Why were so many old bibles printed in "verse form"

[dowiecritic]

Can anyone say when the “versiculis distincta” look became the custom? I would have thought that the scriptures had always been written in paragraphs before verse numbers were introduced.

I see that the old Rheims (1582) had paragraphs, whereas the Protestant King James (1611) is line-by-line, and nearly every Challoner Douay-Rheims (i.e. post 1749) is also line-by-line. Fr. Pope’s “Layman’s New Testament” (1934, 1928?) and Dr. Arenzen’s New Testament (1947) are nicely paragraphed versions of Challoner so you can read things in their proper context. Ronny Knox’ translation (1944-49) and the Confraternity text (1941) are also paragraphed.

The same seems to have happened to the Vulgate: Fillion (1878), Hetzenauer (1914) and Colunga & Turrado (1946) have paragraphs, but older ones are line-by-line. It don’t know whether the original Clementine Vulgate was line-by-line or in paragraphs.

When did it all go wrong? Was this something Protestants introduced (because they like to “quote chapter and verse”), and did the Church jump on the band wagon?

It seems odd that so many would sacrifice context and readability for “accuracy”.

 

[JRKH]

Here is a **link to an Article **that should help answer your question.

Basically it seems that the purpose was to help people look up specific things in the bible.

Peace
James

 

[dowiecritic]

Thankyou James, I had already read about Stephen Langton and Robert Stephanus, but I’m still not sure when they (or rather, we) actually started printing each verse on its own line. It seems that the Geneva bible (1560), like the King James, was printed that way.

Quickly finding a verse is an obvious advantage, but numbers are easy enough to distinguish from letters, and they were already in numerical order, so finding a verse can’t have been that difficult, even for a theologian with a morbid obsession about efficiency.

That would mean that for three hundred years (until the Revised Version of 1885), the whole English-speaking world was pretty much encouraged to read and quote out of context, except for those few Catholics in the 1600s who dared to possess an illegal bible (the old Douay, which was printed in paragraphs).

David.

 

[ChadS]

Thankyou James, I had already read about Stephen Langton and Robert Stephanus, but I’m still not sure when they (or rather, we) actually started printing each verse on its own line. It seems that the Geneva bible (1560), like the King James, was printed that way.

Quickly finding a verse is an obvious advantage, but numbers are easy enough to distinguish from letters, and they were already in numerical order, so finding a verse can’t have been that difficult, even for a theologian with a morbid obsession about efficiency.

That would mean that for three hundred years (until the Revised Version of 1885), the whole English-speaking world was pretty much encouraged to read and quote out of context, except for those few Catholics in the 1600s who dared to possess an illegal bible (the old Douay, which was printed in paragraphs).

David.

Are you sure writing in paragraphs is most akin to the original sources? From what I understand ancient Greek and Hebrew were often written in blocks of lettering that would take up entire scrolls without paragraph or sentence breaks. So maybe the differences you noted between the Douay and KJV were two attempts to make the scriptures more readable to the modern, English reader already used to another style and format?

ChadS

 

[JRKH]

Are you sure writing in paragraphs is most akin to the original sources? From what I understand ancient Greek and Hebrew were often written in blocks of lettering that would take up entire scrolls without paragraph or sentence breaks. So maybe the differences you noted between the Douay and KJV were two attempts to make the scriptures more readable to the modern, English reader already used to another style and format?

ChadS

This is a good point the methods of writing in the NT times was quite different from our writing today. Yet another difference is that they did not have “upper and lower case” letters.

Peace
James

 

[dowiecritic]

Hmmm, I forgot about that. What’s more, the older Hebrew and Greek manuscripts didn’t even have spaces between the words.

I guess as soon as the Reformers (quite possibly Stephanus himself) started printing each verse on its own line, Catholics did the same, if only for comparison (and to look just as as ‘modern’ as the other lot). Two hundred years later, when Challoner started doing his revision, the English had already had the King James droned into themselves for well over a century, so “the faintly bishop” just had to give them what they were used to hearing and seeing.

Funnily enough, Tyndale’s bible was printed in paragraphs, as was Coverdale’s (judging from images.google.com). It’s a shame our bibles aren’t as trumpeted as the Protestant ones are :ehh: I’d love to know what fifteenth/sixteenth century Vulgates looked like.

Thankyou for your help.

David.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

I recall hearing that the breakdown into chapter and verse was to facilitate organizing the type for the printing press. Not sure how true that is.

