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I recently answered a question on this site. A few hours later it was edited in various ways, all of them at the level of minor proof-text amendments. I was relaxed about the result of the edits, but some of the changes were to the way I had referenced specific Bible verses. For example, suppose the text was the first verse of John's gospel. I would have put John 1.1, which is how I've quoted biblical texts for years. The editor would have changed this to John 1:1 (from the full stop to the colon).

As I say, it's a very minor issue for that particular answer, but it raised for me the more general question about citation conventions. Are there any? How important is this? If it is important, where are the conventions located, and how are they communicated to newcomers? (I'm asking these questions because the more I understand, the better I can contribute and the less time other people need to spend changing things.)

Edit: Here's the link to the related Q&A.

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  • A number of your textual references were incomplete, not noting the actual verse. Which is unhelpful for reference purposes.
    – Nigel J
    Commented Jul 18 at 20:05
  • All answers and comments so far are helpful and appreciated. My instinct is that formal conventions would be challenging given the wide range of texts, topics and contributors. But maybe there are other ways, such as a link to some sample answers that experienced members consider to be high quality (By analogy with feature articles in Wikipedia).
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jul 19 at 2:09
  • This isn't a fully-fledged duplicate; this question asks whether we have standards and has answers from two moderators. The other question asks what the standard is (when there isn't one).
    – Jesse Mod
    Commented Aug 11 at 18:22

2 Answers 2

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No, there are no required conventions for quoting Bible texts. The revision you're referring to seems mostly inconsequential to me, if it had come through Review I'd have probably said it didn't substantially improve the content - but as you say, no harm done. Due to the high rep of the user it went through automatically. Generally they do a lot of really good work improving content across the site, so this is probably just an edge case where it wasn't a significant improvement. Happy to help you roll the edit back if you'd like.

Appreciate you prompting the Q about whether they were aligning it with known conventions though, rather than just assuming one way or the other.

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  • No need for the roll back. (That would also reinstate the spelling mistakes that I missed!) Thanks for your advice.
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jul 19 at 2:11
  • @PeterKirkpatrick and Steve As an FYI, I would not have edited the scriptural notation if there had been no other reason to edit the post. As I saw it, it was an additional edit at the end of other edits.
    – agarza
    Commented Jul 20 at 14:18
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No, but try to softly self-enforce

We do not have any set, enforced convention or style for citing and quoting verses.

But, the hermeneutics and theology arena at large does use recognizable conventions. Certainly try to use those.

Personally, I use this format across my posts:

  • Use a block quote for the text
  • List the verse reference at the top
    • DO NOT include the verse reference as part of the quoted text
  • Include a link
  • Identify the translation by common abbreviations

Genesis 1:1 (NASB)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Variant, for:

  • Multiple verses (use <sup> tag around verse numbers: <sup>3</sup>)
  • Abbreviated book name
  • Different translation

Rev 22:3-5 (NKJV)

3 And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. 4 They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. 5 There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

...source code from second example (just above)...

**Rev 22:3-5** ([NKJV][3])

> <sup>3</sup> And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of
God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve
Him. <sup>4</sup> They shall see His face, and His name shall be on
their foreheads. <sup>5</sup> There shall be no night there: They
need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them
light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

At the risk of dups, this has been asked on our meta before.

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  • 1
    I like the examples you've shown here. Do you enter all the markdown manually, or are there templates/algorithms to simplify the process?
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jul 19 at 3:38
  • @PeterKirkpatrick No, those <sup> tags must be entered manually. I use Ctrl + L to add the link. I just added the source to the actual body of my answer for your reference. Awesome question. And, IMHO, it's about time we start some kind of attempt at normalizing our verse quoting, softly self-enforced is probably best.
    – Jesse Mod
    Commented Jul 19 at 12:28
  • What's wrong with putting the verse reference at the end of the text? That's my usual preferred way to cite things, personally.
    – Steve can help Mod
    Commented Jul 19 at 13:41
  • I usually put the verse reference at the beginning of the quote. So that much is just personal style.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Commented Jul 19 at 23:28
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    @PeterKirkpatrick There is also a post here on Meta for Standard format for biblical quotations.
    – agarza
    Commented Jul 20 at 14:20
  • Yup. It's a dup, but not a big deal since this is meta. Again, only suggestions; no set, enforced standard. And, that is very similar to the style I suggest, also using Bible Gateway and citing version, but I don't want to link the verse reference itself for easier copy-paste.
    – Jesse Mod
    Commented Jul 22 at 16:19

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