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.

Section 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 Biblica 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 on them at all. It's often said that the very first manuscripts were just a series of letters with not even spaces between words and punctuation, that sort of thing, which is basically true.

However, very early on, people started saying, "Look, we need to have these things with helps." The early manuscripts were read out loud, so oftentimes the very first things that appear are breathing marks, little spaces between words, page numbers, those sorts of things. And I think what happened over time is we just started inserting more things into the text, all with the interest of providing help, of course.

There were practical reasons for these things. But by the time you get to the end of the history of the Bible in our time, these helps, these additions, have pretty much overwhelmed the text. So, chapter numbers, surprisingly to many people when I speak about this, came rather late in the game.

The chapter system that we know in our Bibles today came from Stephen Langdon, who was an English church leader in the early 1200s. So to think about the fact that the Bible existed without these chapter numbers for over a thousand years is startling to many people. And I think just the realization, I think one big light that comes on for people is to know that the Bible itself has a history as a book, and that it developed over time in its format, and that the Bible doesn't have to be what we see today.

And in fact, it always hasn't been what we see today. And they're interested to know that verses and chapters have separate histories, really. The chapter numbers were inserted--Langdon was actually working on Bible commentaries, and so it's very helpful to find the Bible in sections that are easier to find specific pieces.

So the chapter numbers came in for that reason. Also, many times, some of the various chapter number systems-- there were more than one at various points in the Bible's history-- were included so that people could find passages for public reading of Scripture. So it's these practical uses that really developed the form, the changing form that we see in the Bible.

Verses came 300 years later in the 1500s, and it's interesting, the gentleman who started the verse number system, the man that we know, Robert Estienne, a French printer, was actually working on a Bible concordance. So verses, of course, are more precise than chapters, and so he needed something closer to smaller pieces of the Bible than chapter numbers.

So he inserted verse numbers into a Greek New Testament and added numbers to the Hebrew breathing marks that already existed in the Old Testament, and voila, you get the modern chapter and verse Bible for the very first time in the 16th century, which is, again, surprisingly late in the Bible's history.

And again, it's fascinating, I think, to realize that both innovations were added to the text in the search of better reference help, commentaries and concordances, and that's what led to the introduction of chapters and verses. The history of oral Bible reading is a rich and incredible story of its own, but it'll have to wait for another podcast episode.

I want to talk about the implications of this reference style in a moment. When we open our Bibles, we also see a two-column style. Where did that originate, and how does that style influence our engagement with the Bible? Well, when you think about the scroll, right, opening horizontally, columns had to exist.

Those lines can't go on forever. So, you know, the scrolls certainly had columns. It was a question of how long is the length of a column. And then when you switch to the codex form of the book, what we would know as a book form, first on animal skins and later on paper, it became just a practical matter of being able to fit as much material onto a page as possible.

And so it was really that practical desire, I think, that drove this. Because the Bible's a big book. It's hard to fit it into a single volume without putting two columns on the page, which really maximizes the use of space with your words. The problem I have with double-column Bibles, or even worse, this terrible thing I saw a few years ago, which is a three-column Bible, which was almost impossible to read.

It squeezes the Bible down into a few hundred pages, but what can you do with it? So the two-column was a page-saving, space-saving device, but it really is very hard on things like poetry. So Hebrew parallelism, that the lines are always meant to work together, they're talking to each other and so forth, this becomes almost impossible to see in a two-column Bible because you can't fit a whole line of the Hebrew text across a column, so you end up indenting.

Then you have multiple levels of indents, and the page becomes indecipherable. You can't really see what's going on with the Hebrew poetry, so therefore you don't really read it as poetry, you're just reading words. Yeah, that's really key. The Bible is a huge book. I mean, that's just reality, and then it's packaged with a lot of added references and other notes and materials.

How did the rise of concordances change how Christians read the Bible? Well, and again, I tell you, it's the desire to make good use of the Bible. So concordances are very helpful things, and now, of course, we can do all this electronically. It's so fast and so easy to look things up, which is great in many ways.

The problem is concordance drives you to use the Bible in a particular way, and when we back-design or back-format the Bible to fit our desire for something like a concordance, then we're changing what the Bible is in its regular presentation. So it would be one thing if we said, "Well, we need reference Bibles for when we're using the Bible to reference things." Like when I want to do a word study and I look up words, finding the verse number is much faster than scanning a chapter for that word.

