my first thread, so be gentle. sorry if this is the wrong forum; i’m not sure i’m up to a debate on the subject, but i’m interested in finding out what people think.
both me and my husband were raised in what you call “full-bible” churches; that is, churches that teach that every single word in the christian bible was dictated by god and is literally true. (i have some relatives who say that’s only true of the king james version.) one thing that happens in such churches is that a minister will say he is preaching on a particular bible verse or verses. that is, he’ll say “today’s topic is luke 3:16”, in which john the baptist says he is not worthy to loosen the thongs of jesus’s sandal. often you’ll hear a minister give 4 or 5 verses at the beginning of his sermon, verses from different books even, and weave them all together.
the thing is, if i understand this right, the bible wasn’t written that way. luke didn’t break his books into chapters and verses; it was all one continuous narrative. they didn’t have paragraphs back then, even, because paragraphs are a convention of the printing press. so luke would have thought of the story he was telling as 1 continous unit instead of something you cld break up into many small parts. it was a stew, not a shish-kebab. but when people see the bible broken up that way they are encouraged to look at it in an inaccurate way.
I participated in a week-long study of the first 1/3 of the book of Mark, and part of the deep reading that we did included deciding, on our own, where the breaks should be. The manuscripts we had were printed with no punctuation or section breaks of any kind.
Of the part that we studied, we very rarely differed from the “accepted” chapter and verse breaks. In all but one case, after being told what the generally acknowledged reasoning for putting the break in a certain place, we agreed that it made more sense than where we had placed the break. In only one case were we unconvinced, and even that case was pretty equivocal, and not a fundamental difference, either. I could see how it easily could have been broken up either way, and both had a pretty similar message.
I should point out that I’m an atheist, and was participating in the bible study as an educational experience. Most of the other participants were devout Christians. While we disagreed on many interpretations of the text, I don’t recall any substantial disagreement over the organization of the text.
Given how much study has been put into the Bible, I would guess that the vast majority of such section breaks only add clarity. I’m sure you could find places where an unorthodox reading would change the meaning, but in general, the annotation is both helpful and innocuous.
I’m not too hot on the New Testament, but what we call a verse in the Old Testament was the Hebrew equivalent of a sentence (structural differences in the languages mean that a Hebrew verse is sometimes a part of an English sentence and sometimes more than one English sentence), so the verses definitely have validity there.
Priceguy, do you have a source for your statements regarding Hebrew sentences? (And, of course, if this is true of Hebrew, it has no serious effect on those portions of the bible written in Greek.)
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I would tend to figure that for the most part the text is sufficiently coherent that paragraph and chapter breaks would not seriously compromise the intention of the final authors. I do not recall any doctrinal disputes that resulted from such divisions. (Given that the divisions were not implemented until the Werstern Church had already begun to fragment during the era of the Reformation, it is unlikely that any serious doctrinal disputes would have arisen based on the chapters.)
OTOH, there are a lot of silly claims made by preachers and polemecists (as opposed to theologians) that use the chapter breaks in odd ways to create homilies or “popular” appeals that employ the chapter breaks. (E.g., no serious scholar is unaware that the division between the two Creation stories occurs between Genesis 2:3 and 2:4, although I have encountered odd claims by (only a very few) preachers attaching the first three verses of chapter 2 to the second story in an effort to claim that the second story provides no contradictions to the first.)
Such errors are more likely to occur when all three of the following conditions are met:
the person is a biblical literalist;
the person is engaged in exegesis based strictly on a translation (such as English) rather than the original texts;
the person has a preconceived theology that relies on the first two conditions for support.
Google Books turned up this. See first paragraph of page 17. Any Hebrew Bible with verse numbering will show that the sof passuq ends verses, and any translation shows that verses don’t correspond exactly with English sentences.
tomndebb, can you explain why the gen. 2:1-3 shd be thought of as belonging to the 1st story and not the 2nd? bcz i’ve heard that there are supposed to be 2 separate creation stories, but if that is so, why was the narrative broken up that way?
The first narrative begins in Gn 1:1 and ends at Gn 2:3. Breaking the text into (artificial) chapters based on some arbitrary criterion began around the twelfth century (earlier than I had recalled–I suspect that I was recalling printed divisions). Several different commentators created different methods of breaking up the text. The method employed by Stephen Langton (ca 1150 - 1228) is the one that eventually won out. While it is generally understood that Langton was setting up break points to permit easier cross-referencing for his commentaries, I have never seen the purported logic he employed to break the chapters where he did. Number of words (in Hebrew or Greek or Latin)? Length of lines (in Hebrew or Greek or Latin)? A separate understanding of what the text meant? I don’t know. However, since he was a prolific commentator (while at the University of Paris, before he became Archbishop of Canterbury), it was useful for later commentators to use his number system so that they could cite the same passages either to agree with him or to disagree with him. His system was apparently pretty popular as Jewish publications using the same system began appearing in 1330.
As to how we know that Gn 2:1 - 3 belongs to the first story and not the second, we look at the very formalized construction of the narrative, employing parallels and repeated ideas. In those three verses, first it notes that God had completed his work, (paralleling but completing his “let there be…” constructions), then it notes that he rested, (paralleling his actual actions or works on the first six days; then it notes that he blessed it in direct parallel to the blessing he extends at the completion of each day’s work. (I will note, in passing, that some scholars divide Gn 2:4 into two separate sentences, ascribing the first as the conclusion of the first story and the second as the intro to the second story. That discussion is not really relevant to this thread, so I have simply lumped all of Verse 4 into the second story to highlight that the first story extends across the borders of chapters.)
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