The Bible as a Jigsaw Puzzle

Imagine a beautiful 15-foot by 20-foot painting of a mountain. It’s grand. It’s beautiful. It’s full of fun details to understand or just marvel at. This is the Bible of early Christianity.

Now imagine someone takes that painting and turns it into a 30,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. This is our modern Bible. Hundreds of years ago, Stephen Langton and Robert Estienne sliced our scriptures into distinct portions of regular size. Our chapter numbers, verse numbers, and subheadings break the Old and New Testament up into bite-sized portions that fit together nicely but are found more often on their own.

Most Christians could tell you all about the individual pieces, and have even memorized a few. Some Christians could tell you about the piece with part of a climber’s hand on it, or the one with the head of a mountain goat on it. They’ve seen some pieces with snow on them (they thought those pieces were just blank), and some with grass. They’ve even seen the piece with the mountain top on it, although it didn’t look much like a peak all by itself.

Christians have favorite jigsaw pieces that they motivate their lives with. They name their organizations and fellowship groups after the most well-known puzzle pieces. They are even so dedicated as to study a whole section of puzzle once piece at a time, squeezing meaning and reflection out of each piece, not skipping a single one.

And yet, ask those same Christians about the huge tree near the base of the mountain, and chances are they’ll have never seen it or even heard of it. Or the team of hikers? They’ve heard of that, and have even been pointed to a piece or two with a part of a shoe or a hat on it, but have never seen the whole hiking team together. In fact, most Christians, although they could tell you that the whole painting is certainly, definitely a painting of a mountain, have never actually seen the mountain for themselves. Or ask a Christian what this or that section of the painting is of, and they’ll have no idea, except to say, “That’s the bottom half of the mountain,” or “That’s the top half.”

This is a strikingly accurate analogy of our modern Bible reading experience. Our Bible, hundreds or thousands of years after its writing, was split unnecessarily into 1,200 chapters and 31,000 verses. Beyond that, new editions constantly add their own subheadings. We have verses memorized, we dedicate ourselves to verse by verse studies, we craft mission statements based on verses, we depend on them for encouragement, and we recognize verses just by their “John 3:16”-style references.

And yet, very seldom do we take a couple of the puzzle pieces, put them together and realize that what we thought was a mountain peak actually turned out to be a tent at base camp. We rarely realize how connected to each other Bible verses are. We do vaguely know of the overall story, but to describe what one book is about as a whole, or Paul’s main points to the Philippians, or the thematic differences between Matthew’s Gospel and John’s Gospel is a task we’ve never even considered.



Why do we persist in reading the Bible this way, myopically focusing on one piece at a time and missing out on the beautiful larger strokes God has given us through his scriptures? I suggest that Christians must stop reading Bibles with subheadings and verse and chapter numbers, and instead read a presentation of the Bible without such arbitrary divisions. I personally only know of one such Bible currently in print, and I strongly recommend it: The Books of The Bible, a presentation of the TNIV published by the International Bible Society. Reading the Bible without distinguishing between the individual pieces has energized and put a fresh perspective on my Bible reading over the past year. It’s like reading a whole new book and seeing the whole big picture—and smaller sections of the picture as well—like I’ve never seen it before.

But is this extreme measure necessary? Reading a whole new Bible without ANY numbers? After all, most of us own several chapter-and-verse-equipped Bibles that are fully intact and contain every word. The whole picture is there, right? I would argue that this isn’t good enough, for two reasons.

First, looking at the original image of the mountain is clearer and more satisfying than looking at the puzzle version with dividing lines all though it, even when it’s all put together. In the same way, even if you read three chapters at a time, your effort to understand the passage as a whole is constantly interrupted by tiny numbers every dozen words or so. Why put hurdles in your way every 15 yards when you’re trying to run a marathon?

Secondly, although we may have Bibles that contain all 31,000 puzzle pieces put together in the correct order, we’re so used to being fed one puzzle piece at a time in church, on the radio, in conversation, on merchandise and in books that unless we eliminate the verse numbers altogether, they naturally control the framework in which three think about the Bible. For example, you likely didn’t even notice that I said “read three chapters at a time” in the paragraph above because three chapters at a time is a perfectly normal way to read.

And yet, why end at three chapters? Just because of arbitrary divisions installed in the thirteenth century? What’s that have to do with anything? Since the chapter markers were added hundreds of years after the books were written and often end right in the middle of an important passage, it would make more sense to stop reading when there is a natural break in narrative. But because of our tendency to think of our Bible reading in terms of chapters, this concept barely computes.

A common reason one might contest this and argue for a Bible with chapters and verses is for the sake of referencing particular sentences. The Bible, with all 66+ books together, is incredibly long. If you need to tell someone about Jesus feeding 5,000 people, it’s easier to simply say, “Luke 9:10-17” than it is to say, “In the first half of Luke, when Jesus is still doing his ministry in the Galilee area, in the middle of the passages that focus on Jesus’ disciples and their understanding of his identity, we find…” That’s reason enough right there to keep the verses in, right?

Actually it’s just the opposite. Think of the puzzle analogy again. What makes more sense: to say, “At the intersection of the 55th piece from the top and the 209th piece across, there’s a man with no gloves on,” or, “Down near base camp, in the cluster of tents, next to the campfire, there’s a man with no gloves on”? The first way may be more exact and quck, but which way promotes better understanding of the photo as a whole? Which one is more helpful to the reader in the long run? Which way assures that the man with no gloves on will not be taken as a crazy person?

In the same way, referencing parts of the Bible without chapters and verses promotes a full understanding of a section in the context of the book and of the story of the whole Bible. It also discourages taking the Bible out of context. Besides all this, I would guess that most Bibles published without verse/chapter numbers are like The Books of the Bible in that they feature chapter references someplace convenient but out of the way, such as the corners of the pages.

It’s amazing what the Holy Spirit does through our crude treatment of the scriptures, bringing meaning to us from just a couple of pixels. However, why work against His effort to help us understand His Word by focusing in so narrowly? I suggest we each get a copy of Books of the Bible or a similar Bible presentation, and allow the Holy Spirit to help us see the beautiful paintings his human authors create in full.