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

[Michael Paul Johnson]

At 10:51 AM 9/4/00 -1000, Brandon Staggs wrote:
>Isn't the issue here one of comparison? A standard of verse numbering is
>necessary not for doctrinal purposes (since the numbering did not exist when
>the words were originally penned anyway), but for easy comparison. ...

This is a good point. It is still also true that to properly represent a translation that uses slightly different versification, you need to use its own versification. Perhaps a good compromise is to just use each translation's own versification, but keep a map to a common reference (i. e. KJV versification) for use in synchronizing parallel Bible translations. For example, in the World English Bible and the Majority Text Greek New Testament (which the WEB conforms to), there are exactly 4 variations from KJV versification (Matt 23:13 & 14 swapped, Luke 17:36 & Acts 15:34 not found & relegated to footnotes, and one paragraph is placed at the end of Romans 14 instead of 16. Seeking to Matt. 23:13 WEB should cause a parallel KJV window to sync to Matt. 23:14, and vice versa. Seeking to Rom. 14:24 in the WEB should go to Rom. 14:24 in the WEB, but display Rom. 16:25 in the KJV, and vice versa. This may seem like a hassle at first, but the exception list should be fairly small for any one translation, especially since you really don't need to handle verses relegated to footnotes in this manner. That leaves an exception list of only 5 verses in the WEB that need this special handling (Matt. 23:13 & 14 swapped and Rom. 14:24-26 <-> 16:25-27). The NRSV and UBS4 would need 3 John 15 <-> 3 John 14, and I don't know if there are any others (besides more verses relegated to footnotes than the Majority Text) that would require special handling. It seems to me that a short verse synchronization exception list packet stored with a Bible text file, along with one more layer of indirection for verse synchronization, could handle this much more elegantly than forcing all translations to use KJV versification.


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