being subjected to such a process as the common edition of the Scriptures
(…). These divisions (…) are without any authority — being purely the work of man (…). [They]
are not only without authority for us, but they have no advantage whatever, except for facility of
reference; while their disadvantages are numerous and grave. We fully agree with Dr. Coit (…)
that the obscurity and difficulty of understanding the Scripture are, in a no small degree, attributa-
ble to these unnatural and arbitrary divisions, and that the Bible would become … quite intelligible
in itself, if only put in an intelligible shape. (…) He has indicated, in small figures, the divisions of
chapter and verse of the common editions; so that this has the same advantage with them for refer-
ence, while at the same time the logical divisions and connections are kept unimpaired. We could
heartily wish this plan were adopted in every edition of the Bible for common use. We are sure it
would contribute unspeakably to render the Scriptures intelligible and interesting [emphasis —
author] (The New York Review, October 1838, pp. 481f).

Regardless of the forcefulness of the above arguments and clearly against the wishes of
their adherents, expressed almost two centuries ago, the imperfect versification system
has not been universally abandoned up until this day. On the contrary, largely because of
the enormous influence of the King James Version and its direct successors which per-
petuated the most obtrusive numbering system, most readers of the English Bible are used
to the text of the Scripture interrupted with verse numbers and perhaps hardly realize that
it could be presented otherwise.
***
A brief survey of the contemporary approaches to section divisions in English Bible ver-
sions shows that text partitioning may include various options situated along the con-
tinuum stretching between the two extremes: “to divide or not to divide.”

6. Contemporary division systems and layout types

(1) Starting from one end of this continuum, we find versions that persist in the legacy of
the Geneva Bible and the King James Version by starting every verse on a new line, with
the number in the same font size as the text. Sometimes the verse numbers are in boldface
type. This layout is found e.g. in the New American Standard Version (1963) New King James
Version (1982), and the Recovery Version (1985) (fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Layout of the Recovery Version

Because of the clear-cut divisions, this is also the necessary layout of Bible versions available
online or in research software (such as Logos Bible Software of Bibleworks) whose search
engines and display features are organized by the verse (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Screenshot of Bibleworks for Windows ver. 7.0

(2) A slightly improved system consists of combining the individual verses into paragraphs
while still retaining the same or similar font size of verse numbers (sometimes in boldface).
This layout in employed e.g. by the New World Translation (1984) and God’s Word (1995).
In a modified version of this layout, verses beginning a sense unit, often a paragraph, are
preceded by numbers in regular size while other verses are numbered using superscript
(e.g. New Revised Standard Version [1990], the Today’s English Version [1976]). Chapter
numbers are usually substantially larger (fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Layout of Today’s English Version

(3) Another commonly used format (e.g. the New International Version [1973], the New Liv-
ing Translation [1996]) follows text organization by paragraph, with the individual verses
numbered in superscript. This layout may be modified by minimizing the size of font of
the numbers to the point at which they become hardly noticeable in the paragraph structure
(e.g. the Inclusive New Testament [1994]) (fig. 4).

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Fig. 4: Layout of the Inclusive New Testament

(4) A different effect is achieved by some versions (e.g. the New English Bible [1961], the New
Jerusalem Bible [1985]) in which the verse numbers are relegated to the margin, appear-
ing at the height of the appropriate line (fig. 5). This presentation undoubtedly improves
the cohesion of the text; although at the expense of obscuring precise verse breaks (it seems
that such an extreme level of referential precision is seldom necessary anyway).

Fig. 5: Layout of the New English Bible

(5) Towards the other end of the continuum, verse numbering may be abandoned, with
the range covered by a paragraph indicated in the margin (e.g. Wuest’s Expanded Transla-
tion [1961]) (fig. 6). In this system, the precision of reference is considerably reduced.

Fig. 6: Layout of Wuest’s Expanded Translation

(6) Finally, some versions offer no versification whatsoever, the smallest unit of text organi-
zation being the chapter (e.g. the Unvarnished New Testament [1991], the Message [1993])
or — in some rare cases — the entire book (the Un-Defiled Bible [2007]). This eliminates
all referential aids, thus bringing the Bible to conformity with the default layout of most
literary works.

Fig. 7: Layout of the Message

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 Piotr Blumczyński

7. Conclusion
As could be reasonably expected, there is a strong correlation between the translation
method and the partitioning format, with functional equivalence versions favoring un-
interrupted paragraph organization and formal ones leaning toward conspicuous verse
breaks. The latter tendency may well be motivated and encouraged by the presentation of
the source material, for the two critical Greek texts, the NA27 and the UBS4, both follow
layout type (2), as shown in fig. 8. below.
Fig. 8: Layout of the NA27 (left) and UBS4 (right) critical texts of the New Testament

Interestingly, some relationship may also be observed between the confessional profile of
the version and the preferred type of versification. Conservative Protestant translations
(e.g. the New American Standard Version) generally use layouts organized by the verse,
as opposed to paragraph layouts favored by Roman Catholic (e.g. the New Jerusalem Bi-
ble) or liberal Protestant (e.g. the New English Bible) versions, which roughly corresponds
to the views on the verbal (i.e. connected to the word level) inspiration of the Scripture
espoused in the respective ecclesiastical groups.
Setting aside the somewhat provocative dichotomy contained in the title of this paper,
it seems that referential convenience need not necessarily be achieved at the expense of
interpretative hindrance. Between the extremes of the visually disruptive verse number-
ing found in layout type (1) and no versification whatsoever provided in layout (6) — each
of them both useful and harmful depending on the perspective — there is a spectrum of
intermediate options, differentiated with reference to their emphases. Among these, lay-
out (4) with the verse numbers if the margin is perhaps the most balanced, ensuring both
uninterrupted reading and a sufficient level of referential precision. With the Bible being
both read as literature and studied as Scripture, there is a need for diversified formatting
styles: the challenge is to properly match the purpose with the format in recognition of its
inherent advantages and limitations.

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Metzger, B.M. (1992). The Text of the New Testament. Its Corruption, Transmission, and Restoration. Oxford
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