Garrick Allen’s Words Are Not Enough is the natural successor of David Parker’s Living Text of the Gospels (1997). Both are short, accessible works meant to stimulate study of an overlooked aspect of New Testament texts and manuscripts. Parker’s book called attention to a wide range of textual variation of the Gospel texts and inspired a new generation of New Testament textual critics to look at the old text in new ways, not as a repository of scribal variants but as a living text. Likewise, Allen makes the paratexts of the New Testament come alive for present and prospective students of the New Testament, opening up once fallow fields for new research. Just as the full range of manuscript variation was largely unknown to readers outside of the specialization of New Testament textual criticism before Parker’s Living Text of the Gospels, Allen’s Words Are Not Enough speaks to an audience largely uninformed of the wide diversity of paratexts that subsist in the manuscripts that convey the biblical text—an audience, truth be told, that even comprises many specialists in textual criticism.

Paratexts are rather notorious in being difficult to define, and Allen offers a heuristic definition that paratexts are “the other things that appear between the two covers of a Bible beyond the biblical text itself” (12). After listing a panoply of various paratexts (including prologues, lists, tables, and annotations), Allen maintains that these “add-ons encourage the readers to interpret the text in particular ways” (12). Allen’s notion of a paratext is expansive, and his book goes into further fascinating detail for titles, cross-references (especially the Eusebian Canons for the Gospels and the Euthalian apparatus for Acts and the Epistles), prefaces, textual corrections, and readers’ doodles. These paratexts are introduced to the reader with a personal vignette or modern analogue before diving into the nitty-gritty and often engaging details of the particular items. Probably the most unfamiliar and most intriguing set of paratexts to New Testament textual critics are the various doodles that readers have scrawled into the margins of the text. They are fun and engaging and should spur scholars into looking for more.

Allen’s choice of paratexts to illustrate, however, makes the notion of paratext so capacious of so many distinct features that it may seem challenging to find a single thread that unites them all both formally and functionally. Formally, the idea that paratexts are anything written (or scribbled) in a manuscript “beyond the biblical text itself” is challenged by the inclusion of corrections by users to the biblical text (chapter 11). What is the (para)textual status of these corrections? While not part the biblical text as intended by the scribe who planned and penned the manuscript, the corrections of the user appear intended to update the biblical text. Are they part of the biblical text or not? In appearance they are not: they are made in another hand in margins and other places where the biblical text is not itself laid out, and in many cases indistinguishable from short annotations or notes that are clearly paratextual. Yet in effect, they were certainly intended to be the correct text.

Functionally, the idea that paratexts are meant to shape the reader’s interpretation of the text may fit most paratexts but not necessarily all of them. Certainly, titles and even tables of contents work to provide a certain approach to the text, as Allen amply documents, but it is not clear that such an explanation is appropriate for the elements Allen identifies as paratexts. In particular, I have in mind the doodles. To be sure, some of them may help guide the reader’s interpretation, especially if they were inspired by the biblical text in the middle of the page. But for other doodles, it is hard to see how they could be helpful when their content seems wholly unrelated to the biblical text. There seems to be a trade-off at play here: the more inclusive one becomes of paratexts, the less one can say about a single function in common for them.

Now, this tension between scope and coherence for paratexts has long been part of the notion of paratextuality ever since Gérard Genette’s seminal work on it, and one should not expect Allen’s introduction to this area of study to be the exhaustive tome that definitively settles these issues. Rather, it seems that Allen’s expansive notion of paratexts is an appropriate choice for calling attention to this overlooked area of study. Paratexts are so varied and do so many different things, both propositionally and aesthetically, that a broad scope is necessary to attract further research into them.

