Many of the things created to enhance our ability to navigate life have unintended consequences that can sometimes offset their benefits. Google Maps, for example, is a huge help when driving across town or across the country. But its ubiquity and reflexive use have made non-map readers of us. (Remember Rand McNally road atlases?)
In the same way, the numbered divisions in Scripture that the we know as chapters and verses are deeply ingrained in our conscious and unconscious experience of the Bible. Conscious, because we use them to study, teach, and write about the Bible. Unconscious, because we would struggle to imagine a Bible without them. They are there to help us navigate, but at the same time, something might be lost in their ubiquity and reflexive use.
Relative Latecomers
The divisions of the biblical books first appeared in the 13th century (chapters) and the 16th century (verses), which means that for more than millennium, Jews and Christians read their Scriptures with no such divisions and markers to aid their reading. So, what are the implications of this inherited convention? How does it affect our experience of the Bible, and how does it impact our exegesis and subsequent hermeneutics?
The breakup of biblical books into chapters and verses is undeniably helpful for studying and teaching from the Scriptures. But these elements lend a potentially disjointed, atomistic character to the text. This, in turn, enables easy decontextualization of any given passage as well as the ability to marshal a collection of passages to make a point that the larger context of any given verse so employed may not justify. Christians often speak of citing “book, chapter, and verse” as a means of giving authority to a statement they are making. Unfortunately, decontextualized citations make it possible to justify nearly anything, or in a best case scenario use the wrong passages to make a valid point.
A Couple of Thought Experiments
A good thought experiment in this regard is to imagine how you might read the Bible differently without chapter and verse divisions.1 Would you be forced to gain greater facility with the full text of a given book? Would you, by necessity, grasp the greater context and continuity of what you read? Would that lead to greater exegetical integrity and more thoughtful, responsible teaching?
Another thought experiment is to imagine how the earliest Christians might have read one of Paul’s letters that were copied and passed around among multiple churches. Would they have read a few sentences (verses) one day, put the letter away, and then read a few more sentences the next day, and so on, until they had worked through the letter over a week or two? It’s pretty intuitive that they would have read it (as a community) in its entirety, just as you would devour a letter from a dear friend.
The Evangelical Penchant for Low-Context Citation
Rare on a Sunday morning in most Evangelical churches is the reading of long passages of Scripture, let alone a larger cycle of readings used by older church institutions. The dominant Evangelical approach to preaching on a topic is to pull diverse citations from multiple books of the Bible in order to make a theological or doctrinal point.2 While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it can sometimes break asunder the internal unity of a given book of the Bible. It also enables the promulgation of nearly any point of view. In the hands of responsible teachers and scholars, such proof-texting can be beneficial. But that approach can be dangerous for less well-trained teachers, let alone charlatans with some sort of an agenda.
For Christians who aren’t regular readers of extensive portions of the Bible, a large-context “aerial view” of the Scriptures may go unrealized for years, maybe even a lifetime. They will have been trained and conditioned by the way Scripture is used in sermons to read passages out of context. So, perhaps pastors and teachers in the church would do well to 1) model greater use of extended context when teaching or preaching, and 2) encourage the flock to read large portions—entire books—of the Bible.
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The Bibles we own today, with their closed canon, traditional ordering of the books, and chapter and verse divisions would have been foreign to the followers of Jesus in the first several centuries of the Christian era. They would have had no idea what a “Bible” is. I’m guessing they would have been grateful for the chapter and verse formatting we enjoy, but they did just fine without it.
- The ESV reader’s Bible is one such translation (https://www.crossway.org/bibles/esv-readers-bible-cob/) ↩︎
- As a test, I asked an AI tool to create a homily on generosity using five OT and NT scriptures. It took it less than 30 seconds to produce a rather good, if somewhat flat, lesson. ↩︎
