Like many of my readers, I watch the ESV Bible Blog for the great discussion of this translation and to be in the know for new items related to the ESV. In a recent post, entitled Philippians 4:5-6: “It’s Just a (Semi-)Colonâ€, the blog points us to a post on 70X7 that inquires about the use of punctuation that does not end a sentence, and that ends one verse for another. Here is an excerpt of what mccarnan had to say about this, beginning with Philippians 4:5-6 for reference:
Philippians 4:5-6
5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; 6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.If you read the Word, you’ll see that Paul’s sentence begins in verse 5 and carries into verse 6, unlike the way we memorise and read it. the end of verse 5 says “the Lord is at hand;” and verse 6 begins: “do not be anxious about anything…” Our bibles divide that sentence into two parts, but it’s a semicolon, not a period at the end of verse 5. It doesn’t make sense to memorise half of his thought, he made it a thought on purpose. It’s like quoting john 3:16: “for God so loved the world.” Well, fantastic, but what did He do about it? Similarly, without the first half of that sentence: “the Lord is at hand,” we’re left wondering why we should be anxious for nothing. His continual presence assures and enables us to rely on Him.
Personally, I would love to have a Bible with only the books to separate the text as well. Especially for the writings of Paul! The translations really butcher his thoughts with the numbering, if you only read from one verse to another. The English translation shows Paul to be a man who wrote rather long sentences, and it is not uncommon for one string of thought to take up two verses and more.
I have had a thought concerning this: What if a respected translation, such as the ESV were to put out a Bible with no change in words, but with the verses renumbered. Yes, it would take some getting used to. But I think it would pay off spiritually in the end. Plus, it would drive those KJV-onlyists stark raving mad! But would it be feasible from a publishing standpoint?
It is beneficial for people in a church to be able to go to the same verses together, and a re-numbered verse listing or a Bible without verses that are numbered would not be good in that setting. Also, Bibles would need to be completely redone, with cross references and the sort, not to mention the translators who determine where one sentence ends and another begins. Imagine though, the vast quantity of concordances and other study materials that would be out in both formats. This could cause a small percentage of people to duplicate portions of their libraries.
It is my understanding that the manuscript evidence does not have upper and lower case letters or punctuation of any kind. I am told that there is not even a space between words, from a conversation I had about two years ago with Shane. Here’s a link to that. It is a discussion of Christ’s promise to the thief on the cross. He said that the comma should be after the word “today” and not before it, which says that Jesus was telling the thief these things on that particular day, and not necessarily that the thief would be in paradise on that very day. Changing the numbering would involve further translation, beyond what we read today.
There are so many logistics involved in such an endeavor, and though I believe it would be worthwhile for personal use as a memorization and personal study Bible, it would be extremely difficult to make this profitable to the publishers (which is a factor to them, you realize) and at the same time, it would need to be accepted by the church. The church does not define the Bible, the Bible defines the church. But I am not so naive as to think that this sort of change wouldn’t be without major controversy.
Even if these things were accomplished, pastors would need to give two different references from the pulpit much of the time. I get frustrated with the tools in my garage. Some are SAE and some are metric, so I have two almost (but not quite) identical wrenches, and only one is useful for the bolt. There are some who say that the US needs to make a sudden abandonment from miles and gallons, convert to the metric system and drive on the left side of the road. I see this happening long before any renumbering of the verses is even seriously considered!
A personal undertaking, or an open source project could be done, not unlike the NET Bible, but they want to be accepted by the community. The KJV doesn’t have the burden of copyright any longer, so that could be a place to start. But the time involved to produce a Bible that would likely not catch on beyond a small group of people who only use it for personal use may not pay off. It would, however, be a beneficial exercise for the individual and would enhance Bible memorization with a fuller sense of immediate context.
Keep in mind that I am not advocating any change to the words within the Bible, only changes to the structure of the chapters and verses. Also, I have no reason to think that this will ever happen. I’m just thinking “out loud.” The structure is not in the original autographs, so this would certainly not be a violation of Sola Scriptura. It may, however, actually be a submission to Sola Scriptura.
We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation, which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.
We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian’s conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.
Article X
We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.
Earlier this week there was an interesting post atCoffeeSwirls on problems with verse numbering in our Bibles. The ESV Bible blog picked up on the CoffeeSwirls post and advanced the discussion to include paragraphing of our Bibles, as well. I think you would find both posts worth reading.
Pilgrimage to Spurgeon’s Met. TabernacleWhy Don?t We Just Re-Number the Bible? Collegelife Emerging Peter: Start with Jesus Rachel S. Yoo, review of Caedmon’s Call “In the Company of Angels: The World Will Sing” Man’s Religion vs. God’s Religion Part 1, Interview with Caedmon’s Call: In the Company of Angesl II
I’ve always believed that one of the reasons the NIV became so popular was because it was written in paragraph format instead of verse-by-verse format.
People are used to reading paragraphs and this helped them string the thoughts of Scripture together. More so than the verse-by-verse did.
Many years ago there was an American Standard Version that was printed in paragraph format. A guy I went to church with had one and I really liked it. I wrote to Zondervan and learned that it was out of print and they had no plans to reprint it.
I echo Tim’s sentiments on paragraph format.
For a long while I used a complimentary paperback copy of a pre-release TNIV New Testament for my devotions. It was a great read because it was set up like an actual book. Paragraphs, indentations, grouped thoughts . . . . Very enjoyable!