 

[JRKH]

I recall hearing that the breakdown into chapter and verse was to facilitate organizing the type for the printing press. Not sure how true that is.

I rather doubt that. I don’t see what advantage that would have when every other book being printed did not use “verse” numbers.

I’ve always seen the Chapter and verse system as simply a convenient way for scholars and others, when writing to each other, to quickly reference passages without having to write them out each time.

Peace
James

 

[dowiecritic]

I rather doubt that. I don’t see what advantage that would have when every other book being printed did not use “verse” numbers.

I’ve always seen the Chapter and verse system as simply a convenient way for scholars and others, when writing to each other, to quickly reference passages without having to write them out each time.

Peace
James

We’re coming to what my question was all about.

The numbers themselves are not a problem. In fact, they are essential as you say for referencing, and also for comparing versions. The problem is that at some point it became something of a Tradition to print bibles “where each verse is a paragraph”. But when? Do any Vulgate scholars out there know what printed Vulgates looked like around the time of Trent and the Clementine Vulgate?

There has obviously never been a standardised scheme of paragraphing, but references to sections like “The Parable of the Good Shepherd” go back a long way, and there have been summaries of sorts.

I can find words to the effect “logicis partitionibus” from the mid-to-late 19th century onwards (Fillion; Hetzenauer; Colunga & Turrado). Before that, I find explicit mention of “versiculis distincta”, which would suggest that in previous editions “verses were not set off by new lines for clarity” (to quote Tan Books’ introduction to the DRB, who seemed not to be too concerned about context).

On the dowie critic:

I first got a Douay-Rheims about six or seven years ago, hoping to get closer to the Vulgate. And sure enough, the Dowie is almost literal to the point of being unreadable – a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that those broken English sentences are then broken up further by verse numbers that shout “I’m a paragraph, me!” So I gave up in disgust…

Six years later, I got myself one of those wonderful Confraternity bibles (you get them for the pictures, like playboy in reverse). I heaved (because it’s a big fellow), saw that it was mostly Challoner and groaned… BUT… the fact that the text is nicely joined up (interspersed with unobtrusive verse numbers) and has useful titles has made the whole thing come alive.

In the last month or two I got J.P. Arendzen’s “Douay” New Testament (1947, after Ronnie Knox’ translation had been authorised), which is a Challoner, nicely laid out in paragraphs with numbers in the margin, and conveniently the same size as the “Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints”. Now I’m beginning to think “this is rather nice” because, despite the obvious problems with the text itself, it reads like normal text. And when I got Fr. Pope’s “Layman’s New Testament” (1927/1934), to my surprise it too turned out to be paragraphed, and it even has marginal titles a la Fillion.

It’s strange that for a good three hundred years (four hundred even), there seems to have been a blindness to the fact that our bibles were encouraging us to quickly look up a single verse and (in all probably) ignore the rest. Dare I say there may even have been resistance to any change for the better, perhaps in the name of Tradition. Nowadays, the Douay stands alone (if you ignore its evil twin, the King James) in taking a verse by verse, blow by blow, legalistic approach to the scriptures. The very bible that is being touted as “the best, most accurate, safest bible”, perversely, lends itself most to a legalistic approach, and being read out of context – if you want to read it at all. What a shame.

David.

 

[Shin]

I like the Clementine Vulgate that you can get ahold of here.

The free PDF comes with either double column or single column, in paragraphs with the verse numbers superscripted.

 

[dowiecritic]

I like the Clementine Vulgate that you can get ahold of here.

The free PDF comes with either double column or single column, in paragraphs with the verse numbers superscripted.

Thankyou Shin. As far as I’m aware, VulSearch’s Douay-Rheims is also the only one on the internet that has any paragraphs. Unfortunately, you can’t browse your way to it, because it’s not in HTML (though you could convert it with the scripts). Michael Tweedale’s Clementine Vulgate is a breath of fresh air, imagine the frustration of looking for a Vulgate on the internet, and finding nothing but line-by-line lowercase, totally devoid of any punctuation.

David.

 

[bpbasilphx]

\Are you sure writing in paragraphs is most akin to the original sources? From what I understand ancient Greek and Hebrew were often written in blocks of lettering that would take up entire scrolls without paragraph or sentence breaks.\

**Not only that, frequently, there were not even word breaks in mss.

There were also abbreviations, contractions, and occasional misspellings!

