<P> While chapter divisions have become nearly universal, editions of the Bible have sometimes been published without them . Such editions, which typically use thematic or literary criteria to divide the biblical books instead, include John Locke's Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1707), Alexander Campbell's The Sacred Writings (1826), Daniel Berkeley Updike's fourteen - volume The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, Richard Moulton's The Modern Reader's Bible (1907), Ernest Sutherland Bates's The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (1936), The Books of the Bible (2007) from the International Bible Society (Biblica), Adam Lewis Greene's five - volume Bibliotheca (2014), and the six - volume ESV Reader's Bible (2016) from Crossway Books . </P> <P> Since at least 916 the Tanakh has contained an extensive system of multiple levels of section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions that were indicated in Masoretic vocalization and cantillation markings . One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a full stop or sentence break, resembling the colon (:) of English and Latin orthography . With the advent of the printing press and the translation of the Bible into English, Old Testament versifications were made that correspond predominantly with the existing Hebrew full stops, with a few isolated exceptions . Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440 . </P> <P> The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470--1541), but his system was never widely adopted . His verse divisions in the New Testament were far longer than those known today . Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French . Estienne's system of division was widely adopted, and it is this system which is found in almost all modern Bibles . Estienne produced a 1555 Vulgate that is the first Bible to include the verse numbers integrated into the text . Before this work, they were printed in the margins . </P> <P> The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524--1579). The first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published shortly afterwards in 1560 . These verse divisions soon gained acceptance as a standard way to notate verses, and have since been used in nearly all English Bibles and the vast majority of those in other languages . (Nevertheless, some Bibles have removed the verse numbering, including the ones noted above that also removed chapter numbers; a recent example of an edition that removed only verses, not chapters, is The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language by Eugene H. Peterson .) </P>

Who divided the bible into chapters & verses