As a textual critic interested in editing ancient texts and presenting them to modern readers, Allen’s book has inspired me to think more about the inevitability and function of paratexts as we publish our critical texts and how to best serve our readers. The Nestle-Aland editions of the Greek New Testament, for example, are not limited to the Greek text but present a variety of material on the initial “threshold” of its front matter, as a well as a number of features throughout their printed book. For example, after the title and copyright pages, there is a foreword (in German and English) from the editors acknowledging the contributions of many people to the edition. Next there is an extensive Introduction (also in both German and English) giving the history of the edition, the goals and methods of establishing the text for the edition, a detailed explanation of the critical apparatus with scores of abbreviations, a brief exposition of the various notes in the inner and outer margins, and discussion of the appendices to follow. Nestled between the Introduction and the first of the Gospel is an untranslated Greek version of Eusebius’s letter to Carpianus explaining how to use the Eusebian Canons that had been already explained, differently, in different languages. These constitute the paratextual front matter for the edition.

As for the layout of the biblical text within the edition, it is set forth in the top half of the page within a block of punctuated Greek text with verse numbers and text-critical sigla. On the outer margin are found a set of topic and parallel cross-references, and on the inner margin, the Eusebian canons and sections for the Gospels, and “traditional” kephalaia number outside of the Gospel. Dominating the bottom of the page in a smaller font is a detailed critical apparatus presenting multitudinous variant readings and their manuscript support. On the top of every page is a page number, a verse number, and a short title in Greek. The short title is repeated at the front of every New Testament book as an inscription, with a text-critical siglum to note alternative forms of the book titles in the manuscripts. A careful reader of the critical apparatus for the title will notice that the edition’s title differs from those given in nearly every other witness to the New Testament.

As Allen’s book makes clear, many of these paratextual elements or their analogues were found in medieval copies and editions of the New Testament. Medieval manuscripts also had titles, but their form was usually much more elaborate (and arguably spiritually edifying) than the stark, bare titles of the Nestle-Aland edition. Both modern and medieval editions employed cross-referencing systems. The medieval systems with the Eusebian and Euthalian systems are explained in Allen’s book; the modern system relies heavily on the chapter-verse system more or less finalized by Robert Stephanus, with vestigial traces of the medieval system in the inner margin. While the Nestle-Aland edition includes medieval and modern explanations of the Eusebian Canons, the Euthalian system is almost entirely absent. Gone are the extensive listings of the various sections; gone are the quotation lists; gone are the prefaces. Only the otherwise unexplained kephalaia numbers are printed, in the inner margin. To be sure, some of the functions of the Euthalian apparatus are now marked differently: quotations in italics and their source cross-referenced in the outer margin. Some of their paratextual functions may remain today, but the user of the modern critical edition will have no inkling that there was an extensive paratext apparatus outside the Gospels, as explained in detail in Allen’s book. This raises in my mind some questions. If we are going to print and explain the Eusebian apparatus, then why not the Euthalian as well? Should critical editions also document the historical paratexts our biblical inexorably found itself in? What work are medieval and modern paratexts doing and is it the same?

As to the last question, I might venture that the main work the paratexts of the modern critical editions is to support the scientific nature of the process that produced the critical texts. This is why our critical editions are introduced with lists and lists of witnesses to the biblical text and why the biblical text itself is decorated with a surfeit of text-critical sigla cross-referencing extensively listing of witnesses in the dense apparatus below the biblical text. Paratexts that promote a devotional or spiritual reading of the text are mostly if not entirely gone. Titles are stripped bare, old prefaces are removed, and helpful annotations are removed. One gets the feeling that the critical text is designed for objective, critical scholars, rather than the vastly larger part of the audience for the Bible.

