[sword-devel] KJV verse numbering is not universal.

Michael Paul Johnson sword-devel@crosswire.org
Mon, 04 Sep 2000 13:08:18 -0600


At 10:50 AM 9/4/00 -0700, Chris Little wrote:
>...  I'm not sure what we'll do for translations with
>more verses in any given chapter than the KJV since SWORD would map them
>onto verses in the following chapter, where another verse ought to exist.

This is an important issue to clarify. Consider Romans 14:26 (WEB or MT), which is equivalent to Romans 16:27 (KJV) or 3 John 15 (NRSV or UBS4), which is equivalent to 3 John 14b (KJV). Trying to force all Bible translations to use the KJV versification is a mistake, in my opinion. If you must persist in this mistake, probably the only really graceful way to handle it is to include all verses after the last KJV verse in a given chapter as if they were an extension of the last KJV verse in that chapter. That would stuff Romans 14:23-26 of the Greek Majority Text and all translations based on it in Romans 14:23, for example. (The KJV puts Romans 14:24-26 at the end of chapter 16, presumably because the translators didn't have access to the majority of manuscripts that put those verses earlier. It makes little difference in meaning or theology, either way, but it is something that any good Bible study program deals with gracefully.)


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Michael Paul Johnson                   
mpj@eBible.org    http://ebible.org/mpj