One of the most interesting things to happen to the scriptures is their balkanization into verses. We generally don't atomize other writings that way, and when folks read the scriptures as a series of disconnected logical propositions all sorts of wackiness ensues. What would it look like to have an API for the collected works of Jane Austen that returned snippets (some of which are not even complete sentences)? How would that shape the way we read, say, Persuasion?
That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment that is diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures, which emphasizes their unity and their role in liturgical worship.
Good observation, but I think it's overstated. I don't know many people who read the bible as a series of disconnected logical propositions, they mainly read it in much longer sections covering some topic.
Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.
In this usage, it's very similar to the way we cite Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Milton, etc. For example, the St. Crispin's day speech in Henry V is at IV.iii.18-67, and any Shakespearean actor, fan, or scholar knows what that means, but that notation doesn't force them to think of the play as merely a set of disconnected speeches.
>> One of the most interesting things to happen to the scriptures is their balkanization into verses. We generally don't atomize other writings that way, and when folks read the scriptures as a series of disconnected logical propositions all sorts of wackiness ensues.
> Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.
It's also worth noting that the Bible is a text that pre-dates the printing press. Modern citation technology (cite edition and page number) depends on having standardized, mass-produced editions. It makes sense that closely-analyzed texts that only appeared in hand-made bespoke editions would need a different system.
Edit: This is a pretty interesting topic. Looks like the chapter/verse divisions were standardized after the printing press, but had roots in earlier systems of division [1]. Plato and Aristotle also got standardized sub-page-level citation systems around the same time [2].
You make a good point, but I think your making the academic argument rather than the practical argument. Yes, scholars and avid Bible readers understand the exact location of a verse based on its Biblical coordinates, but plenty of others don’t. In practice, it is far more common to see the Bible quoted as a small snippet meant to re-enforce some other point. The Twitter feed of Senator Marco Rubio is a good example.
I think what you're saying is right on. But I do know the occasion where someone will take a verse by itself and consider it a single logical unit where they get all meaning, understanding, etc. from that one verse and nothing else. It's just a learning point is all. I've always been taught to take the scripture as a whole and not just take one verse for understanding.
I'm thinking, for example, of the RCL, which often breaks passages mid chapter and occasionally omits individual verses. What sort of Christian community do you mostly know?
If you said "The St. Crispin's day speech" I'd immediately know what you mean. I'm definitely a Shakespeare fan, but would have no idea which act, scene, &c. that speech occupies. I'd wager that's much less true of the scriptures in many circles.
> I don't know many people who read the bible as a series of disconnected logical propositions
It's common to quote short passages (1-3 verses) in society, either to prove a point (often missing context) or in a "thought for the day" manner. Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.
Correct, its very seldom indeed any other work - ancient or modern - is quoted in this way. You have entire generations of Christians thinking only in isolated "memory verses".
One wonders if this practice is connected to the degradation and commercialisation of worship and countless trivial splits. It just doesn't make for lucid thinking or deep understanding of any work.
It is worth noting that the chapter divisions came long before the verse divisions. For reading, the chapters are as helpful as they are in any other book. I recall the verses were introduced around the time of the Geneva Bible and were intended to cross-reference for the purpose of arguing doctrine. Perhaps useful for scholars - who'd already be deeply familiar with the text as a unit - but hardly a method for comprehension of the books as a whole.
Edit: This discussion reminds me of the so-called Reader's Bibles which were made a few years ago. They present the text as a flowing single-paragraph, with minimal distractions. One such example is the ESV Reader's Bible: https://www.bibledesignblog.com/2014/06/crossway-esv-readers...
> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world
On the contrary, the atomization and recombination of the text into new meanings is highly characteristic of Midrash. Of course, this isn't the same as the "prooftext" hermeneutic I think you're criticizing.
Even Jesus himself often referred to specific verses in the Old Testament: "Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7; cf. Luke 4:12)" "“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’” (Matthew 5:38)" So the Scripture must have been "Balkanized" before Christianity existed. Which is not so strange given that it served both as religion and as a code of law.
It probably began as a reference scheme for scholars, by scholars. The same thing has happened to other ancient texts, like the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer.
You can refer to The Republic 327a1, or Book 1 line 230 of The Odyssey, and people who study ancient Greek texts will immediately figure out which line you're talking about. Those references aren't complete sentences, either. Apparently it didn't matter to the people who first came up with the numbering scheme. The Plato reference format is actually nothing more than the page, column, and line number of a particular edition that happened to stick.