Christian Bibles, however, tended to be in the form of the codex (similar to books today), rather than scrolls.**

 

[ChadS]

It’s strange that for a good three hundred years (four hundred even), there seems to have been a blindness to the fact that our bibles were encouraging us to quickly look up a single verse and (in all probably) ignore the rest. Dare I say there may even have been resistance to any change for the better, perhaps in the name of Tradition. Nowadays, the Douay stands alone (if you ignore its evil twin, the King James) in taking a verse by verse, blow by blow, legalistic approach to the scriptures. The very bible that is being touted as “the best, most accurate, safest bible”, perversely, lends itself most to a legalistic approach, and being read out of context – if you want to read it at all. What a shame.

David.

I suppose that after I read this post I’m curious why you believe the particular Bible layout was responsible for chapter & verse prooftexting or quoting out of context. Why couldn’t Protestant theology be responsible for that regardless of what format the Biblical text was in?

Was this same trend of chapter and verse prooftexting found among Catholics of the time? Has the trend subsided now that many Bibles are in paragraph form?

I just wonder if we’re trying to answer a red herring, where the response has more to do with theological presuppositions rather than text layout.

ChadS

 

[dowiecritic]

I suppose that after I read this post I’m curious why you believe the particular Bible layout was responsible for chapter & verse prooftexting or quoting out of context. Why couldn’t Protestant theology be responsible for that regardless of what format the Biblical text was in?

Was this same trend of chapter and verse prooftexting found among Catholics of the time? Has the trend subsided now that many Bibles are in paragraph form?

I just wonder if we’re trying to answer a red herring, where the response has more to do with theological presuppositions rather than text layout.

ChadS

I must confess, I’m a loss now. Let me summarise:

1. 
   *]Ignoring the very old manuscripts which do not even have spaces between words, it looks to me like older bibles were written as running text, with or without actual paragraph breaks. Examples are Codex Gigas (kb.se/codex-gigas/eng/), the Louvain Vulgate (images.google.com), Luther’s bible, Coverdale, Tyndale (all three, images.google.com). Not all these have verse numbers, but the Louvain Bible does (the Rheims scholars used that edition, because they were just before the Clementine).
   *]At some point the bible, in whatever translation, began to be printed almost exclusively in a line-by-line manner, with each verse on its own line or “paragraph”. The Geneva Bible certainly was, it may even have started with Stephanus himself (who started printing bibles “with verse numbers”, not sure whether verses were actually on separate lines.) Note Louvain and the old Rheims have verse numbers (presumeably same as Stephanus’) but running text with paragraphs. It looks to me like the Protestants started this trend, perhaps because they wanted to avoid “interpretation” (because they were into private interpretation and all that).
   *]While the old Douay-Rheims had running text and paragraphs (like the Louvain, it seems), Challoner did away with them in 1749, perhaps because by then the trend had become ‘tradition’. From then on all DRBs (with three New Testament exceptions, as far as I can tell) were printed that way. Note that there are a few sections where the Challoner and the Clementine Vulgate are one verse out of sync (or maybe it’s just the Tweedale edition). At that time, there were also Vulgates that explicitly stated they were printed in “distinct versicles”, suggesting that there was a move away from continuous text.
   *]In the mid to late 19th century, Vulgates were being printed, explicitly stating that they are “logically partitioned”, which suggests that they were moving away from the line-by-line format back to continuous text. Fr. Spencer’s New Testament, translated into English from the Greek (completed 1913 but not published until 1937has paragraphs, titles, and lots more (perhaps his 1898 four gospels did too, I don’t know). John Lingard’s anonymous four gospels of 1836 were line-by-line but had obvious gaps indicating identifiable sections. The Protestant Revised Version of 1885 had paragraphs, a definite move away from the King James.
   
   What I don’t know, and would like to find out, is whether seventeenth to nineteenth century Vulgates were always in “distinct versicles”, perhaps even starting with the first Clementine Vulgate. Was the first Clementine Vulgate immediately printed in versicles, or was it, like the Louvain, continuous text? Were there “logically partitioned” Vulgates before Fillion? I’m asking this here on the Traditionalist forum because there are bound to be people around who know a lot more about the Clementine Vulgate than I do (which is very little).
   
