Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church

in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and get started, and as I mentioned, when we get started,

we're going to be picking up in St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians,

chapter 16, right at the beginning with verse one. But before that, I wanted to make a couple of comments. One of those is actually sort of an overarching comment about chapters and verses in the Bible. So this might get a little

obstruse, but I want to make these comments. I'm sure I've probably talked about this

at some time before, at least in passing. But I think it's important to be reiterated. We, of course,

take having the books of the Bible divided up the way they are, and having those books then divided into chapters, those chapters

divided into verses, so that we can very easily reference and discuss any particular passage

of the Bible very quickly. And the chapter and verse numbers are fairly well standardized.

Sometime you run into trouble if you're talking about, for example,

the Old Testament of the Orthodox Study Bible,

where because it's based on the Greek tradition,

some of the material and some of the books is rearranged or different.

But in general, all of our English Bibles, and even if you get the scriptures in the Greek

or Hebrew text, the numbers have been standardized now.

And I've talked many times in the past in terms of understanding quotations from the Old

Testament in the New Testament,

about the fact that these chapter and verse divisions, and in some cases even the book

divisions, as we have them now, are very late. The book divisions were settled earlier,

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