Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 25

The earliest Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the Bible lack any chapter or verse numbering (see Figure 0.2). The Hebrew Bible was divided into sections for reading in the synagogue, and the Greek New Testament was divided into sections as well, but there were no numbers in these early manuscripts.

Verse divisions were first added into the Hebrew Bible (without numbers) by the Masoretes, a group of Jewish scholars who worked in the seventh to tenth centuries CE and produced the standard edition of the Hebrew Bible now used in Judaism. The chapter divisions we now have were developed in 1205 by Stephen Langton, a professor in Paris and eventually an archbishop of the Church of England. He introduced them into his edition of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, and these divisions were later adopted by Jewish scholars as they became popular means to refer to biblical passages.

The first Old Testament and New Testament Bible with numbered verses was produced in 1555 by a Parisian book seller, Robert Estienne (also known as Stephanus). He is reported to have divided a copy of his New Testament into the present 7,959 verses while riding on horseback from Paris to Lyon. He also numbered the chapters and verses of both the Old and New Testament. Now these verses are found in scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible (see Figure 0.1 on p. 8) and in translations of the Bible.