jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com (01/07/90)
Recently I ran across some notes I took during a sermon a while back. The chief point of the sermon was that the smallest division in the Bible is the *book* (except for the Psalms); the chapter and verse divisions are *not* inspired. If people merely go to a concordance and pick out all the verses on a particular topic, different people may arrange those verses in different ways and get different interpretations of God's ideas on that topic. (This preacher didn't use, but certainly implied, the old saying, "A Bible text out of context is pretext.") If you want to really know God's mind on anything, read a whole book of the Bible through to get a total impression of what that book says about the topic. And the books say different things, e.g., Matthew, John, James, Hebrews, and Romans look at the same general topic (faith) from very different angles. I'm not sure I remember this exactly, but he said something like this: Matthew sees faith as childlike trust; John as an intimate relationship; James as something that will, if genuine, eventuate in good works; Hebrews as a mental conviction; and Romans as "saving faith". And that's just one example. Considering just how BIG God is, and how complex we are, it makes sense that God would talk about the same thing in many different ways to meet different needs and to cover the whole of the topic. So just picking a verse or two and saying "The Bible says <thus and so>" is at best a half-truth; the verse is in the Bible, yes, but it needs to be seen in the context of at least the book in which it appears, and preferably of the whole Bible, to get the true meaning of what the Bible is really saying. I'll close with a couple of mildly humorous notes on the sometimes bogus versification of the Bible: I surely wish I could kick the jerk who, for no apparent good reason, put a verse division in the middle of the "fruit of the Spirit" list in Galatians.... It's been said that the division of the Bible into chapters and verses was accomplished by a drunken monk riding horseback. Every time he hiccuped, he started a new verse; and every time he fell off the horse, he started a new chapter! -- Jeff Sargent att!ihlpb!jeffjs (UUCP), jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com (Internet) AT&T Bell Laboratories IH 5A-433 (708) [new area code] 979-5284 [In the OT, even book divisions aren't always significant. E.g. the division between I and II Kings is almost certainly just because the whole thing wouldn't fit on one scroll. This may even be the case with Genesis and Exodus, etc. --clh]
mike@unmvax.cs.unm.edu (Michael I. Bushnell) (01/15/90)
In article <Jan.6.21.14.57.1990.6762@athos.rutgers.edu> our moderator writes: >[In the OT, even book divisions aren't always significant. E.g. the >division between I and II Kings is almost certainly just because the >whole thing wouldn't fit on one scroll. This may even be the case >with Genesis and Exodus, etc. --clh] The Jewish tradition is precisely that Kings is *one* book. Same with Chronicles, and Samuel. Ezra and Nehemiah seem to have been split similarly, though for different reasons (they aren't nearly as long). But there is little possibility that Genesis and Exodus were so split. The term "pentateuch" is quite ancient, and I doubt is was originally a quadrateuch. The text has very obvious divisions in content between the books, so I don't think they were split that way. Ezra and Nehemiah have such divisions, but there they are largely superficial, perhaps added later in order to explain the different names. In the septuagint, they are I Esdras and II Esdras respectively, so the names aren't quite as old. In fact, when deciding what is and isn't sacred scripture, remember that the titles aren't either. The titles are church/Jewish tradition, but not part of the books. Note in particular that "A Letter to Hebrews" doesn't look like a letter, and doesn't say anything pertaining to Jewish Christians in particular. There is, in fact, no reason to suppose it was a letter at all. The same applies to books such as "The Gospel According to XXX", in which the authorship is indicated *only* in the title, not the text. -- Michael I. Bushnell \ This above all; to thine own self be true LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE \ And it must follow, as the night the day, mike@unmvax.cs.unm.edu /\ Thou canst not be false to any man. Telephone: +1 505 242 2329 / \ Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!