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

[Jerry Hastings]

There is a problem when people give you a reference and they use something 
other than KJV. If asked to look at Psalm 120 by a Roman Catholic, would 
you know to look at Psalm 121? If you guess that it was from a text that 
follows the Douay you could get right to it if the Douay in Sword would use 
Douay references.

At 10:51 AM 9/4/2000 -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. If you
>want your user to be able to compare what different translations do with
>different verses, it is desirable to make each translation conform to a
>single standard of referencing. The same goes for linking with commentaries
>and other resources. And since every commentary, Bible dictionary, etc that
>I can think of uses the KJV verse numbering as standard, it simply makes
>sense to make each Bible module conform to that standard. Now, one should
>certainly make an effort to indicate where the verse is placed by the
>translators if it is not the same as where it is in the program (using a
>footnote or just putting the verse reference in []s).
>
>-Brandon
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Michael Paul Johnson" <mpj@ebible.org>
>To: <sword-devel@crosswire.org>
>Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 9:08 AM
>Subject: [sword-devel] KJV verse numbering is not universal.
>
>
> > 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.)
> >
> >
> > _______
> >
> > Michael Paul Johnson
> > mpj@eBible.org    http://ebible.org/mpj