At the heart of Allen’s book is the bold claim, “There is no Bible, no New Testament, without paratexts” (169). Those familiar with paratextuality will appreciate its resonance with Genette’s claim that “the paratext is what enables a text to become a book.”1 Allen’s expansive definition as everything but the biblical text fits this claim, and he gives us an important reminder. Textual critics and other exegetes of the New Testament must never forget that the biblical text is not a perfect Platonic form floating out there somewhere in the realm of ideas casting imperfect ink-stained shadows on the tangible media of our manuscripts. Rather, it is what readers beheld in their books and encountered on their pages. What its readers read does not exist in isolation but within a nexus of many other elements that support it. As Allen demonstrates, these other elements—the paratexts—have a life and history of their own and they are necessarily an inseparable part of the story of the New Testament.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “chapter and verse” is first attested in English in 1628.1 Most people are aware that originally the phrase referred to citing exact chapter and verse numbers from the Bible to substantiate a point. Today it is used more generally to mean providing all necessary details, sources, or evidence for something. In the Bible, chapters and verses allow readers to mark the position of words, phrases, and passages and to communicate them to others with great precision. Chapter and verse numbers have become a kind of shorthand for the words of Scripture themselves. Young Christians who want to show their faith in God may get “John 3:16” or “Philippians 4:13” tattooed on their arm or chest. Women who spend time in Christian spaces online have surely come across videos and articles with tips on how they too can become “a Proverbs 31 woman.” Yet, even as inherent to the text as chapters and verses seem to modern Christians, not to mention how difficult it would be for most readers to find their way around the Scriptures without them, they are a relatively new addition to the paratextual tools that help us navigate our modern Bibles.

In Words Are Not Enough, Garrick Allen writes, “even some of the more conventional paratexts that we now associate with Bibles weren’t invented until the sixteenth century when they first appeared in Stephanus’s 1551 printed Bible. Looking at the paratexts shows that our modern Bibles are indeed just that: very modern.”2 The man in charge of this edition was Robert Estienne, or “Stephanus” (1503–1559), a visionary printer and gifted editor.3 Estienne’s major contribution was not the chaptering of the biblical text, which dated from an earlier time, but the division of those chapters into verses.4 William Weaver has noted that, “the technological breakthrough of the verse [. . .] is the use (and arguably the invention) of a unit of discourse as a systematic means of reference, both within the page and within the codex.”5 In the decades following its introduction (and at amazing speed for the time), Estienne’s chapter and verse system quickly established itself as a widely-accepted means of reference for conveying specific locations within the text of the New Testament.6 The appearance of the term “chapter and verse” in English to mean an exact reference less than a century later is certainly a testament to the popularity of Estienne’s invention. To many, a printed Bible without chapters and verses would probably be, ironically, something of a novelty.7 But how did Greek-speaking readers navigate their hand-written copies of the Bible before the advent of chapters and verses? How did they mark a position in the text for personal study, for exegesis, or for liturgical use?

Allen gives a comprehensive answer to these questions in the section of his book called “Cross-References,” in which he introduces readers to various systems of text division and organization that existed for different parts of the New Testament.8 For the Gospels, the three oldest systems of text divisions date back to the fourth and fifth centuries. The oldest and rarest of these systems, appearing in only two manuscripts, is the fourth-century Capitulatio Vaticana. It takes its name from the Codex Vaticanus, where it was first attested. A second, much more common system is the Gospel kephalaia, also known as the Old Greek Divisions, whose first attestation is in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus. In this system, the Gospel text was divided into sections of varying lengths and each section was assigned a brief descriptive title, or titlos. The titloi were then compiled into a list placed at the beginning of the corresponding Gospel. The third late antique system of Gospel text divisions, and arguably the one which enjoyed the greatest cultural cachet, was created by the fourth-century historian and cleric Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius divided each Gospel into sections (kephalaia) and then set these numbers into ten tables, to establish a system of cross-references between the four Gospels. Eusebius’s system differs from the other two systems in three significant ways: first, Eusebius was a known historical figure whose name is strongly associated with his system in the manuscripts, whereas most Gospel paratexts, such as the Capitulatio Vaticana and the Gospel kephalaia, are the work of anonymous authors, scribes, or annotators. Second, it has the distinction of being the only Gospel paratext that regularly circulates with its own user’s guide, the Letter to Carpianus, which precedes the canon tables in most manuscripts. Lastly, Eusebius’s system was the only system of text divisions expressly developed for the purpose of cross-referencing, highlighting the points of intersection and the difference between the four Gospel narratives.9

