.. More than this, the chapter has become a way of looking at the world, a way of dividing time and, therefore, of dividing experience. 

.. The chapter might have disappeared in favor of some other form had not the early Fathers of the Church made it their signature technique. 

.. In their enthusiasm for chapters, however, early Christian editors and writers introduced a problem, one that cut to the heart of their own sacred texts and presaged the challenge that chapters present to writers even today. How do you segment continuous, narrative texts rather than informational ones? How, for instance, do you divide Scripture—like the Gospels—into bits, given that they were written as one continuous text, undivided and unlabelled? 

.. The Bibles of late antiquity and early medieval culture contained a bewildering variety of chaptering systems to complement or replace Eusebius’s sections, and each system had its own sense of what counts as a significant unit of action or a significant moment deserving of its own heading. To divide, it turns out, is already to interpret.

.. By having the industrious Parisian university copyists produce his version, Langton could insure that its adoption would be as quick and as universal as possible. This approach worked—the biblical chapters devised in Paris in the first two decades of the thirteenth century are the ones we still use today.

.. The Langton chapters, if we can call them that, gave the Bible a particular narrative style. By trying to produce chapters of roughly equivalent lengths, Langton had to unmoor himself from a traditional understanding of scenic units. 

.. These discrete acts are, in the systems that preëxisted Langton, also discrete chapters. The moment between Jesus and the bleeding woman sometimes even gets its own chapter, despite the fact that it occupies only a few sentences and comes as an interruption as Jesus walks to Jairus’s house. But for Langton these three incidents are all part of one chapter, for a simple reason: they happened in one place, “the country of the Gerasenes,” as the first verse of the Langton chapter tells us. When Jesus and his disciples move on to Nazareth, a new chapter begins.

.. The chapter says something like: They may not have known it, but something had ended, and something else was about to begin.

..  Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” insisted that “chapters relieve the mind,” encouraging our immersion by letting us know that we will soon be allowed to exit and return to other tasks or demands.

.. As the chapter ceased seeming peculiar, it also grew in length; the average Victorian chapter was around thirty-five hundred words, roughly twice the eighteenth-century norm.

.. It is a brief episode, “so short that it scarce deserves to be called a chapter at all,” as W. M. Thackeray writes in “Vanity Fair.” And yet, Thackeray continues, “it is a chapter, and a very important one too. Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?”