   …
   
   About chapter and verse proofreading. That certainly happened with the Douay-Rheims, as evidenced by the many different editions and printings, where often anonymous editors have mixed and matched verses from Challoner’s three New Testament editions, two Old Testaments and MacMahon’s later developments. Sometimes this was for a more correct rendering of the Clementine Vulgate, sometimes a matter of personal preference (e.g. ye or you), sometimes because Challoner’s 1752 edition was felt to be a little too like the Authorized Version (the King James). Sometimes you could only guess what was going on, perhaps a bit of typesetter’s “mad-eye”. Occasional errors and omissions were even perpetuated just like they were with the ancient manuscripts. Of course, a bishop could not be expected to scrupulously check every line before they gave their imprimatur, so quite often it would have been a quick scan over the top of each to page to check that it was “a faithful copy” of such and such edition, probably with a more detailed look at certain very important doctrinal passages. Pope & Bullough’s “English Versions of the Bible” is mind-boggling.
   
   About reading out of context, I’m struck that the Challoner and Haydock footnotes concentrate more on individual words than explain passages, but perhaps that is just the nature of commentary. I find newer bibles much better in that respect. But then quoting out of context is nothing new, it was nothing new at the time of the reformation, and even in the days of the Fathers it was nothing new. St. Peter himself complains that people are always misrepresenting Paul’s letters.
   
   …
   
   Please excuse my waffling. I’ll be more than happy just to know whether the earliest Clementine Vulgates were printed in paragraphs, or by verse. :compcoff:
   
   Thanks again,
   David.

 

[ChadS]

Obviously I don’t have the knowledge you desire to answer the question you put forth. However, I thought the one sentence in your original post was important to the question, but perhaps you just thought it was a throwaway line that didn’t deserve much attention.

You asked:

When did it all go wrong? Was this something Protestants introduced (because they like to “quote chapter and verse”), and did the Church jump on the band wagon?

I merely suggested that perhaps “quoting chapter and verse” has much more to do with theological presuppositions than text formatting. That’s why I said that trying to figure out when the change over was made from block text to line by line text may not be the key to unlocking why Protestants like to quote “chapter and verse.” I don’t think Catholics have ever been accused of being “chapter and verse” type of people either.

And if you want to focus on Haydock’s fixation on certain words as being related to the way the text was printed may I suggest that perhaps Haydocks concerns were more related to the state of Biblical scholarship at the time rather than him having to read in versicles.

ChadS

 

[dowiecritic]

I merely suggested that perhaps “quoting chapter and verse” has much more to do with theological presuppositions than text formatting. That’s why I said that trying to figure out when the change over was made from block text to line by line text may not be the key to unlocking why Protestants like to quote “chapter and verse.” I don’t think Catholics have ever been accused of being “chapter and verse” type of people either.

Ah, I see. No, my question was purely historical, if you like. When did we first start printing bibles in distinct versicles.

I agree that out of context quoting, and quoting chapter and verse probably came before context-free printing. Protestants, because they often know do know the chapter and verse number, will obviously be able to use that line-by-line bible very effectively (like a “who can find it first” sort of game). Your average Catholic who might think “the parable of such and such” (i.e. a context) would probably have been better served with one of today’s bibles, where we have paragraphs and titles (I know I certainly do, because I’m hopeless at using numbers, let alone remembering them).

I have to admit I don’t really know Haydock’s version that well, so I probably over-generalised there. But I can well understand your concern about the state of biblical scholarship at the time (and perhaps the way Modernism was developing at the time, if that is the real concern, though I can’t claim to understand either side of that).

It may be a reassurance that the Revised Version which came after Haydock (the Revised Version of the King James, that is) actually adopted renderings that the Douay-Rheims had been using for about three hundred years, and the Vulgate before that since time immemorial. So the state of biblical scholarship at the time was not entirely for the worse.

Maybe it’s time for me to thank all of you once again, and just leave this thread unanswered. Perhaps some good Vulgate scholar round here will stumble upon it some day, and answer my historical question out of the blue.

Blessings +
David.

 

[ChadS]

Thank you for the reply. I understand better what you are asking, unfortunately I can’t answer your question.

However I did a Google image search and came across an image for a Gutenberg bible that appeared to be printed in blocks of print, not even with any spaces for new paragraphs.

I wonder if part of your question could be answered in a broader history of printing in general. Maybe at some point in the timeline you’ve sketched out perhaps there was just a general shift in how certain material was printed. Other than that I don’t know.

ChadS