Indeed - and I'd say that the division of those sources has been broadly restricted to scholars, and that those scholars broadly also read those ancient texts in the enlightenmenty way that I'm suggesting does violence to them.
This is exactly it. The chunking of chapters and verses was so monks could verify their copies. Imagine a monastery, with 100 scholars who are tasked with copying the entire bible, with duplicates. The best way to verify that it was copied correctly is to do spot-checks where the source and transcribed documents are compared on certain chapters and verses.
At this point, I don't think it's necessary to split them up for making copies. That said, a lot of churches have integrated chapter/verse look ups as part of their service/sermons/bible studies, so it would be very difficult to remove them now.
The Bible was not written as single work the way novels like Persuasion are though. It is really a collection of books of very different origins and genre. Some books are laws where individual rules can be examined and there are collections of proverbs. But there are also parts which are longer narratives.
I think my point, though, that the unit of thought in the scriptures is not the atomic verse, still stands. If you'd like to emend "collected works of Jane Austen" to "collected works of 19th century authors", feel free.
No, but single narratives have been done -- Tolstoy's "The Gospel in Brief" is a nice example that both captures his interpretation of Christianity and ties explicitly back to the original verses. And its Tolstoy, so it makes a nice read :)
> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment that is diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures, which emphasizes their unity and their role in liturgical worship.
I just had to quote that sentence construction without comment.
But to reply to it more coarsely: who are you to define what a "Christian reading" of the bible is? As I see it, watching from outside the community, the piecewise selective quoting is very much a fundamental part of the practice of Christianity in the modern world -- especially of the evangelical Christianity that dominates in the USA.
I mean, I agree it's dumb. I just don't see why it's not "Christian". Christians are what Christians do.
This is generally not true. Try to replace "Christian" with "Atheist" or "Gnostic" and see how far this travels. While there are, I suppose, some distinctive practices that characterize various systems of belief (or disbelief), what distinguishes Christianity from, say, Judaism, is a set of irreconcilable beliefs (e.g., that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah). It is true that practices might distinguish religious groups (e.g., Orthodox Jews eat no pork, which is allowed to Christians), but those practices directly correlate to beliefs (Peter, citing Jesus, declares all meats clean in the New Testament).
No, religions are not merely practice: they are creedal, too. One who rejects the virgin birth is per se not Christian, at least if the word "Christian" means anything.
Sure - by "Christian reading", I mean something like the practice of the ancient church that canonized the scriptures. That there should be normative Christian practice and reading is, perhaps, controversial, but a claim I'm happy to make. Modern American evangelicals who read the scriptures that way are doing it wrong and should knock it off.
The scriptures weren't atomized into verses until scholars of the 15th century wanted to work on them. The practice you see today is an outgrowth of that epistemology, and greatly to the detriment of Christian witness, theology, and practice.
> I mean, I agree it's dumb. I just don't see why it's not "Christian". Christians are what Christians do.
But American evangelical Protestants are a small minority of global Christianity. Catholics and Orthodox take a different approach, one which emphasises the binding role of church Tradition in interpreting the Bible, an idea which Protestants reject.
I agree that it is a very interesting topic. Even the chapter breaks can be a real issue for a theologian. I believe there are some stories in the gospels which are consecutive in multiple books, but split by a chapter break in others. There are arguments in the epistles which span multiple chapters. But to the modern reader a chapter break implies a stopping point. Which might lead you to misunderstand the author’s intent.
Is "balkanization" really a general term for "dividing into parts" ? I think some sort of both internal and geopolitical strife needs to be involved.
And verses are not disconnected logical propositions, they are a structure between a sentence and a chapter aka. a paragraph. If anything - the grouping of verses into chapters is far more arbitrary than that of sentences into verses.
I agree that it's odd that we have atomized the writings in the scriptures. You can find reader's editions if you want to remove the verses structure.
However, I don't agree that the verses are "diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures". I believe that there is room for both reading whole books and reading short quotes.
For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking John 3:16 out of context because it is a very straightforward verse. It's really nice to be able to share verses easily by giving a <Book> <Chapter>:<Verse>. There is danger though when we do that with all verses of scripture, and we should be careful to study the context for verses before coming to any conclusion.
The key is to actually study the scriptures, and not just take the easy route and find verses that make you feel good about yourself. But that's easier said than done.
