We are so accustomed to quoting chapter and verse, it’s hard to imagine the Bible without these designations. But they are a relatively recent introduction.
It’s always important to remember that ancient manuscripts generally did not have spacing or punctuation, let alone chapters and verses. Catholic Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, is generally credited with the modern system of chapters around 1227.
About 300 years later, in the mid-1500s, Protestant printer Robert Estienne published the first Greek New Testament text using Langton’s chapter numbers and introducing a system of verse numbers. A few years later, in 1555, he published the entire Latin Vulgate with chapter and verse numberings. Estienne lived during the Protestant Reformation, and his numbering system quickly became a standard for the many Bibles being translated into vernacular languages. In 1592, the first official Catholic Vulgate edition was published utilizing Estienne’s numbering.
In the modern era, many “study Bibles” began to appear, and these introduced subtitles within the text.
While chapters, verses, and subtitles can be helpful, they can also be distracting, and they can obscure connections. If two stories are delineated with chapters and subtitles, you might miss a connection between them. Or if two verses are separated by numbers, you might not always see a connection. It’s also important to understand how much subtitles can influence the interpretation of a text.
I always advocate using multiple translations for Bible study. An ideal addition to those translations is at least one Bible that does not contain subtitles. I’m still looking for a Bible that minimizes the chapter and verse designations, although The Message comes closest to that ideal. Find out more about different translations of the Bible here.