However, when we change the form to fit that particular need, what we've done without really thinking about it is we've hurt reading. So when we changed the Bible into a chapter and verse Bible, plus added all these other modern additives, cross-references, section headings, footnotes, all the other stuff that we put in Bibles, we've really made it hard for people to just flat-out read the Bible.

And one of the things I contend in my book is we should be reading first and studying second, and actually doing our study in the context of having read whole books, because that's really what authors intended. Their central unit is not a verse, is not a chapter, it's a book.

Those are the central units the Bible is built on, and I think we should read holistically first, and then do our study in the context of that reading. And I think the modern Bible reverses those things. It does. Yeah, it does. And verses and chapters are two fairly recent phenomena, even more recent than newer data smog, as you call it.

I'm thinking of those tiny cross-reference texts that are listed in Bible margins. When you have a column of references to point you to related texts as you read, what's your fear? What does this phenomenon do to our Bible reading? Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't really do the research to know when that originated.

I should probably track that down. That would be a fascinating piece of this history, of the development of the format of the Bible. But I know how they function. They function, again, helpfully in the right ways, but the problem is they tend to take over. And what it does, again, is I say it prevents long-form, in-depth, kind of lose-yourself-in-the-text reading.

I don't know if you ever knew the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, what the Internet is doing to our brains. And I think he has a fascinating chapter in there about how, in electronic media, when we have these built-in distractions, hyperlinks, ads running down the side of the page, a million things on a page to look at and click on, those distractions become actually addictive to our brain.

And in fact, there are studies that show that actually starts to rewire our brains, so that our brains prefer the distractions and like to keep clicking on new things rather than stick with a long piece of text, reading it, absorbing it, understanding it in a deeper way. And I think, you know, cross-references down the middle column of a Bible, they're kind of an early version of a built-in distraction system.

They tell us that if we jump around the Bible, looking at this verse and that verse, not necessarily stopping to take the time to read each of those references in its own context. What kind of book am I looking at? Is this poetry? Is it a letter? Is it a narrative?

And what's the context of what's happening in that book? I think the danger of a cross-reference system is that it becomes a kind of an out-of-context distraction system that tells us this is serious study of the Bible, when actually it can easily become a superficial kind of study of the Bible, unless I stop to do the due diligence of making sure every reference that I'm looking up is read in its own context, which of course is a time commitment.

It's a commitment to read the Bible a particular way. The danger is, I think I'm really getting significant Bible study, topical study, these sorts of things, but there's a clear danger. And again, I'd say the first and the primary and the most natural thing to do with the Bible is to read individual books at length in their own terms.

So understanding the kind of literature it is, who was the author, who were they writing to, what was the issue, those kinds of things. One of my first Bibles was a Thompson's chain reference Bible. You would pick a topic and then bounce from Genesis to Revelation verse by verse thematically.

I'm having flashbacks of that right now, but you're exactly right. Biblical cross references are like a pre-digital hypertext, really. You ask this question in the book, I think it's so important, I want you to address it now. You say this, "Which of the following is the Bible most like?

A. Bartlett's familiar quotations, B. The Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repairs, or C. The collected papers of the American Anti-Slavery Society." Great question. These are illustrations, of course, not exact representations. So what is more close to the right answer and what do the other two options imply? Right. We want to believe, and many times we're presented with a Bible that's either A or B.

That is, it's either a collection of familiar quotations, so we see the usual suspects, Philippians 4.10, Jeremiah 29.11, Joshua 1.9, all these verses that get regularly shared as the most encouraging, most uplifting collection. It presents the idea, and social media I think has just made this problem kind of even stronger, it's heightened it, that the Bible just is a collection of these little gems, these precious one-liners, that just do amazing work to encourage us and strengthen us and so forth.

So there's that, and the problem is that answer says, well, the Bible is meant to be used in a way that you can look past all those verses that don't fit this model and find the good ones. Now, we never really stop to ask, why are these good ones buried in all this other text, and what do we need that text for?

