How Chapter Divisions Could Be Impacting Your Bible Study

What if I told you Matthew, the disciple who wrote that gospel account, likely had a different answer. He doesn’t need to Google. He wrote the thing. So, he shouts out the correct answer: 5!

Yes, there are only five chapters, or sections, in the gospel of Matthew. Let me explain…

Where Did These Divisions Come From?

For almost as long as biblical books have been written, believers have been dividing them up into manageable sections. The Pentateuch (the first five books of the OT) was once divided into 154 different sections that would help those interested in learning Torah to have a three-year reading cycle. There were some paragraph divisions of NT books as early as 325 as well. But if you approached St. Augustine (354-430) and asked him to quote John 3:16, you’d think he wasn’t very good at his Bible drills when he would look at you with a blank stare. The divisions we have today simply did not exist back then.

Somewhere around 1230 AD, an archbishop by the name of Stephen Langston decided it would be a good idea to add chapters to the Bible. The Wycliffe Bible (1382) used Langston’s divisions, and that is pretty close to what we still have in our day. Verse divisions didn’t happen for another couple hundred years. A Jewish rabbi put verses on the OT in 1448, and the NT was divided into verses around 1555 by a guy who went by the name Stephanus. The Geneva Bible, published in 1560, used these verse divisions throughout the Old and New Testaments. And we’ve been using pretty much the same divisions since then.

This means that even though it might be of great help to modern readers, chapter and verse divisions are not inerrant. They are not inspired. At times there could be unfortunate chapter breaks or verse breaks that impact the flow of an author's thought. Langston or the others who took on this project could have missed the overall thought of the biblical author and framed the passage in a way that obscures the meaning. If we do not take this into account, our Bible reading could be greatly impacted.

How Does This Impact Our Bible Reading?

There are benefits to having Bible verses. It is helpful that I can stand before my congregation and say John 3:16, and most of the people understand the reference. It is also helpful that I can announce a text for the morning, and many will know how to find the same passage in their own Bible. You could say that verses and divisions help us speak the same language. But this can also impact our read our Bible.

Consider Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross. When he shouted, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!?” we assume that he is a modern Bible reader and is quoting Psalm 22:1. Full stop. In our minds, all he is attempting to convey is the first verse because this is how we quote verses. When you sip coffee out of your Philippians 4:13 coffee mug, you likely aren’t thinking about the surrounding context. You like that verse because it talks of “doing all things through Christ who gives you strength.”

But this is not how Jesus, or really anyone before the 1200s, would have quoted Scripture. When Jesus says “My God, My God…” this would have immediately taken them not to only that verse but to the entire psalm. Jesus isn’t only quoting one verse. Yes, his cry is soaked in pain. Yes, he feels forsaken. But he also is proclaiming the victory of verse 24 (and all the other verses). He is crying the whole psalm.

Remember when Jesus overturned the tables in the temple and he talks about a house of prayer and a den of robbers? Those are OT quotations. But again, he isn’t just attempting to say one little verse. He is placing each of those statements into their whole context. He quotes Isaiah 56 and God’s vision for making the temple a house of prayer and welcoming for Gentiles. And his quoting of Jeremiah 7 not only penetratingly calls them a den of robbers but also points to their trusting in the temple system while having hearts far from God.

If we assume that the biblical authors use quotations the way that we use biblical quotations, we will end up misreading them. When a New Testament writer quotes a passage from the Old Testament, do more than just look at that specific verse. Study the whole context from which it is quoted. He’s probably saying more than just the one sentence carried over. When Jesus says, “My God, My God” it’d be like us saying, “turn in your Bible to Psalm 22.”

This also impacts the structure and how we get into the mind of a biblical author. If you are studying 1 Corinthians and read 1 Corinthians 8 one day, chapter 9, the next and then the 10^th chapter on the third day, this would be like leaving a conversation mid-sentence and then trying to pick it back up exactly where you left off the next day. You’re going to miss things. You’re also likely to misinterpret. 1 Corinthians 8-10 is one big thought. 1 Corinthians could be structured around the statement “now concerning…” and if we leave one of those thoughts before he is finished, then we aren’t reading it accurately.

There are numerous places like this in your Bible. Several chapter breaks create abrupt stops where they are not meant to be. This can even impact meaning and the way we understand the argument that the author is attempting to make.

5 Chapters of Matthew?

The gospel of Matthew has an incredibly beautiful and intricate structure. Yet it is also a simple structure. In his book, Matthew for Everyone, the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright highlights a phrase that appears five times in Matthew: “when Jesus had finished teaching…” This could be used as a concluding phrase for teaching blocks in Matthew. It has been noted by others that the gospel of Matthew is broken up into five discourses. What else has five books? The Torah.

There is some debate about the specifics of the structure in Matthew. But for our purpose today it is important to note that Matthew has decided to structure his book not in 28 separate chapters but in 5 lengthy sections. Would it not be wise for us to read each of these in one sitting? What might we connect that we missed previously?

Conclusion

Matthew is not the only book where the author has structured it differently than our modern chapter and verse divisions have done. Consider challenging yourself to read one Bible book in one sitting. Over 60% of the books of the Bible could be read in less than an hour each. Many of them you can read in under 10 minutes. It will take about 5 hours to read through the book of Psalms, a couple of hours for each of the gospels, and about 2-3 hours for each book of the Torah.

It may also be helpful to purchase a literary Bible that does away with chapter and verse divisions for this project.

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