I’d read somewhere that a printer was the first to essentially number the verses of the Bible. I lifted the following from Wikipedia. I note that 1551 was after the invention of printing, which made verse numbering more practical and repeatable.
Quote from Wikipedia …
"The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541), a system that was never widely adopted.[3] Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament.[4] The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524-1579). The first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published shortly afterwards in 1560. These verse divisions soon gained acceptance as a standard way to notate verses, and have since been used in nearly all English Bibles.
Unlike the Hebrew of the Old Testament,[citation needed] the structure of the Greek language makes it highly susceptible[citation needed] to being broken up into divisions that would be syntactically inappropriate and even contrary to the sense of the passage. Inexact apportionment of the Greek into verses therefore could easily have obscured the intent, relation, emphasis and force of the words themselves, and thus elicited the most strenuous objections of theologians. The retention of Robert Estienne’s verse divisions essentially without alteration is a tribute not only to the inherent utility of his contribution to Bible study, but also to his excellent knowledge of the scriptures and grasp of the fine points of the ancient Greek language."
