Bible Study Tools: Chapter & Verse

Did you know that chapters and verses are not inspired? Did that get your attention? During the Medieval era of history, Stephen Langton from the University of Paris added chapters to the Biblical text so that passages could be referenced in commentaries. Roughly 350 years later (1550) a French scholar, Robert Estienne, who was working on a concordance to the Greek New Testament, started to put verses into the Biblical text. The addition of chapters and verses are certainly beneficial for us today, but sometimes they can be problematic as we read and study the Bible text. What we ought to do is pay attention to that natural structures and divisions that are placed in the text by the biblical authors because these markers are truly inspired.

Let me give you two examples. First, is the book of 1 Corinthians (which is the series that Pastor Lemming is currently preaching). Only two chapters (5 and 15) actually correspond to a single discussion, and several of his discussions span multiple chapters (1-4, 8-10, 12-14). The repetition of key phrases can be clues to an author’s structure. For Paul, in 1 Corinthians, take note of the phrase “now concerning,” because this is how he typically starts a new section. A second example is the book of Acts, which has a geographical flow to it. The gospel starts in Jerusalem, it extends to Judea and Samaria, and eventually to the rest of the world (Acts 1:8). This definitely makes for a great outline to trace the progress of the gospel, however, in the text itself, Luke writes a progress report (“the word of God grew and multiplied”) at the end of each section. Acts has seven of these, and they make a great way to study the book in author-inspired sections.

The easiest way to stay alert to a Bible author’s structure is the paragraph, which is inspired because it’s part of the biblical text. Most Bibles have paragraph markers next to the verses that start them, or other Bibles have the texted grouped into paragraphs (my preference). I can’t imagine how difficult it would be without chapters and verses, but sometimes man-made divisions can be a hinderance to understating the Bible’s inspired message.