Who Did It?

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Who developed the system of chapter numbering used in modern Bibles?

Answer: Cardinal Archbishop Stephen Langton

Stephen Langton was an English cardinal of the Catholic Church and served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 until his death in 1228. During this time, he developed the system of chapter divisions now used in modern Bibles.

The oldest biblical manuscripts present the text in continuous fashion with occasional paragraph breaks. It was not until the tenth century CE that the Masoretes, highly trained Jewish scholars of the biblical text, developed a system of cantillation symbols that included the sof pasuq or “end of verse,” a special colon-like mark used to divide the text into verses. With minor exceptions, the resulting versification has informed subsequent treatments of the text of the Hebrew Bible up to the present day.

It was Langton, however, who divided the biblical text into chapters, thus providing both a convenient division into smaller units and a simple system by which specific passages could be referenced.

The versification of the New Testament would come a few centuries later, with the 16th-century system developed by a French printer named Robert Estienne serving as the basis for subsequent numbering schemes.

Although modern Bibles generally reflect Langton’s system, there remain minor discrepancies, most notably between Jewish and Christian textual traditions. For example, the superscriptions that begin various Psalms are treated in the Hebrew tradition as part of the biblical text and accordingly receive verse numbers of their own, whereas Protestant Christian Bibles treat these introductory phrases as paratextual. Likewise, the five verses of Joel 3 in the Hebrew text are considered part of the preceding chapter in Protestant Bibles, leaving the Book of Joel with only three chapters, not four.

With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, Langton’s system became widely accepted. The first English Bible to be printed with chapter and verse numbers was the Geneva Bible of 1560.