How should Bible quotes be formatted?

Question

In the absence of Markdown support for Bible quotations, how should people format quotes from the Bible? For instance, here is 2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV) (both are really good verses) with some different formatting:

Format A

7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God;

2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV)

Format B

2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV)

7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God;

Format C

⁷ For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Do you put all of the verses in one continuous flow of text?

⁸ Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God;

2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV)

Format D

7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; (2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV))

Format E

7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God; (2 Timothy 1:7-8 (KJV))

You could spend all day coming up with different combinations of possible format elements. Do you put the citation before or after the quote? Is the citation in the quote, or outside of it? Do you use superscripts for verse numbers? Are the verse numbers in bold? Italics? What about the citation? Bold? Italics?

Does this just not really matter much at all?

Answer 1

Don't forget that the chapter and verse numbers are not part of the Word of God. The scribes of old put them in there to help you and me find our way around and communicate with each other.

Format for readability, I say! And give chapter/verse citations, as well as translations.

Answer 2

I think we primarily should get site support for automatically embedding scripture. For manually inserted Bible passages, I oppose creating strict guidelines. These are my reasons:

• It's troublesome to manually edit the formatting, especially for longer passages (thankfully, I know regex-fu!)
• Bible passages as blockquotes don't look very good, no matter how we format them
• You may have different needs at different times:
  • Sometimes you want paragraphs separated, sometimes not
  • Sometimes the verse division is important (verse-by-line), sometimes just a little (verse numbers as superscript), sometimes not at all (no verse numbers)
  • etc.
• There's no strict format for questions, either -- I don't see any real problem from a little variation, especially since there's bound to be some

Answer 3

I would only like to see that people actually include the scripture in their posts. It will aid in search engine results as well as understanding.