After doing this blog for going on fourteen years now, I’ve gotten better at anticipating questions that my posts will get.  I’ve just finished a short thread dealing with “How We Got the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible” (both how the canon was formed and how the texts were copied).  And I’d bet my bottom dollar (whatever a bottom dollar is) I’ll be getting questions on when we got the chapters and verses in the Bible.

I’ve dealt with the question on the blog before, but it’s been years and it’s the kind of thing that is a bit hard to recall without reiteration.  So here I reiterate.

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Given the fact that ancient manuscripts did not use punctuation, paragraph divisions, or even spaces to separate words, it will come as no surprise to learn that the chapter and verse divisions found in modern translations of the Bible are not original (as if Isaiah, or centuries later Paul, would think to number his sentences and call them verses!).

In order to facilitate the reading of these books—especially in public—scribes began to make chapter-like divisions (in the New Testament) as early as the fourth century. But the chapters in translations of the Bible used today go back just to the beginning of the thirteenth century, when a lecturer at the University of Paris, named Stephen Langton, introduced major divisions into the Latin Bible.

Verse divisions were not to come along for another three centuries. In 1551, a Parisian printer named Robert Stephanus published a Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament in which each chapter was divided into separate verses, followed by the 1555 Latin edition of the entire Bible with the Old Testament versified as well.  These are the verse divisions still in use today. They first appeared in an English translation in the 1560 Geneva Version.

An interesting anecdote: Stephanus’s son indicated that his father made these verse divisions while “on horseback” (i.e., on a journey) from Paris to Lyons. Presumably he meant that his father took the text along with him and worked on it at night during his layovers at inns along the way. Some wry observers have noticed, though, that in places our verse divisions make little sense (sometimes they occur right in the middle of a sentence), and have suggested that Stephanus literally worked “on horseback,” so that whenever his steed hit a pothole, it caused an inadvertent slip of the pen.