The Bible’s volume management is rarely a serious consideration for most Christians. We flip from page to page and take the Book titles word-for-word without any second thought. Hey, there’s no problem with that. It’s the content that matters most, right?
On the other hand, in the world of interpretation where we are burdened with the task of overlaying the whole world in one language on top of another, we often find many things that don’t match quite exactly, in words or in methods. This is one such place.
There’s a long history behind the canonization of the Christian Bible that we read today, during which many books were divided into separate volumes. We talked about how Kings and Chronicles used to be one Book each, how Ezra-Nehemiah used to be in the same volume, and how Luke-Acts was separated as two Books. The fun part is that English and Chinese versions name their volumes slightly differently, too.
In English, we use numbers in front of Book names, through and through. Two volumes get 1 and 2, such as 1 Peter and 2 Peter. Three volumes get 1, 2, then 3. We have also discussed the pronunciation of the volume numbers. Feel free to say “First King“, “Two Corinthians“, and “Three John” (just not “Three Johns”, please). For Chinese, I’m afraid, things are not so simple, so buckle up.
All multi-volume Books of the Old Testament get suffixes (words at the end) that indicate the volume. However, instead of numbers, we assign “上” (meaning up) instead of 1 and “下” (down) for 2, hence goes 列王記上 (1 Kings) and 撒母耳記下 (2 Samuel), etc. In the New Testament, 1 and 2 are translated to “前書” (former book) and “後書” (latter book), so instead of 彼得上書, we have 彼得前書 for 1 Peter. These are not too bad because of the duality in 上下 and 前後.
But what happens to 1/2/3 John? That’s the exception where the Chinese version finally “gives in” and calls it 約翰一書, 約翰二書, and 約翰三書. Okay, fine.
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