So, having read the whole of what you wrote, the reason not to do both is that atomization promotes an epistemology that does grave violence to Christian belief. God's self revelation could have been a math textbook: a collection of independent propositions related by logical necessity. But it's not.
His self revelation is a person who has a story and who tells stories. When we atomize the scriptures, we're implicitly constructing an argument against the epistemology that God has revealed in the scriptures. That's the thing that Satan does in the wilderness when he puts Jesus to the test. We ought not lead others into that time of trial.
So the convenience of being able to cite a verse as quick shorthand comes at the price of a profound argument against the coherent truth of the scriptural witness.
Well, some books of the bible are more aphoristic, like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, as are plenty of other ancient texts like the Quran or the Sutras or the Tao te Ching. There's also Jewish numerology, and the mystical(?) idea that the arrangement of the letters in the Pentateuch is only one of many possible perfect combinations. The concept of divine infallibility definitely has a lot of weird implications, or semi-implications that people just run with. Conversely, the cipher-like quality of the scriptures is what makes them so hermeneutically fun, especially for all those violent little cults that have a way of taking over the world.
Ecclesiastes is very easy to take out of context. Individual verses seem like nice aphorisms, but the book as a whole is actually quite skeptical and even critical, at least of certain worldviews. In some ways, it's a series of rejections of easy answers.
King James Version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
It was a neat little project at the time, but due to copyrights, I didn't get as far as I would have liked... I had planned on making a `diff` tool for bible verses between versions.
There's a ton of work getting the data into the correct format for this API. I, too, would love to have Greek and Hebrew available, but I'm glad that we have at least as much as this.
The problem (which Shakespeare also has[1]) is that there are numerous versions of the texts in their original languages, with no particularly definitive or even consistent editions of the Old Testament in Hebrew or the New Testament in Greek AFAIK. Not to mention, the original Mosaic writings have been completely lost to time, having been written in Ugaritic and not Hebrew.
While not an API with multiple translations, there are sophisticated desktop software packages like "Accordance Bible" (https://www.accordancebible.com/) that will let one view any chosen, supported, English translation side-by-side with the original language (usually Hebrew or Greek) for that same passage. The software also will follow quasi-word-for-word the text your cursor hovers in one view to the analog in the other view it's translated from or to. This shows there's been considerable effort in mapping the translations and original languages back and forth and making them easily accessible.
For an example of a direct use of this feature, reference Chris Roseborough's "Fighting for the Faith" YouTube series where he often uses this feature of Accordance Bible, along with his knowledge of the original languages and the built-in original-language dictionaries and thesaurus to analyze heretical or erroneous interpretations and applications of biblical text made by what he deems the myriad "false teachers" in current "evangelical" preacher-dom. For example of use of this particular word-for-word feature look at the video shortly after https://youtu.be/tFeF04F8Tf8?t=828 (a critique of Joel Osteen's "prosperity preaching"). At around 14:01 in the video you'll start seeing the Greek text analogs highlight as the cursor drifts around the English text. In this section of the video he's not explicitly using the feature, but he often does ... hmmm, at around 16:30 or so he does, showing the original text for "I AM" and "do not be afraid."
In any case, there's been much work in software such as "Accordance Bible" and others to make "translation mapping" more apparent, and to expose any "translation issues" ... this necessarily would require the user to be very familiar with the original languages.
Chris Roseborough himself is very conservative (young-earth creationist; women should not be pastors; ... etc., many views that would not be popular). The most frequent targets of his criticism are those who preach "prosperity gospel" (e.g. Joel Osteen); those who believe apostles and prophets still exist and can write "scripture" today with as much authority as the original Hebrew and Greek texts (e.g., New Apostolic Reformation / NAR / Bethel / Hillsong); those who believe they can "decree and declare" God to steer hurricanes, heal people of their sicknesses (I don't think C.R. would object to the possibility of healing, just that there are no guarantees this side of eternity and God's purpose isn't to alleviate all suffering here and now), cause career success and wealth, and that believe if you aren't blessed you don't have enough faith.
I don't understand the utility of an API for this beyond APIs generally being fun to build.
All of the work is in formatting the data to be machine readable, and each bible is <5mb. If you needed this, you could also just download the open source bibles it uses and crawl it yourself which is surely superior in 99% of use cases.