If we're not using it for our daily encouragement, I don't really need the other text. And so it narrows the Bible down into these really tremendous bite-sized pieces that we love, but it ignores the rest of the text. So it misrepresents what the Bible actually is, and has just become the way that we're familiar with using the Bible.

The second answer, B, the Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repairs, again, says that the book was designed to be a kind of a self-help book. That what I do is I think of a topic, marriage, for instance, and I look up all the verses, all the passages that are about marriage, and I think that by adding them together, I can get the Bible's teaching about marriage.

Problem is that that kind of work isn't contextualized. It doesn't say, well, the marriage of the patriarchs was set in a certain cultural setting, and it operated a certain way in ways that we don't do, things that we don't do anymore, ways that we don't operate, and had assumptions that we don't work with anymore.

So you can't just look up the marriage of, say, Jacob, and say that's a model or something for what God's intention is for marriage in every respect. It isn't. And through the story of the Bible, God's teaching about marriage moves forward into more light, I would say, which is this key point that I really learned from Gerhardus Voss, who was a professor of biblical theology at Princeton back in the day, and really did tremendous work on helping us read the Bible well as a revelation that gets more clear as it moves toward Christ and towards God's ultimate intentions for human flourishing.

So really, we need to end up with C, the collected papers of the American Anti-Slavery Society. That is, the Bible is a collection of different kinds of writings, each of which exists in its own context, its own literary form, and they have to be taken as this kind of a collection.

It's true that the collection of the Bible comes together to tell this amazing, redemptive, restorative narrative of what Jesus the Messiah has done, but the books themselves are the core units. The Bible is the collection of those things. It's not a collection of verses. It's not a collection of little how-to passages.

Again, it's a matter of receiving the Bible on its own terms, receiving the Bible in the form that God actually chose to give it to us. That, I think, is something that our modern format tempts us to move away from. Yeah, it certainly does, and the market seems to push these "scripture McNuggets," a phrase you use in your book, these isolated verses applied to a situation of life, not a horrible habit in itself, but certainly not a sufficient method for understanding the sweep of those books.

You write this, quote, "In an atmosphere where consumer choice is the bottom line, the pressure is overwhelming on Bible providers to shape the Bible to these market-driven expectations. The core proposal is that these and similar tools will help you quickly find the small pieces of the Bible that seem to speak directly and meaningfully to you individually, without having to bother with who these words were first written to and what they might have meant then." Where do you see this, and what types of things illustrate this market trend in your mind?

Yeah, it's interesting. My own experience, nearly three decades in Bible publishing, in a non-profit setting, yes, but we also know what it's like to have market pressure. Donors, and when I was selling Bibles in a non-profit atmosphere, there were still demands that I felt as the publisher to make the Bible a certain kind of thing.

We always would introduce helps into our Bibles. This introductory material, the front and the back of New Testament, Gospels of John, Bibles, our material is mostly used for low-cost outreach and evangelism, but I felt that pressure. When we met with a partner, and we're producing a specialty New Testament, one of these niche products for a certain kind of target audience, you know, think of the whole list of the kind of Bibles that you see these days.

When I met with that partner and they said, "Yeah, here are the verses that we found that are most helpful for this audience." And I would say, "Well, I think the whole Scripture is helpful for this audience." And we would have these discussions, and I would feel the pressure to say, "Yeah, but these people aren't readers.

They're not big readers. So this audience, we can't expect them. It'd be great if they would read more of the Bible, but we can help them find these little Bible vitamins that especially speak to this situation that they're in." So this desire to kind of adapt the Bible to an audience in a market sense so that people will buy a product.

And I think, and that's a really dangerous thing because the Bible is what it is. And it has words of correction and teaching besides just encouragement and promises. And so the danger with a market-driven Bible is that the pressure is to turn the Bible into a very happy thing all the time.

And it's hard to sell people correction, for instance, you know, depth. These are things that people don't necessarily want to buy. They want to be encouraged. Life is hard. We understand that. But the Bible has to be respected kind of for what it is. And so there's been a real change, I think, in how people think about the Bible with the increasing commodification of the Bible.

Making the Bible into a commodity that has to be bought and sold will necessarily put pressure on the Bible to be a certain kind of thing. And we need to be really aware of that as the Church. The Church should be the prime caretakers of the Bible, not something like a business, in my opinion.