I posted this over at 70×7 –
I have a question for you– the ESV translators decided that a semi-colon was appropriate here. You seem to agree. But, they are ALONE amongst English Bible translations – as far as I can tell (didn’t do an exhaustive search, but thanks to Bible Gateway and other sites I looked at NASB, NIV, NRSV, The Message, NLT, CEV). I am at school, unable to look up the UBS4 Greek, but in the 26th edition of Nestle-Aland, the editors picked a period. I would agree that there is no punctuation at all in our earliest copies, everything in that regard is an “educated guess.” But, given that everyone else who considered this chose a period, is it really appropriate to condemn those who read/memorize the text that way?
-matthew
That is a good question, but the answer is (I believe) obvious. We cannot fault anyone for memorizing the verses in the way that they have been made available to them. This is not to say that the ESV definitely has it right while the other translations are definitely wrong.
A semicolon acts like a hybrid of a comma and period. It is used when you have two statements that could each be a sentence, but when you have decided to incorporate them into one sentence. I happen to think of them as lazy punctuation for lazy grammar, even though they are completely valid.
Jesus did not fault the laity for following the Pharisees. He faulted the teachers of the Law for their abuses of their station. Even as I say this, I am in no way saying that we should begin prosecuting Bible translators! I just think that a consensus among translations is in order, including a reduction of translations that are made available.
If we could narrow it down to ten English translations (an arbitrary number) that are in print at any given time and force paraphrases that take liberties with the scriptures to be sold as commentaries rather than as Bibles, it would be a good thing. Those who are knowledgeable and equipped in translation could put their expertise toward producing Bibles for people who do not have the word of God in their own language.
If Bible translation is a form of evangelism, wouldn’t it be better to glorify God through the spread of His word to those who don’t have it, rather than the production of yet another flavor to another niche market in the English speaking world?
Re-Paragraph Your Bible
Doug at CoffeeSwirls takes our recent post about punctuation and runs with it:
Personally, I would love to have a Bible with only the books to separate the text as well. Especially for the writings of Paul! The translations really butcher his thought…
The first edition of the New English Bible went some way to address this. Verse numbers were placed in the margin (so you could still look things up), but NOT in the running text. The arrangement made for a bit of ambiguity, but basically achieved what is argued for here, without requiring whole-sale revision of cross-references, etc.
I could post photos if anyone cares….
[Btw -- the dates on these comments are showing as March 7-8! But it's only March 6! Am I in a time-warp? Crazy.]
I have March 8, but then I still say that it’s 2005 on my checks…
I have mostly given up on the paper version of the bible for a digital one on my Palm by Laridian. I like being able to highlight text in all different colours, and especially that I can hide the verse indicators, and chapters to if I want.
Seeing I have my palm with me everywhere, it gives me a bible for reading (without the verses) AND for looking up verses by number. I like that I can change the text size too.
When I begin to study a passage I print the whole thing out and use Logos (Libronix) to chop out the numbers all together. Then I use that version to get into Paul’s flow of thought. So many times then when I jump back into my versed Bible I end up saying, “Why the heck did they chop that there?” I guess that’s why I de-verse the text before I study.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it would be useful to try to re-number the Bible. My take on the verses is that they are primarily useful for referencing, so that everybody knows where to look. But they have become detrimental because they tend to make Christians think of the Bible as disconnected sentences or verses to be cited and not stories or propositions to be understood.
So if I would propose anything in response, I would say that the publishers should publish specialty Bibles without verses for use in personal reading, like how The Message does it. The verse ranges could be off to the left so you know where you are, but imagine the freedom of having the Bible without all the chopping. I would buy it in a second.
Kind of like that concept of putting the references in the margin? Yeah, that would be nice.
My pastor wasn’t so sure about someone moving around paragraphs without a working knowledge of the original languages, and made some great points to support what he said.
However, it is not required that you learn Greek to read the writings of Paul and to meditate on them. Ultimately, we are at the mercy of the translation teams and need to trust them to use words and sentences according to their knowledge.
We didn’t discuss verse numbering very much, but it seems that there must be cases where the translators make some of their choices based on the accepted structure of writings ad least to some degree.
I don’t want to disable the verse numbers online for the ESV Bible because I would constantly be re-emabling them for my own reference. Since Internet Explorer pulls cookies from a different source than Firefox, I believe I will disable verse numbers in IE.
I agree. Paul’s writings would be better without the verses numberes!
I like the hat…where can I find one like that?
Re-numbering the Bible?
There’s an interesting series of posts going around about the “uninspired” parts of the Bible, including chapter and verse divisions, paragraphs and punctuation. For example, Doug McHone wonders Why Don’t We Just Re-Number the Bible…
A personal project covering the past few years has resulted in the availability of a copy of the Holy Scriptures without chapter and verse divisions.
The chapter and verse designations are included in the left margin.
Please visit the website http://www.kathosgrapho.com for smaples and comments along with ordering information.
I just ordered a new Bible from the International Bible Society. It is amazing what has happened! In August 2007 IBS releasted a volume titled “The Books of the Bible” which in reality is a Bible. This is the first time in history that a complete Bible has been published WITHOUT THE CHAPTER-VERSE DIVISIONS! The text used is the Today’s New International Version (TNIV). The books are in a different order, but some books that have been separated (like 1 and 2 Samuel) have been recombined into the single book that they were when written (so now 1 and 2 Samuel is a single book called Samuel). Check it out at http://www.thebooksofthebible.info and order your copy at http://www.ibsdirect.org. FINALLY!!! The Bible as it was meant to be read has arrived!!!
E-Sword has the option of not showing verse numbers, and displaying text in paragraph style, though the chapter divisions remain.
[...] numbers, in addressing issues of external authority in relation to human verse numbers, as have others. The least we can do is to bump the numbers out and have normal paragraphs. This has been done [...]