Maybe like me you’ve read some arguments based on chapter and verse.I should mention that I mean chapter and verse in the Bible.The typical scenario will go like this: Genesis (say) uses this word three times in chapter 38.The case then often slips to making a point on the number of instances a word or phrase occurs within a circumscribed set of verses.(The actual word doesn’t matter—this is a thought experiment.)When I ran into an example of this a few days ago a thought occurred to me: chapters and verses are later additions to the biblical text.They were never part of the original and were only added because Bible readers got tired of saying “That part in Genesis where…”In other words, chapter and verse are artificial means of interpreting the Bible.They’re very useful for taking quotes out of context.
I used to tell my students that you have to think carefully about what is the Bible and what isn’t.As a culture where the book has instant recognition, we tend to think of that discrete unit of pages and cover as coming from one person—the author.In reality most books (I can’t speak for the self-published) are the work of several people.Just like it takes a community to raise a child, it also takes one to assemble a book.That includes the Good Book.Not everything between the covers is sacred text.I’m pretty sure about that since as I was glancing through the latest edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible I found my own name in the Preface.As much as I’d like to claim otherwise I’m not exactly biblical.
Modern ways of looking at ancient texts require a degree of facility in understanding how God’s scribes of yesteryear went about their work.While early experiments in binding books may go back close to the time when the latter parts of the Bible were being written, the scroll—without chapter and verse—contained only the words of the text.Most ancient manuscripts in Greek, anyway, didn’t even bother to put spaces between the words.That leaves some room for ambiguity in among all those letters.The Bible is a complex book with a complex history.We do it a disservice as modern readers treating it as a modern book.If you read Scripture online, or via electronic media, an even further layer of interpretation has been added.That’s why we still need Bible scholars tangled somewhere in this world-wide web.