Although intended to operate as part of a sophisticated system of textual cross-references, the Eusebian sections also served a more basic but no less essential function: that of bookmarks and placeholders within a set of continuous texts, allowing readers to keep their place and communicate with others about specific locations in the text by referring to a widely diffused numbering system. As Allen writes, “instead of subdividing each Gospel into chapters and verses like modern Bibles, Eusebius broke up each narrative into a single linear set of units. In a time before the modern chapter and verse systems, this numeration allowed readers to identify texts in a highly specific way.”10 While less granular than Estienne’s chapters and verses, Eusebius’s sections could equally serve as points of reference in the Gospel text and were well-suited for that purpose. In the rest of this contribution, I would like to examine some Greek Gospel paratexts which use Eusebian section numbers to help readers locate points in the text, much like chapters and verses.

One often finds notes and comments (also called scholia) in Byzantine Gospel books, which help interpret, explain, or clarify the Gospel text. These so-called exegetical scholia are often placed directly in the margins next to the word, phrase, or passage that they comment on.11 If, for reasons of space, it is not possible to put the scholium in obvious proximity to its reference text, the scribe may put a number or sign by the scholium and its reference text, to signal to the reader that the two are connected. Sometimes, however, scholia are added to the end of the Gospel, or at the very least removed from the direct vicinity of their reference text. In the following examples, scholia use Eusebian sections to direct their readers to the correct point in the text. The first example is a scholium found in three Gospel books and concerns the scribe’s decision to omit the pericope of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) from the Gospel of John and add it at the end of the Gospel instead.12 The scribe writes:

I have omitted at its usual place the kephalaion for the Gospel of John about the woman taken in adultery, since it is not found in most copies and is not mentioned by the Holy Fathers in their exegeses – neither by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, nor by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the rest – but it can be found a little after the beginning of the 86th kephalaion, by “search and look, for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.”13

This kind of editorial transparency is highly unusual in Byzantine paratexts, but for our purposes what is especially interesting here is that the scribe gives the reader a Byzantine equivalent of a chapter and verse reference. The pericope of the woman taken in adultery falls within section Jn-86, covering our John 7:45 through 8:19. To help readers locate the precise starting point of this pericope, they are advised to begin reading at section Jn-86 (John 7:45) and continue until they reach the final words of John 7:52, which marks the place of the omitted pericope. The reader would have been able to determine exactly where this pericope began.

Another instance where Eusebian section numbers are used to guide readers to points in a text occurs in a twelfth-century manuscript now held in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB), suppl. gr. 164, Diktyon 71628, GA 2622 (date: 1108–1109), in the Gospel portion of what used to be a complete New Testament manuscript but, at some point in its circulation history, was divided into two parts. In this manuscript the Gospel of John is followed by around 23 folios of liturgical tables and other paratexts, including various exegetical scholia on different Gospel passages. Beginning on f. 105r, a series of scholia attributed to John Chrysostom has an unusual style of title. The first one reads “Commentary by Chrysostom on the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew, kephalaion 23.”14 Another title reads “Commentary by our father among the saints John Chrysostom on the Lord’s Prayer, kephalaion 43 of Matthew.”15 The two sections mentioned in the titles take the reader to Matt 4:23, where the interpretation begins ahead of the beatitudes at Matt 5:2, and to Matt 7:2, ahead of the Lord’s Prayer at Matt 6:9. Since the scholia are removed from their reference texts, the addition of the Eusebian sections allows readers to quickly locate the relevant passages within the Gospel of Matthew, following the lemmata within the scholia to further identify the relevant portion of the section.

What these kinds of references show is that even without the convenience of the chapter and verse system that we use today, the Greeks had their own, idiosyncratic but no less effective, “reference technologies” for navigating the Scriptures.16 Exegetical scholia are not the only Gospel paratexts which use Eusebian sections; there are also a few manuscripts where liturgical tables use Eusebian sections to point to the location of liturgical readings and Gospel kephalaia lists which have the corresponding Eusebian section displayed in an adjacent column.17 Garrick Allen’s engaging new book makes the treasures of ancient biblical scholarship, such as the Eusebian system, accessible and understandable to a wide readership and shows how old ways of looking at old books can offer us something new.