Wednesday, April 15, 2026

4 Things We Added to the Bible

the text of John 3, verses 14 through 17
I'm a nerd. Always have been, always will be. After college my nerdiness shifted some of its focus from science and science fiction to the scriptures. Yep, you can nerd out on the Bible. I haven't learned any esoteric secrets, but lately I've come to realize that a lot of what's rattling around in my head isn't exactly common knowledge, either, so we're going to start a series we'll call Bible 101. Some of the facts I'll share may only be interesting; others may have apologetic value or help us interpret the scriptures. Let's dive in by looking at things in our Bible that aren't actually in the inspired text.

Chapters
There's a more complicated history, but the chapter divisions we use now were developed in the 1200s by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. A tradition says he was reading as he rode on a mule, and whenever the mule stopped, he would mark a chapter division. And some of them feel that random, such as when the seventh day of the creation account gets bumped to chapter 2.

Chapter numbers allow us to say "Psalm 23" instead of "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" to refer to that psalm. But the downside is we tend to think of them as hard breaks in thought when they usually are not. We often start reading one chapter without thinking about what came before. John 14 flows out of John 13. Romans 8 is a response to Romans 7. We rarely read Romans through in one sitting, much less John, so my practice has become, wherever I left my bookmark, I back up and read the last paragraph before proceeding. This helps maintain a sense of the logical flow of the text.

Verses
If we added chapters, it should be no surprise we added verse numbers. The history is complicated, but the version we currently use was made in the 1500s, and the Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to print them.

Like chapter numbers, verse numbers are so very useful. And they create the misconception that verses can stand alone. We pull favorite quotes out of books all the time, but we know they exist in a context. Somehow we lose that with Bible verses very easily. "Judge not lest you be judged" is the opening sentence in Jesus' instructions on the topic, not the whole thought. Even when we read the Bible, we can easily focus on one sentence, one "verse", and let it trip us up instead of letting the paragraph tell us what it means like we would in literally any other book. Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason likes to say, "There are no verses in the Bible." The numbers are useful for referring to a particular passage, but don't let them trick you into thinking they are standalone ideas.

Section headings
By now this is probably obvious, and if you've got two different translations, you've already seen that different versions will have different section headings. These are added to modern Bibles by editors trying to help us to recognize pericopes (that is, thought blocks) and to find things when we're skimming, looking for "that more than conquerors passage".

Different editorial teams will break the text into different blocks and give them different headings. And you can change them. As I study books, I develop my own outlines and label the sections as something that helps me remember what the passage teaches.

For example, the ESV labels Titus 1:8-16 "Qualifications for Elders". But that stretch goes into more than just elders. I wrote "Leaders to Rebuke False Teachers". Titus 2 is labeled "Teach Sound Doctrine". I wrote "Teach Lives that Adorn the Gospel". Are my sections headings better than theirs? They remind me of what I learned, and that's all they need to do.

Quotation marks
Actually, there is no punctuation at all in the Greek or Hebrew manuscripts; what we have is the product of decisions by translators. But the quotation marks really raise some issues.

If I could go back in time, I would teach the apostles about quotation marks. As it is, we cannot be 100% sure whether they're quoting or paraphrasing. When they quote the Old Testament and it doesn't match anything we have, is it because they were working from a different textual tradition or because they were paraphrasing? Some have suggested they didn't really see a difference between a quotation and a paraphrase.

In 1Corinthians 7:1, was Paul quoting the Corinthians or making a statement? The NASB reads:
Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman.

The ESV reads:
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”

Which is it? We cannot be sure. There are several places in Paul's letters where it'd be really, really useful to know whether he was quoting what they'd written to him. Translators just have to use their best judgment.

This even affects the words of Jesus. In John, it can be hard to tell whether it's Jesus or the narrator speaking. Did Jesus utter the words of John 3:16? Translators go both ways on the issue.

Some questions we have about the scriptures simply cannot be answered. And that's OK. It'd be nice if 1Cor 7 was a little clearer, and we'd like to know if Jesus said those words, but God's message to us in his word is clear enough for us to understand what we absolutely need to understand. A few niggling questions around the edges don't change that.


Part of Bible 101

Image via Pixabay

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