Capitation Biblical

The books composing the Bible or Tanakh are divided into chapters.

Old Testament / Tanakh

The division of the Old Testament into chapters is relatively recent , a minimum of 21 verses . Another division, which is also found in the Torah, is the division parashiyot. For the Torah, the first division covers a little over 150 sections and reflects a system of continuous play weekly over three years at least , the second covers 54 sections, reflecting a yearly reading, still in use today ' hui. Other books of the Hebrew Bible are divided into parashiyot . These divisions are not numbered Jewish.

For the Christian Old Testament, the original division in the Greek text of the Septuagint , consists of " paragraphs ". The word "paragraph" means, in paleography Greek, the small horizontal bar located in the biblical manuscripts, as elsewhere in the Greek manuscripts at the beginning of a line before which is a caesura, in principle, indicated by a white space. A similar principle is found elsewhere in the text of the Hebrew Bible: Whitespace short (setumot Hebrew, literally "closures") or long (in Hebrew petucht "openings") indicate the subdivisions of parashiyot.

For chapters proper, here writes a specialist:

Can be considered an established fact that for most books of the Bible, our current chapters are derived from a standardized divisions of the Latin Bible made in the course of the University of Paris by Stephen Langton (later Bishop of Canterbury ) before 1209, that is to say from the creation thereof. Division Langton was then altered slightly by the masters who followed later in the ^thirteenth century and especially by the Dominican Hugh of St. Cher (later Cardinal) wrote the first Bible concordance (...). It seems that for the placement of joints of this isolation, Langton was inspired divisions alcuiniennes and thodulfiennes ^.

The division of the Christian Bible has been taken in the Jewish custom, partly it seems because of the Judeo-Christian polemics of the late Middle Ages, when Jewish doctors were summoned to respond to arguments based on Christian system chapters.

New Testament

It is likely that ^the fourth century , as has been suggested about St. Basil , several systems of paragraphs in the New Testament existed simultaneously. These divisions were fundamentally reference systems, variable according to location. One of them would probably eventually be required if the system of Eusebius, which he will be no question, had appeared.

The Codex Vaticanus (B.03) has retained, at second hand, the numbering of one of these systems, in 464 chapters in the Gospels, but other books, including the Old Testament, were filled in this manuscript numbering their paragraphs. It is hard to tell when was the numbering, which is in all cases of second-hand, perhaps the ^fifth century. This system, at least for the Gospels, has had some diffusion .

The oldest of the Gospels capitation is probably fairly coarse division kephalaia (217 sections in all), including securities (titloi), often summarized in the Greek manuscripts into a sort of table of contents. This division is not liturgical, as is sometimes said, because it is not intended to divide each Gospel into chapters thematically distinct from each other. Its purpose is to bring such a gospel section of a similar section in another. It is, as shown by von Soden, a synopsis of test, as was probably about the same time, the Diatessaron of Tatian or harmony Evangelical Theophilus of Antioch . It is not known if this system was known synopsis of Ammonius of Alexandria or Eusebius of Caesarea, which he must speak now.

The manuscripts of the Gospels generally contain (at least in Greek), in addition to the division into chapters , a numbering system which is included in tables often richly illuminated copy of the accompanying text. These tables or concordances of guns , can be attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea. It has preserved this author a letter to a certain Carpal where he explains how he himself has built this system synopsis from the division made before him by Ammonius of Alexandria , a commentator from the early ^third century. This division, probably further enhanced by Eusebius himself when preparing its crosswalks, includes hundreds of sections in each Gospel (1162 sections in total) .

It has existed in other divisions. Several fragments of the Gospel according to St. John, the ^third to the ^seventh century , divide the text into pages, simply. Each page contains a pericope thus determined with a "Hermnie" at the bottom of the page, preceded by a short summary of the word . It is, in sum, an intermediate system between the paragraphs and chapters that.

The present division into chapters of the gospels also back, as the Old Testament, Stephen Langton. For Acts and Epistles in the New Testament, the division of Euthalios seems to have been endorsed by the medieval Bible.

The Lectionary ( Gospel , etc..) are also a division into chapters, but choose not to use clever but according to the liturgy, indicating the day of the liturgical year is appropriate and sometimes a title and numbering. Such liturgical items appear occasionally, often second hand, in Biblical manuscripts themselves.

Notes

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