Meet the Two Men who divided the Bible into Chapters and Verses

The Bible is a compilation of many books written at different times by a variety of authors and later assembled into the biblical canon.

Unknown to many, early manuscripts of the biblical texts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form we know today. In the original Hebrew, texts were divided into paragraphs that were identified by two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Peh ( פ) indicated an “open” paragraph that began on a new line, while Samekh ( ס ) indicated a “closed” paragraph that began on the same line after a small space.

The question, however, is how the did chapters and verses entered the Bible and who were those behind the job? 

In answering these questions, we need to understand first that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses occurred at different dates in history and were done by different individuals. The division into chapters came first during the 13th century by Archbishop Stephen Langton.

In the early 13th century, Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro developed different schemas for the systematic division of the Bible. However, it is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions of the Bible are based.

Stephen Langton born in 1150, was an English Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and 1228. He died in July 1228.

Though chapter divisions have become nearly universal today, there are some other editions of the Bible that have been published without them. Such editions, which typically use thematic or literary criteria to divide the biblical books instead, include John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1707) and Alexander Campbell’s The Sacred Writings (1826).

The first person who attempted to divide the Bible into verses was an Italian Dominican biblical scholar, Santes Pagnino who lived between 1470 and 1541. Pagnino’s system was never widely adopted. His verse divisions in the New Testament were far longer than the ones we know today.

In 1551, Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French. Estienne’s system of division was widely adopted, and it is this system which is found in almost all modern Bibles. 

In a later date, 1555 to be precise, Estienne produced the first complete Bible to include the verse numbers integrated into the text. Before this work, verses were printed in the margins.

Robert Estienne known as Robertus Stephanus in Latin was born on 7th September 1503. He was a 16th-century printer and classical scholar in Paris and the proprietor of the Estienne print shop after the death of his father Henri Estienne, the founder of the Estienne printing firm. Estienne published and republished many classical texts as well as Greek and Latin translations of the Bible. 

He was a former Catholic who became a Protestant late in his life. Many of his published Bibles included commentary which upset the Catholic theologians of the Sorbonne who sought to censor Estienne’s work. Eventually, overcome by the prejudice of the Sorbonne, Estienne and his family fled to Geneva where he continued his printing uncensored, publishing many of the works of John Calvin. He became a citizen of Geneva in 1556, where he died on September 7, 1559.

Finally, it should be noted that Estienne’s works were mainly in French and Greek, the first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published shortly in 1560. These verse divisions soon gained acceptance as a standard way to notate verses, and have since been used in nearly all English Bibles and the vast majority of those in other languages.

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