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HOW THE TEXT WAS FORMED

It is likely that you have said or heard someone say, “My favorite Scripture is...” or, “The one verse I build my life upon is…” The heart behind such statements may very well be pure; however, it may shock you to know that for the majority of the history of the church such statements would not have been uttered, because they would not have made any sense.

The original manuscripts of the Bible did not contain chapters or verses. Biblical Hebrew even lacks punctuation. Imagine trying to read such writing today! It wasn’t until approximately 1227 when Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, began adding chapter divisions to the Bible. Then, in 1551, Robert Estienne added verse divisions to the Greek New Testament. This led to the Geneva translation, which was the first translation to incorporate the chapter and verse divisions throughout its entirety.

Today, we have the luxury of having Bibles, which contain chapter and verse divisions, footnotes, headings and subheadings. We even have amazing access to the Bible electronically through things such as the YouVersion Bible APP! However, these useful advancements can also be a hindrance to doing the hard work of seeking the original meaning of the author. The interpreter of today must guard against an over-reliance on chapter and verse divisions so that he or she does not take Scripture out of context.

A lack of chapter and verse divisions was not an issue for the early church or the first theologians. There are over 1 million quotations by the early church fathers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of what was eventually canonized as the Bible. This meant that those church leaders had to read the entire letter of Matthew or Galatians in order to reference a specific part from those letters. 

The important thing for us to remember from a hermeneutic perspective is that because the Bible was not written in chapter and verse format, when we quote a particular scripture as chapter 3, verse 12, that verse (to us) was and is part of a larger sentence and a larger thought and a larger letter. Keeping this in mind will help us to keep Scriptures and stories within their original context. In this way, we allow the text to speak for itself and the meaning the author intended to remain intact.