Because business has a goal. It's not that they're bad people. It's that businesses have to sell things. And there's pressure to form things in certain ways when something has to be sold. Whereas the Church is free to say, "This is the Word of God. This is what it proclaims.

This is what it teaches." We have to conform ourselves to it, not it to our consumer desires. Yeah, we must think of how the market demands influence our Bible design and how we engage the text as a key point. In your book, I sense another caution, an implicit pushback as I read it.

And I think it's healthy. You seem to say that for a lot of us, when we say that we have confidence in God's Word, what we're really saying is that we have a certain amount of confidence in an edition of a study Bible that puts enough guide rails around the text to protect a reader from messing up on interpretation.

Is that right? Do I sense that right? Yes, there is. And I think that's right. I mean, I live and work among evangelicals. I have for three decades now in the Bible ministry in particular, Bible publishing, Bible work. And it's clear that the group of evangelicals that I interact with, they have a high view of Scripture in their minds.

And I'm not doubting the sincerity, but I think the danger is that the Scripture that we have a high view of is so often, I think this is a danger in particular for Protestants, because we see ourselves as the Bible people. We're the people who kind of brought renewal and reformation to the church in the name of the Scripture.

This is what the Scriptures actually say. But over time, any group, I would say, can build up kind of its own tradition. And then it's a danger for every single one of us that at some point we quit letting the text be the text. And we think of our notes and our guardrails as the thing that is really where the authority is.

Once back when the Christian Booksellers Association were having their annual summer gatherings of booksellers and authors, those big events that would happen annually, I heard a presentation by someone doing research on Bible use. Saying that with the average study Bible, what was actually happening more often than people were reading the text and going to the notes for explanation on the text, people were starting to jump straight to the notes and not reading the text and just reading the study notes.

And again, I think this is a fascinating thing. And again, it's a huge point in my book, is the relationship of form and content. Because study Bibles put the design emphasis on the call-outs, the notes, they're usually, if there's going to be color on that page, it's going to be around the call-out material, not in the Bible text.

The Bible text doesn't really receive significant design attention. So our eyes are even drawn to the notes first. And I think for many people, the notes then replace the text as the real source of authority. And I think that's the danger. So the danger with even the group that thinks of itself as having the highest view of Scripture is that at some point we will say, "I'm so comfortable in my positions, I don't really have to delve into the text and put things back on the table and just see what the Scriptures actually say again." Anybody who spends time with the Bible is in danger, I think, of saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this.

I've read this. I got this one down. It's all figured out." We need to make sure we're always ready to listen to the text first and put our material, which is not inspired, our thinking, which is not inspired like the original text was, and say, "Hey, a real high view of Scripture says, 'Let the text be the text and always seek to let it speak to me.'" Even on things where I think I might have my mind settled, you know, and it's true, you can't question everything at once.

We have to have places where we stand, but we need to always be willing to say, "What does the Word of God say?" not, "What have I always said that the Word of God says?" Yeah, I think that's a wise and helpful pushback for lovers of study Bibles like me.

So we have this TMI Bible, this Too Much Information Bible, as you call it, which is cluttered with all these things. When we talk about the market, we talk about "the market." How much of this is really tied to reader impatience? The time commitment you mentioned earlier, we want the point fast, we want the application now.

Therefore, our Bibles come super technical looking as a reference document. Right, and much of the material in my book is tied to this, what I call a modernistic paradigm. Information, and information at our fingertips, is a huge value in the modern world. We want to be able to access information.

The electronic revolution has just heightened that again, so it's now on hyperdrive, this thing. I expect to be able to look things up. I mean, if you're presenting a talk these days, you know that there are people in the room, you know, who will check what you're saying immediately as you're talking to Google it, "Is this really what it says?" So this expectation of instant access to information is a big deal in our culture.

And so this idea that the Bible should be broken down into that kind of information, again, helpful in many ways. I love my electronic Bibles. I use it, and it's great. When I have YouVersion on my phone, my pastor's preaching, I can look things up, check things, I'm doing all that.

So that's great. But the danger is, when am I just taking that stuff away, all that information gathering, information accessing, overloading my brain with multiple distractions, when am I simply living deeply in the text? When am I reading it, just absorbing it, reading at length, so I'm getting the flow of an argument over time?