I think the use case for a lot of churches and personal sites is they can do things like "random verse" or "daily verse" with just a small bit of copy and paste java script. Granted the same thing could be done, by pulling the files, but its a lot of overhead for something like that.
I think this is more akin to the old silly services of the web and not something that would be evaluated as commercially meaningful.
I wondered the same thing. Surely a useful API is for data that changes, and the recipient doesn't want to manage the content themselves? An API for searching static data seems only useful as a learning exercise.
Readit News
That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment that is diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures, which emphasizes their unity and their role in liturgical worship.
Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.
In this usage, it's very similar to the way we cite Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Milton, etc. For example, the St. Crispin's day speech in Henry V is at IV.iii.18-67, and any Shakespearean actor, fan, or scholar knows what that means, but that notation doesn't force them to think of the play as merely a set of disconnected speeches.
> Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.
It's also worth noting that the Bible is a text that pre-dates the printing press. Modern citation technology (cite edition and page number) depends on having standardized, mass-produced editions. It makes sense that closely-analyzed texts that only appeared in hand-made bespoke editions would need a different system.
Edit: This is a pretty interesting topic. Looks like the chapter/verse divisions were standardized after the printing press, but had roots in earlier systems of division [1]. Plato and Aristotle also got standardized sub-page-level citation systems around the same time [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapters_and_verses_of_the_Bib...
[2] https://getproofed.com/writing-tips/citing-plato-and-aristot...
If you said "The St. Crispin's day speech" I'd immediately know what you mean. I'm definitely a Shakespeare fan, but would have no idea which act, scene, &c. that speech occupies. I'd wager that's much less true of the scriptures in many circles.
It's common to quote short passages (1-3 verses) in society, either to prove a point (often missing context) or in a "thought for the day" manner. Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.
One wonders if this practice is connected to the degradation and commercialisation of worship and countless trivial splits. It just doesn't make for lucid thinking or deep understanding of any work.
It is worth noting that the chapter divisions came long before the verse divisions. For reading, the chapters are as helpful as they are in any other book. I recall the verses were introduced around the time of the Geneva Bible and were intended to cross-reference for the purpose of arguing doctrine. Perhaps useful for scholars - who'd already be deeply familiar with the text as a unit - but hardly a method for comprehension of the books as a whole.
Edit: This discussion reminds me of the so-called Reader's Bibles which were made a few years ago. They present the text as a flowing single-paragraph, with minimal distractions. One such example is the ESV Reader's Bible: https://www.bibledesignblog.com/2014/06/crossway-esv-readers...
On the contrary, the atomization and recombination of the text into new meanings is highly characteristic of Midrash. Of course, this isn't the same as the "prooftext" hermeneutic I think you're criticizing.
You can refer to The Republic 327a1, or Book 1 line 230 of The Odyssey, and people who study ancient Greek texts will immediately figure out which line you're talking about. Those references aren't complete sentences, either. Apparently it didn't matter to the people who first came up with the numbering scheme. The Plato reference format is actually nothing more than the page, column, and line number of a particular edition that happened to stick.
At this point, I don't think it's necessary to split them up for making copies. That said, a lot of churches have integrated chapter/verse look ups as part of their service/sermons/bible studies, so it would be very difficult to remove them now.
I just had to quote that sentence construction without comment.
But to reply to it more coarsely: who are you to define what a "Christian reading" of the bible is? As I see it, watching from outside the community, the piecewise selective quoting is very much a fundamental part of the practice of Christianity in the modern world -- especially of the evangelical Christianity that dominates in the USA.
I mean, I agree it's dumb. I just don't see why it's not "Christian". Christians are what Christians do.
This is generally not true. Try to replace "Christian" with "Atheist" or "Gnostic" and see how far this travels. While there are, I suppose, some distinctive practices that characterize various systems of belief (or disbelief), what distinguishes Christianity from, say, Judaism, is a set of irreconcilable beliefs (e.g., that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah). It is true that practices might distinguish religious groups (e.g., Orthodox Jews eat no pork, which is allowed to Christians), but those practices directly correlate to beliefs (Peter, citing Jesus, declares all meats clean in the New Testament).
No, religions are not merely practice: they are creedal, too. One who rejects the virgin birth is per se not Christian, at least if the word "Christian" means anything.
The scriptures weren't atomized into verses until scholars of the 15th century wanted to work on them. The practice you see today is an outgrowth of that epistemology, and greatly to the detriment of Christian witness, theology, and practice.
