It is time we overhaul the bible. At first glance this may seem like a drastic proposal: the Good Book we read today is the product of numerous translations and touch-ups by skilled scholars over the centuries. As such I think its been awhile since the Bible has been in such sore need of refurbishment to the extent that I am about to suggest.

Don’t worry. I don’t want to mess with the wording. Every last group of letters, every article, adjective, even every diction-destroying Old Testament geneology can stay put. I won’t lay a finger on then.

The words stay. The superscripts go.

All I want to do is take some white-out and a really pointy Q-tip, and erase all the verse and chapter numbers that currently crowd the precious text. I want to make chapter and verse free Bibles the inalienable companion of the contemplative Christian.

Why the white-out? Is numerical crowding of the page really that much of a headache?

The problem is that chapter and verse numbers train us to treat Bible verses as isolated, bite-sized bits, rather than insoluble threads of a rich story. Thanks to the numerical nature of locating Bible verses, we splinter the Bible rather than read it.

So let’s scoop up all the numbers and toss them out. Let’s instead tune in to the text, using the author’s voice, audience, and themes to guide our reading rather than numbers. Let’s figure out where we’re going and why rather than gazing at road signs.

But wait, you plead, won’t such a system ensure that the massive biblical text dissolves into unrecognizable chaos? There are 66 books after all; isn’t some basic inventory in order? How will we retrieve treasured texts like Romans 8 if there’s no 8?

I don’t see this as a major stumbling block. After all, do superscript-free classics like the Declaration of Independence or Huck Finn require mile markers to guide us through? Do we need sentence-by-sentence bookmarks to help us remember their beautiful words, to appreciate the nuances and rhythm of the text?

Is the cryptic “Nevermore” in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” the least bit more haunting because it appears in line 48? Does Scene 3, Act 1, line 64 of Hamlet ring any bells? Yup, that’s “To be or not to be.” Big deal. As long as we keep the book titles in our new Bible, why do we need all the little labels?

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream Speech” is as long as many books of the Bible, and yet it is easily navigable, and its phrases are sealed in our memories even without any numbers. If anything, numbers shear meaning from the text.

Without our current method of fragmentation we could read the Bible with the same continuity as we do other great literature, poetry and narratives. We could better appreciate the flow of the Old Testament, the love-hate relationship Israel maintains with the God who won’t stop loving them, the bloody cross this tough love leads to, the thread of redemption woven through the Bible’s stories, letters and poetry. It is too easy to disconnect one verse from another when each has its own number. This is an intricate, perplexing, and mysterious collection of texts. Why are we so rushed to chop it up?

Perhaps numbers have always been unnecessary, but never before have they been such a stumbling block. Within the last few decades the strain of Christianity that has come to represent the faith in popular culture is both anti-intellectual and knee-jerk. A sliced-and-diced Bible exacerbates the problem. Fundamentalist pop theology may owe a good deal of its domination to the ease with which numbers enable the stringing together of various verses. The prominent Christian voices in our society are prone to fashioning such Theology-Ka-Bobs, and many touchy-feely megachurch Christians are eager to follow suit.

Today’s consumer culture itemizes, mass-produces, de-contextualizes and com-modifies. A Bible with chapters and verses fits right in. In this atmosphere, holding a “John 3:16” sign in the stands at the Super Bowl passes for meaningful evangelism. Posting the Ten Commandments in schools passes for meaningful moral guidance. In an age in which communication is increasingly distant and brief, one might suppose Christians would stand out by refusing to commodify and dilute, to flee from truncation and cling to meditation. Instead we are willing partners in a McDonalds culture.

There’s also the issue of humility. Numbering everything off makes it seem a little climate-controlled. There’s a sense in which numbers signal that we have it all figured out. If you were a trained bird-watcher and came upon a strange, exotic new species in the rainforest, you would be filled with wonder. If you then noticed a tag on the fowl’s ear your wonder would dissipate. Someone’s been there, done that. Your curiosity takes a hit.

Numbers decrease the neces-sary mystery of this centuries-long collection of voices and styles held together by the breath of God. The Bible is a majestic, complex story of God’s infinitely baffling and amazing grace. Numbers are for marking things on sale at Wal-Mart.