[lbo-talk] Americans and the bible

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Thu Mar 25 15:06:18 PDT 2010


much later. Chapter divisions in the 13th century, and modern versification and numbering in the middle of the 16th century. There are longer traditions of something like paragraphing in both the NT and Tanakh (including numbering), but neither has anything to do with the modern divisions.

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Jeffrey, was the Bible originally organized into chapters and verses
> (whatever "originally" means here), or was that done later?
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>
>
> One of the things I've started doing recently, when I'm teaching Biblical
> material in some other class, is that I will grab a chunk of the text that
> I
> want and format it for them like a single continuous plain old story -- no
> chapters and verse numbers (I usually provide line numbers so that we can
> refer to the text in discussion). It suddenly becomes a real live story,
> with characters, and motives, and things happening, instead of a reference
> book with long chains of statements only in passing connected to the
> material around them, which is what it's currently presented as.
>
> I keep wishing someone -- and it's a little surprising that Eerdman's or
> Fortress don't do this, as much as it is that Oxford or Penguin hasn't, yet
> -- would publish a complete Bible without chapters and verses. KJV is in
> the
> public domain, afaik, but it's not what I would want for studying the
> Bible,
> or I would just take that and do it my own self. You could use line
> numbers,
> and/or provide marginal references to chapters and verses (along the lines
> of teh way that Plato and Aristotle are typically handled in a Penguin
> Classics volume).
>
> In fact, this has always seemed to me like a no-brainer volume for Penguin
> Classics. I would use it for all my classes where they need to buy a Bible.
> And I have colleagues (religious ones, too) who agree.
>
>
>
>
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>



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