My wife has been saying they should do this for years, she may have a point. Some of her reasoning is in the reasons given on the blog for this:
* the impression given by c&v is that the reader is encountering a reference manual of some sort, so it immediately misrepresents the nature of the Bible;
* c&v imposes a kind of numbing “sameness” on the biblical material, flattening it out and disguising the real variety of material;
* c&v is off-putting and confusing to new readers of the Bible;
* chapter divisions typically don’t correspond with the authors’ divisions of thought;
* chapter divisions can direct people to make sense of only a piece of a longer section as if it were complete in itself;
* chapter divisions can direct people to read two or more smaller sections as if they really belong together in a single section;
* even when chapter divisions do align with the natural breaks in the text, they are all about the same length, thus allowing only divisions of a certain size to be shown and ignoring divisions of both a larger or smaller size;
* chapter divisions encourage the reader to stop upon reaching the end of the chapter;
* verse divisions imply that the Bible is a collection of independent and free-standing statements;
* verse divisions are often placed at awkward or inappropriate places;
* verse divisions lead to “verse-jacking”, an intrusive breaking into the biblical text, typically leading to the robbery of selected words in which the original context and meaning are left behind;
* verse divisions encourage a relativistic reading of the text in which the original meaning fades back and all that matters is what the isolated words say to me, now.
In short, c&v presents a serious distortion of the biblical text.
Of course the really worrying aspect of all this is the people who talk about doing something like this as if it's changing scripture...
The Books of The Bible | Comparison:
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