Who placed chapters and verses IN the Bible?

  • Thread starter Thread starter justinthemartyr
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

justinthemartyr

Guest
Who did it and are they extra biblical? I do not see the apostles or Jesus quoting chapters and verses, they only quote the passage they are referring to itself.
 
Wikipedia says,
“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. Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament. 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.”
 
If you watch documentaries, it’s a kick sometimes-- in the ancient world, they had yet to invent a lot of the pauses, spaces and punctuation we now use. This is because literacy was often something that a lot of people did not get to do. The rich and professional classes were the only ones who did it, and they didn’t need to help each other, because they already knew what to look for. When education became part of the larger public life, then they had to change things and make them easily recognizable to everyone. So when you watch the History Channel and you see a big wall of Roman lettering on a courthouse wall, for example, and it (pardon the caps) LOOKSLIKETHIS-- it kind of makes me smile.

I think once more and more people began to convert to Christianity, and they had more priests who had to be able to read the Scripture, and even later when the average person could buy a Bible, then they had to make it something they could read. In the pre-Christian days, not everybody had a Torah scroll, just the rabbis and the temple did–so it was okay, they could read it for everyone else. They knew where the different stories and sections began and ended. But what do you do when a new religion comes in, and this time their book adds another language to the total? Either Hebrew or Greek can be a pip to learn, for some, so when you have a book that is half one and half the other-- oo boy! Better start making it easier for a more everyday type of reader to digest.

Well, I’ve rambled on enough. Just my opinion. 👍
 
lampstand said:
If you watch documentaries, it’s a kick sometimes-- in the ancient world, they had yet to invent a lot of the pauses, spaces and punctuation we now use. This is because literacy was often something that a lot of people did not get to do. The rich and professional classes were the only ones who did it, and they didn’t need to help each other, because they already knew what to look for. When education became part of the larger public life, then they had to change things and make them easily recognizable to everyone. So when you watch the History Channel and you see a big wall of Roman lettering on a courthouse wall, for example, and it (pardon the caps) LOOKSLIKETHIS-- it kind of makes me smile.

I think once more and more people began to convert to Christianity, and they had more priests who had to be able to read the Scripture, and even later when the average person could buy a Bible, then they had to make it something they could read. In the pre-Christian days, not everybody had a Torah scroll, just the rabbis and the temple did–so it was okay, they could read it for everyone else. They knew where the different stories and sections began and ended. But what do you do when a new religion comes in, and this time their book adds another language to the total? Either Hebrew or Greek can be a pip to learn, for some, so when you have a book that is half one and half the other-- oo boy! Better start making it easier for a more everyday type of reader to digest.

Well, I’ve rambled on enough. Just my opinion. 👍
Click to expand...
This is a bit inaccurate, though true enough in the early and mid Middle Ages.

During Roman times, literacy was common; most people knew how to read and write at least a little. Usually the language was Greek and/or Latin.

It was not until the fall of the western Roman Empire that literacy took a nosedive. The late 5th through mid 10th centuries were a period of much upheaval and countless small wars. Few people anywhere in Europe made it through a generation without some war affecting their small village. This, as you can imagine, was very disruptive. When people are struggling to survive, learning to read took a back seat to learning to farm, hunt and hide valuables (e.g. winter food supplies) from the bad guys. It was during this period of time that monasteries protected many of the great writings. It is also why so many early writings were lost, because they were not stored in monasteries which survived the onslaught of the Vandals, Goths, Huns, Visigoths, Muslims, Moors, etc.

The evolution of written language is an interesting thing. You are correct when you point out that much punctuation did not exist in early writings. In fact, some writings did not even put a space between words. Asyoucanimaginethiscanbeconfusing.

My understanding is that chapters divisions were added to Holy Scriptures long before the verse divisions were.

My understanding was that Cardinal Hugo introduced the chapter divisions in the 1400s. This was about 100 years or so before the introduction of verse divisions. Now, I do not consider my source to be terribly reliable as it cites no other sources, so it is entirely possible I am wrong about the who and when of the chapter divisions. This is my source, judge it for yourself.
 
I read that Bishop Stephen Langton put the Chapters to the Bible in 1228.
 
My questions is why Protestants realizing that Catholics put chapters and verse numbers to the Bible in recent times, have not challenged that too like they challenged the Canon?
Can they be the mark of the Beast, a man made tradition made Scripture. How AWANA will be done without them?🤷
 
ibkc said:
Wikipedia says,
“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. Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament. 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.”
Click to expand...

See this = the page reproduced below]:​

for Genesis 1.1 ff. in the Gutenberg Vulgate of 1454. The verse divisions are indicated by red ink in the first capitals of each verse.

**More material here: **
 
One questions that I always have. Why the protestants kept the Septuagint book order while using the Masoretic Canon?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top