![]() ![]() ![]() This is actually how Jesus and the apostles referenced the Bible. In this recent post, for example, I refer to how Paul in 1 Corinthians “applied the law about not muzzling an ox to his own right to receive support as an apostle.” This kind of referencing encourages greater biblical literacy: once you learn even a little about 1 Corinthians, you can find that place without difficulty, whether or not your Bible has chapters and verses in it. (I explain much more about this in my book After Chapters and Verses.)įor all of these reasons, I reference instead by content and context, which I find much more meaningful and more respectful of the Bible. By making all the books appear to be look-it-up reference material, they suggest the wrong answer to the question, “What is the Bible and what are we supposed to do with it?” They make it only too simple to zip in and out of the Bible, looking at statements without regard to their literary and historical settings. But I’m sticking with the original format of no chapters and verses for some very important reasons.Ĭhapters and verses are late and artificial additions to the Bible that distort our understanding of the literary structure and genre of its books. This blog’s readership has now expanded well beyond the circle of the users of the study guides, as others have been reading along and asking their own questions. Those guides were designed to be used with The Books of the Bible from Biblica, an edition of the Scriptures that takes out chapters and verses and instead presents the biblical books in their natural literary forms. That’s because the original purpose of this blog was to be a resource for individuals and groups who were using the Understanding the Books of the Bible study guides from InterVarsity Press. Readers of this blog will have noticed that in my posts I never reference the Bible by chapter and verse. ![]()
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