In one of Paul's letters, I'm seeing, you know, there are deep things in the narratives of the Old Testament, things that we don't pick up because we're always reading small. And so if we would spend time with narratives and see very intentional, like repeated phrases in stories about Samuel and Kings, those things are crafted very intentionally, and I fear it's just lost on modern readers who have this bias toward easy, quick access to information, not dwelling in the text at a deep and slow way.

I think the Christian church in a world that is not going to slow down anytime soon, we have to be somewhat countercultural, as we are in other areas. Morally, we kind of realize there's a need to be countercultural. I hope we do. But we need to be countercultural in ways that we live within our book.

Even if the rest of the culture doesn't do that anymore, that needs to be something that we form Christian people into being dwellers in the book, not just people who access information superficially. That's so good. Amen. But we must end. This has been helpful, Glenn. Thank you. I'll end by asking you about some really interesting trends.

In opposition to all of this, in recent years, there are some really good options for readers who want a clean Bible. Bibliotheca went viral as one example. The ESV Reader's Bible is my choice. And the NIV Books of the Bible functions similarly. I remember when the ESV Reader's Bible launched last year, I used it to read the book of Ezekiel in one setting, and it was like nothing I've ever experienced before.

Waves of powerful metaphors and images and no temptation to stop and parse every phrase, just to let those metaphors wash over me. How do you explain to people the experience of reading a decluttered Bible? It's very interesting you bring up this question. I've had people push back when I'm giving presentations on this topic, saying, "Yes, my Bible is busy." As you say, there's a lot of stuff going on on that page.

But of course, I can read right past that, and it doesn't really hinder my reading at all. And then I hand them one of these new Reader's Editions, which I think I've become the biggest purchaser of these Bibles because I hand them out to everyone saying, "Yeah, you have a Bible, but you have a modern reference of Bible.

You need a Reader's Edition because that's what we are doing with the Bible these days, and this is the thing that we have to recover." Then they read it, and they say, "Wow, that really is a different experience. It changes. I don't get to a chapter number, no stop signs.

I keep reading. I read in the natural sections when the story takes a break. Maybe that's where I take a break or it changes. But I don't have these artificial markers telling me that this is an intentional unit, and this is meant to be taken just on its own out of the context of this bigger writing." So I'm really excited to see Bible publishers embracing this new kind of reading.

And I hope that all of them will do that with all of the translations that we have available to us these days, because it's just good for the Bible. It's good for the church that people have a form of the Bible that lets them see the Bible in something closer to its original form, rather than the reference book format that everybody has at this point in time.

So I hope they do well for these publishers. I'm glad to see these things taking off. The Bibliotheca thing was amazing. To think that many people who wanted to get a four-multi-volume Bible in this clean format, in a well-crafted book. This is the things we need to start bringing back to our Bibles.

Instead of having such utilitarian Bibles, I think books that are actually crafted to honor the Scriptures as the gift from God that they are, that will invite people into reading. I mean, it's hard enough to get people to read these days, but give them a difficult format? What chances do we have of getting people to read Bibles that are hard to read?

And so this new category, I hope it grows. I hope it becomes normal, becomes the new normal, so that one day soon, anybody who has a Bible will say, "Yeah, I have a reader's Bible, and maybe I have a reference Bible too, or maybe that's just what I have as a setting on my electronic Bible." So sometimes I need to reference the Bible.

But my main thing with the Bible is to be always reading it. I'm reading it holistically. I'm feasting on the Bible. I'm not snacking on the Bible anymore. That was Glenn Powell, the Executive Director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading, a think tank dedicated to studying trends in Bible reading and design.

He's also the author of the new book, "Saving the Bible from Ourselves, Learning to Read and Live the Bible Well." Also be sure to check out the simplified Bible projects I mentioned in this podcast if you don't own one. Bibliotheca went viral as one example, but the ESV Reader's Bible is my choice.

The one-volume edition is the one I use, and the six-volume set is coming out in the fall. It looks very appealing. I can't wait to see that. And of course, the NIV Books of the Bible project is in the mix too as another option. Well, thank you for listening to this weekend conversation.

We return on Monday, and I put John Piper back on the hot seat, answering your tough Bible theology and ethics questions. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.