Referencing the Bible

There is a well-established way to make references to the Bible. You will see these regularly in certain fields - Theology, of course; but also in Literature, History and Philosophy, and potentially anywhere where someone wants to quote the Bible. If you want to quote the Bible, follow this convention.

• First mention the title of the Book of the Bible - the relevant one of the divisions of the accepted text. There are 66 of these in the Authorised Version, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. There are recognised abbreviations for these, which are given in the list Books of the Bible. Different publishers, and some academic departments, have different conventions about whether to place these in Italics or not. The Oxford University Press convention is not to italicise the names of books of the Bible.
• After the name of the Book of the Bible, your reader needs detail in order to find your source. The Bible is divided into chapters and verses. Biblical Chapters (abbreviated as Ch.) are units of under a page in length. Verses (v., vv.) are roughly a line as written in the manuscripts in the original languages; but copying and translations affect the precise dimensions. (Indeed, OED tells us that "the practice of dividing the chapters of the Bible into verses, introduced by Stephanus in 1551, was adopted by Whittingham in his New Testament (1557) and followed in the Geneva Bible (1560)" ). The convention is to write the number of the chapter first, followed by a colon, and then the number(s) of the verse(s), so that "John, 1:2" is "the second verse of the first chapter of the Gospel according to St John"; and the Ten Commandments may be found at "Exodus, 20:2-14", or "from the second to the fourteenth verses of the twentieth chapter of the book called 'Exodus'". (These may be referenced more formally, for example where you suspect your reader(s) may not be familiar with the Bible, as "the Book of [or Gospel according to] John, ch. 1, v. 2" and "Exodus, ch. 20, vv. 2-14", and so on.)

Don't forget to identify the translation you are referring to, if you are using English.