The Bible:

Chapter and Verse.

Revised: August 2025

The Bibles we have available to us now (at least fifty or so English translations alone) are divided into books, chapters, and verses. However, the earliest biblical manuscripts (and of course the copies that underlie our modern editions) had no modern chapters or verses; early Greek witnesses are typically written in scriptio continua (continuous script) with minimal punctuation.

At the same time, ancient scribes did use paratextual helps—such as ekthesis (outdenting), paragraphoi (horizontal strokes), and, in the Gospels, systems like the Ammonian Sections and Eusebian Canons—and the Hebrew Bible long preserved ancient verse endings (sôf pasûq) and section breaks (parashot), later accompanied by the Masoretic accent system, which functions as both punctuation and cantillation.[1][2]

In the early thirteenth century, the familiar chapter divisions were introduced—commonly attributed to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, as an aid to study—and these were carried into the English tradition via the Wycliffe Bible (1382). Related medieval systems associated with Hugh of St. Cher helped facilitate concordances and cross-referencing in the Latin tradition.[3][4]

In the sixteenth century, Robert Estienne (Stephanus) added a further improvement by dividing the New Testament into numbered verses in his 1551 Greek New Testament (and in his 1553 French Bible), with a fully versified Latin Vulgate in 1555.[5] For the Old Testament, the division into verses is ancient in the Hebrew tradition; what early modern printers did was to number those verses systematically in Western Bibles. Santes (Sanctes) Pagnino’s Latin translation (1528) advanced this printed numbering of the Hebrew verses, and Estienne’s 1555 Vulgate standardised it widely. “Rabbi Nathan” (Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus), working circa 1437–1448, did not invent Old Testament verses; rather, he produced a Hebrew concordance that adopted the Latin chapter numbers to facilitate cross-referencing in Hebrew usage.[2][6]

The Geneva Bible (1560) then popularised the combined chapter-and-verse system in English, and pretty much all Bibles since have followed that numbering, with only minor variations.[7][8]

The challenge is that the chapter and verse numberings, while helpful, are artificial and don’t always help us get the most from what’s being read. That’s because the chapter and verse divisions don’t always align with the thoughts and concepts being explained.

There is a classic example in Romans. An entire conceptual movement is being explained by Paul that many interpreters trace from Romans 7:1 (or 7:7) through to Romans 8:11. (By the way, in Bible study a set of verses that make up a single, coherent unit or thought is called a pericope—Koine Greek περικοπή, perikopē: literally, “a cutting around,” i.e., an excerpt or discrete unit.)

The current chapter and verse system sometimes (but not always) breaks up biblical pericopes; that is arguably the case here in Romans. Romans 8:1 (“There is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus”) both concludes the preceding argument and inaugurates Paul’s Spirit-centred exposition that follows, so the chapter break between Romans 7 and 8 can obscure the flow of thought if we treat it as a hard boundary.[9][10]

Sometimes pericopes begin or end in the middle of a verse that we would usually treat as a single unit, but which actually contains two parts. For example, Acts 10 is commonly divided into two pericopes that split at verse 23: the first runs from Acts 10:1 through the first part of v. 23 (“…he invited them in to be his guests”), and the second begins with the following clause of v. 23 (“On the next day he rose and went away with them…”) and runs through v. 48. Modern critical editions and many translations mark this internal break (23a/23b), illustrating how pericopes can cross verse boundaries.[11]

Often, the differences between “chapter and verse” and pericopes are slight, but not always. Sometimes our chapter-and-verse overlay can lead to mistaken understandings or to misplaced emphasis or inference.

An improvement on “chapter and verse” reading of the New Testament (I think so anyway) is reading by concept or thought groups—the pericopes.

Below is a New Testament pericope outline created by Ivan Panin and used in his Greek and English Numeric New Testaments. It makes sense to me and has helped improve my understanding of the Word, as well as in setting up reading plans based on concepts or thought groupings (pericopes) rather than artificial chapters and verses.

A brief caution is in order: Panin’s numerical theories are widely disputed in scholarship; use any pericope helps for reading clarity, but anchor exegesis in standard textual, literary, and historical tools.[12][13] The order of the pericopes in the table below (from the top to the bottom of each column, starting with Matthew’s Gospel) is the order that Panin uses.

In summary, the order is as follows: the Gospels, Acts, the letters of James, Peter, John, and Jude, the letters of Paul, and finally Revelation—a sequence that also mirrors a well-attested order in the Greek tradition.[12]

Footnotes

1. Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 22–38.
2. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 45–46 (ancient verse division; sôf pasûq) and 61–69 (Masoretic accents and cantillation) [page range to be verified].
3. Bruce M. Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 28–29.
4. Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (New York: Anchor, 2002), 118–121.
5. Metzger, The Bible in Translation, 37–38.
6. Jack P. Lewis, The Story of the Bible: How It Came to Us (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 58–60.
7. McGrath, In the Beginning, 134–140.
8. David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4–6.
9. Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, 2nd ed., Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 396–402 (on Romans 8:1 as both inference and heading).
10. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 476–485.
11. Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), Acts 10:23 (paragraphing and clause division).
12. Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 47–50 (on traditional book orders and paratext).
13. Ivan Panin, The New Testament From the Greek Text As Established By Bible Numerics. (2nd ed. Reprint, 1973. Toronto, The Book Society of Canada, 1966).

New Testament Pericopes



Legend:

1. Each table cell has an entry for a single "pericope" of the New Testament. Remember a pericope is a set of verses from the scripture that make up a single, coherent unit or thought.
2. (-a) means that the pericope ends half way through the last verse in the reference. E.g. "1Corinthians 2:1-16 to 1Corinthians 3:2 (-a)" means the pericope starts at 1Corinthians 2:1 and ends after the first section of 1Corinthians 3:2
3. (b-) means that the pericope begins with the second half of the first verse in the reference. E.g. "1Corinthians 3:2-17 (b-)" means that the pericope starts with the second half of 1Corinthians 3:2 and ends at 1Corinthians 3:17.
4. [xx not original] indicates that the verse in question is almost certainly not in the original New Testament documents. There are a number of verses that fall into this category - not all of them are shown here. It's a whole other story involving a King, some "Divines", politics and incomplete information.