But American evangelical Protestants are a small minority of global Christianity. Catholics and Orthodox take a different approach, one which emphasises the binding role of church Tradition in interpreting the Bible, an idea which Protestants reject.
And verses are not disconnected logical propositions, they are a structure between a sentence and a chapter aka. a paragraph. If anything - the grouping of verses into chapters is far more arbitrary than that of sentences into verses.
Verses are definitely not functionally paragraphs. Some aren't even complete sentences!
I agree that it's odd that we have atomized the writings in the scriptures. You can find reader's editions if you want to remove the verses structure.
However, I don't agree that the verses are "diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures". I believe that there is room for both reading whole books and reading short quotes.
For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking John 3:16 out of context because it is a very straightforward verse. It's really nice to be able to share verses easily by giving a <Book> <Chapter>:<Verse>. There is danger though when we do that with all verses of scripture, and we should be careful to study the context for verses before coming to any conclusion.
The key is to actually study the scriptures, and not just take the easy route and find verses that make you feel good about yourself. But that's easier said than done.
His self revelation is a person who has a story and who tells stories. When we atomize the scriptures, we're implicitly constructing an argument against the epistemology that God has revealed in the scriptures. That's the thing that Satan does in the wilderness when he puts Jesus to the test. We ought not lead others into that time of trial.
So the convenience of being able to cite a verse as quick shorthand comes at the price of a profound argument against the coherent truth of the scriptural witness.
The First Folio followed the KJV by a dozen years, and the two dominate English.
In contrast to Jane Austen, both the KJV and the Folio are collections of other works.
Thus they may lend themselves ore than novels to being served frgmentally.
Most people reading the bible don't do this. This would be very very odd.
Bible
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Bible.html
King James Version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
https://www.davidwparker.com/2010/03/04/parsing-bible-search...
It was a neat little project at the time, but due to copyrights, I didn't get as far as I would have liked... I had planned on making a `diff` tool for bible verses between versions.
[0]https://youtu.be/HsCVuO1yeJc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_texts_of_Shakespeare%27s...
Where did you get the bit about the Torah originally being written in Ugaritic? What scholarly sources say that?
For an example of a direct use of this feature, reference Chris Roseborough's "Fighting for the Faith" YouTube series where he often uses this feature of Accordance Bible, along with his knowledge of the original languages and the built-in original-language dictionaries and thesaurus to analyze heretical or erroneous interpretations and applications of biblical text made by what he deems the myriad "false teachers" in current "evangelical" preacher-dom. For example of use of this particular word-for-word feature look at the video shortly after https://youtu.be/tFeF04F8Tf8?t=828 (a critique of Joel Osteen's "prosperity preaching"). At around 14:01 in the video you'll start seeing the Greek text analogs highlight as the cursor drifts around the English text. In this section of the video he's not explicitly using the feature, but he often does ... hmmm, at around 16:30 or so he does, showing the original text for "I AM" and "do not be afraid."
In any case, there's been much work in software such as "Accordance Bible" and others to make "translation mapping" more apparent, and to expose any "translation issues" ... this necessarily would require the user to be very familiar with the original languages.
Chris Roseborough himself is very conservative (young-earth creationist; women should not be pastors; ... etc., many views that would not be popular). The most frequent targets of his criticism are those who preach "prosperity gospel" (e.g. Joel Osteen); those who believe apostles and prophets still exist and can write "scripture" today with as much authority as the original Hebrew and Greek texts (e.g., New Apostolic Reformation / NAR / Bethel / Hillsong); those who believe they can "decree and declare" God to steer hurricanes, heal people of their sicknesses (I don't think C.R. would object to the possibility of healing, just that there are no guarantees this side of eternity and God's purpose isn't to alleviate all suffering here and now), cause career success and wealth, and that believe if you aren't blessed you don't have enough faith.
EDIT: clarification, deleted repeated phrase
All of the work is in formatting the data to be machine readable, and each bible is <5mb. If you needed this, you could also just download the open source bibles it uses and crawl it yourself which is surely superior in 99% of use cases.
I think this is more akin to the old silly services of the web and not something that would be evaluated as commercially meaningful.
Or if that data is copyrighted, but allows free usage of small selections.
https://github.com/bobuk/holybooks/tree/master/EN
Is there an API to get the names of the books?
Vulgate appears to be missing the Deuterocanonical books