How did our Bible pages get so cluttered?

If you open your Bible at a random page, you'll find verse and chapter numbers have been

added, of course, and often the text has been scrunched into a two-column layout, like

no other book we read, and often with a bunch of tiny cross-references printed down the

middle of those two columns.

Modern headings have been added, and so too have been book introductions, and often study

notes, colorful images, call out boxes on the pages, and a concordance and maps and other

things in the back.

Our Bibles are loaded with extra clutter.

The history of how our Bibles got so jammed with notes and markings is a long one, and

Bible readers are beginning to ask what the clutter is doing to the psychology of our Bible

reading, and should we be preserving space in our lives to read the Bible without all

of these markings.

I connected with Glenn Powell, the Executive Director of the Biblical Institute for Bible

Reading, a think tank dedicated to studying trends in Bible reading and design.

Glenn is also the author of the new book, Saving the Bible from ourselves, Learning to

Read and Live the Bible Well.

We recently sat down and recorded this weekend conversation, and to start, I asked

him about the history of verse and chapter numbers that we see.

Who added those to our Bible?

Sure, it's actually a little piece of a bigger story with the Bible.

It's actually pretty hard to find Bible manuscripts that are perfectly clean with no markings

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