{"id":1215,"date":"2010-10-16T22:25:47","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T22:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2010\/10\/archbishop-langton--an-interesting-dude.html"},"modified":"2010-10-16T22:25:47","modified_gmt":"2010-10-16T22:25:47","slug":"archbishop-langton-an-interesting-dude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/10\/archbishop-langton-an-interesting-dude.html","title":{"rendered":"Archbishop Langton— An Interesting Dude"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Duke<\/a><\/form>\n

<\/p>\n

Stuck on the back of Person Hall, at my alma mater, UNC is a statue of an archbishop, one Stephen Langton, late of Canterbury.  The statue was rescued from some rubble somewhere between Big Ben and the Parliament building.  You will notice the good bishop appears a bit tired, and he is holding a scroll.  There is a reason. He’s the chap who is responsible for the division of the Bible into chapters and verses. Langton lived between 1158 and 1220, and is important for many reasons, not least was he was the negotiator between Pope Innocent III (his college chum in Paris) and King John Lackland, a negotiation that produced the forerunner of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, namely, the Magna Carta.   But I digress.  It was Langton who decided we needed the Bible divided up into proper soundbytes called verses and chapters, and their modern form as we know it in our English Bible is owed to his hard work.  Though, it is true however that the ole boy must have been nodding some of the time, because some of the divisions make no sense (for example the ones in the middle of sentences which aren’t long).  These chapter and verse divisions are no part of the original text of the Bible, and are not, alas, inspired, despite all the magical hocus pocus sometimes conjured up by Bibliophiles waxing eloquent about numerical connections between this chapter and this verse etc. <\/p>\n

In fact there were good reasons there were no chapters and verses in the original language Biblical texts: 1) Arabic numbers hadn’t been invented yet;  2) papyrus was expensive and so scribes wrote in scriptum continuum, a continuous flow of letters without punctuation or division into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or chapters; 3) letters of the alphabet were used in some ancient languages as numbers (think Latin— five is the letter V,  ten is X, and so on).  This of course explains why Jesus and some inspired NT writers when referring to a particular text in the OT may well says ‘it says somewhere in Isaiah….’.  This is not because they are having a senior moment, its because there was no divisions or numbers to help them locate things. They simply had to have the text pretty much memorized if they were even literate, or at least know where in the document to find a passage they wanted to quote.  Below you will find a poem I wrote about the form of the original Bible.  Here I will just end by saying Archbishop Langton was important, and we all live with his legacy, for better or for worse.  There would be no John 3.16 T shirts if it weren’t for him,  no Tim Tebow eyeblack with Bible verses in them,  etc. The impact of Langton ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.  It thus makes sense that he had been impaled on the back of a building at UNC, for there we find that same range of things being said about the Bible itself.  But that’s a story for another day. <\/p>\n

  <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

WORDSHAPED<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Partial and piecemeal, here and there<\/p>\n

Vowels omitted, consonants square<\/p>\n

No jots or tittles, not one iota<\/p>\n

As if there was, some sort of letter quota.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Line upon line, word for word<\/p>\n

Nopunctuationseparationabsurd<\/p>\n

Scriptum continuum without an end<\/p>\n

Space is so precious, conventions must bend<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fair hand copy, stylus in hand<\/p>\n

Awaiting dictation, write on demand<\/p>\n

Line length is even, no letters odd<\/p>\n

So it must be— the Word of God.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Written revelation, unveiled truth<\/p>\n

Put on papyrus, sold from a booth<\/p>\n

Unroll the scroll, unseal the seal<\/p>\n

Meant to inform, not to conceal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nomina sacra, the Holy Name<\/p>\n

In abbreviation, meaning the same<\/p>\n

IX, XC, IHS too<\/p>\n

Jehovah combines, God’s name times two.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Inspired authors, inspiring text<\/p>\n

God breathed words, soul resurrects<\/p>\n

Let it be written, let it be done<\/p>\n

Fulfilling fulfillment, victory won.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the beginning, God chose to speak<\/p>\n

Creation created, in under a week<\/p>\n

Even the last Word, God will have too<\/p>\n

Alpha-Omega, indwelling you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3\/26\/06 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stuck on the back of Person Hall, at my alma mater, UNC is a statue of an archbishop, one Stephen Langton, late of Canterbury.  The statue was rescued from some rubble somewhere between Big Ben and the Parliament building.  You will notice the good bishop appears a bit tired, and he is holding a scroll. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nArchbishop Langton- An Interesting Dude - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/10\/archbishop-langton-an-interesting-dude.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Archbishop Langton- An Interesting Dude - 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}