Chapters and Verses
Chapter and verse divisions in the Bible were not part of the original manuscripts! Moses and Paul never knew about them.
The verse divisions used in Bibles today were made by printer Robert Estienne (also called Robert Stephanus) as he traveled from Paris to Lyons in France. Estienne most likely did the work when he stopped at inns along the way, but because his divisions are sometimes not logical and come in the middle of sentences, he is accused of doing the work on horseback as he rode. Wherever his pen came down as the horse went up was where a new verse started, it is said.
The books and letters that make up the Bible did not have chapter and verse divisions when they were written. Early Jewish scribes made verse divisions both to aid reading as well as to guard against the addition of new verses.
In the fourth century, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, divided each of the four gospels into numbered sections (355 sections for Matthew, 235 for Mark, 343 for Luke, and 232 for John) and then placed the numbers in charts to indicate parallel passages. These charts, called “canon tables,” were popular in the Middle Ages. These numbered sections were an early effort to make it easy to find portions of Scripture.
Many medieval Bibles were divided into chapters, but the divisions were inconsistent. Exodus, which now has 40 chapters, was sometimes divided into as many as 130 chapters and Mark, which now has 16 chapters, was sometimes divided into more than 40 chapters.
Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1228, is credited with making in the chapter divisions we use today. Most Bibles after 1240 include Langton’s chapters.
Modern verse divisions first appeared in a Greek New Testament published in 1551 by Robert Estienne. Four years later Estienne published a complete Latin Vulgate Bible, the first complete Bible containing modern chapter and verse divisions. The Geneva Bible (1560), which was designed to make the Bible accessible, included them as have almost all Bibles—Protestant, Catholic, and even many Jewish Scriptures—ever since.