All the elements of page and book design can be thought of as punctuation, even if some of them are not intended to have any effect on the reading. Verse division, for instance, is a reference system, yet it exerts a strong influence on how the text is read.
—David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible
I wrote the following introduction to the Old Testament for Bibles International; it is being translated and placed into Bibles all around the world. Come back tomorrow for the intro to the New Testament. The Bible tells one story, because God has one plan for all of...
I recently ran across the the master's thesis of an ardent evangelical egalitarian, written at Regent University Divinity School (Virginia Beach) in 2010. You can Google it if you want to, but I don't want to pick on the (female) author in particular, so I'll leave...
Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen My rating: 4 of 5 stars I apologize to the internet for not giving this classic five stars, but it simply didn't quite reach the level of incisiveness and helpfulness for me in my situation that Packer's analysis in...
Insightful words from Philip Roth: The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes...
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Here I go again, leaving comments on my own posts, but I want to keep these notes together!
Norton also wrote that versification sometimes forced a period into the middle of sentences because the end of a verse feels final, like the end of a sentence (Amos 1:3-4; Acts 21:40 in the 1611 KJV).
Benjamin Blayney in 1769 revised 17th-century punctuation in light of 18th-century standards, stripping out a lot of unnecessary commas (which tend to clutter the text—as in modern German) but otherwise (in Norton’s view) making the punctuation heavier.
A funny comment from Norton: “The only thing sacred about this [KJV] punctuation is that it has not been changed for a quarter of a millennium.” (2:155)
“The practice of starting a new verse on a new line is one of the greatest barriers to a coherent reading of the Bible, splitting the text into small units only for convenience finding references.” (2:158)
Norton also speaks effectively against the use of italics in the text. Most readers simply don’t understand what the italics mean. (2:162)
I sometimes wonder if verse numbers would be best moved to the margin as is common with most ancient works that have similar numbering systems. It would take longer to find verses, but people would be forced to read some of the context in the process.