Memorize the Bible

Because the two primary systems planned for this website are chapter-based and verse-based for learning the Bible, it is important to remember that the Bible as originally written had NEITHER chapters or verses, and so I want to share a couple of thoughts about these artificial divisions of the Bible.

First, just to get our facts straight, the Bible is a collection of individual “books” (sometimes the original documents are things like “letters/epistles”) that each has an individual story about who composed it at what time and in what form, and then how it was copied over time and recognized as canonical scripture. This post is not concerned with the canonization process, the copying process, or really anything else about each book except for the process of dividing it into what we think of as chapters and verses.

While some books had natural divisions (for example, the Book of Psalms), the simplified version of how we got our modern chapters and verses runs something like this:

Around AD 1205, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, divided the Latin Vulgate into chapters and these are the chapter divisions that we use today. Of interest even if we’re keeping this simple is that these chapter divisions are even used in the Jewish Scriptures (the Tanakh) although there are some minor variations from what Christians use in what they call the Old Testament.

Archbishop Langton’s system is not perfect, and even if it somehow were (whatever that even means), by breaking the Bible books into chapters it creates a chance for some artificial biases about our understanding of how the Bible is written. But like many things in life there are pros and cons to the chapter-based structure of modern Bibles, in that while it might break up the Bible into artificial units it does make it much, much easier to find specific scriptural passages. So whether we like it or not, we’re pretty much stuck with it at this point, and my chapter-based memorization system notes this but then just moves on with this fact even though I often wish that the break points between one chapter and the next could be changed.

As for verses, the Old Testament has a somewhat complicated history that basically culminates with verse divisions made by Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus sometime in the 1440’s. New Testament verse divisions are attributed to a 16th-century printer named Robert Estienne (also known as Stephanus).

Interestingly, there is an unsubstantiated rumor that Estienne created these verse divisions while riding on a horse between Paris and Lyons, and this explains why some of his verse divisions seem so arbitrary. As far as I know, there is no firm evidence that this was actually the circumstances under which he made the verse divisions, but in either case we are currently stuck with using his verse divisions whether we like them or not.

As with the chapter divisions, the verse divisions can subconsciously affect how we read the Bible and they have their pros and cons. But once again there is no way to change them at this point, so I use them just like everyone else does even though I recognize their limitations and problems.