WHO ADDED THE VERSES?

Some 300 years later, in the middle of the sixteenth century renowned French printer-scholar Robert Estienne made thing even easier. His aim was to popularize Bible study. He realized how valuable it would be to have a uniform system of both numbered chapters and verses.

Estienne did not come up with the idea of dividing the Bible text into verses. Others had done that already. Centuries earlier, Jewish copyists, for example, had divided the whole Hebrew Bible, or the part of the Bible commonly known as the Old Testament, into verses but not into chapters. Again, as the development of chapters, there was no uniform system.

Estienne divided the Christian Greek Scriptures, or what is called the New Testament, into a new set of numbered verses and combined them with those already in the Hebrew Bible. In 1553, he published the first compete Bible (and edition in French) with basically the same chapters and verses that most Bibles use today. Some people were critical and said those verses broke the Bible text into fragments making it appear as a series of separate and detached statements. But his system was quickly adopted by other printers.

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