Which Ten Commandments?

[Erich]

I guess after 75 posts I’m finally ready to start my first thread!

After reading through at least two earlier threads in this forum on why it is that the Deuterocanonicals are indeed Scripture, and how it is that Protestants accept as Old Testament canon only those books accepted by the Jewish Council of Jamnia ca. A.D. 90, I wondered whether this was the underlying reason why Catholics and Protestants number the Ten Commandments differently.

So, I followed my usual protocol and checked the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Ten Commandments and found the following:

The system of numeration found in Catholic Bibles, based on the Hebrew text, was made by St. Augustine (fifth century) in his book of “Questions of Exodus” (“Quæstionum in Heptateuchum libri VII”, Bk. II, Question lxxi), and was adopted by the Council of Trent. … Another division has been adopted by the English and Helvetian Protestant churches on the authority of Philo Judæus, Josephus, Origen, and others, whereby two Commandments are made to cover the matter of worship, and thus the numbering of the rest is advanced one higher; and the Tenth embraces both the Ninth and Tenth of the Catholic division.

But to my surprise, neither the Catholic nor the Protestant numberings agree with the (current) Jewish numbering (see sundaysoftware.com/ten/number.htm).

Can anyone shed some light on how the current Jewish numbering came about (and whether or not it is the same numbering that Jesus would have known during his earthly life)?

 

[Grayton]

This article may not answer all of your questions, but it provides much information on the different numberings.

catholic.com/thisrock/2004/0403fea3.asp

 

[Katholikos]

Erich:

Can anyone shed some light on how the current Jewish numbering came about (and whether or not it is the same numbering that Jesus would have known during his earthly life)?

Numbering was a very late addition to both the OT and the NT.
The original Commandments as Jesus would have known them were written on scrolls without numbers and were simply continuous.

See here for info on the the addition of chapters and verses to the Scriptures. For the NT, chapters 1228, verses 1551.

bible-researcher.com/chapter-verse.html

Until then, Christians memorized whole sections of the Scriptures.

BTW, there are 613 commandments in the OT, not just 10.

JMJ Jay