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Guide to Chicago/Turabian Style for Seminarians

This libguide was created to help students at Union Presbyterian Seminary learn how to format papers and properly cite sources in Chicago style, which is typically the style preferred in fields related to religious studies.

How to Cite the Bible in a Chicago-Style Paper

Confusingly, the Bible (as well as epic poems like Paradise Lost, and ancient sources like Josephus or the Church Fathers) is cited differently than most secondary source material in Chicago style. For the Bible, just as you would with any other source, you should offer a full citation in your bibliography and in the first footnote reference to the specific edition of the text to which you are referring. This is because there are many different version of the Bible, and your information pertains specifically to the one you’re using. However, instead of citing a page number in your footnote, you should give an appropriate reference in parentheses at the end of your sentence. Moreover, after you have given a full footnote citation, you no longer need to footnote the text at all; simply provide the necessary information in parentheses within the body of your paper. Examples follow.

Bibliography
Attridge, Harold W., et al., eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

First footnote

1 Harold W. Attridge et al., eds., The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).

In the body of your paper

“He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be let out for a little while” (Revelation 20:2-3).

Note that the first time you identify a biblical book in your paper, the book name is spelled out fully. Any subsequent reference to that biblical book should be abbreviated with no period after the abbreviation (ex., Rev 20:4-5).

Citing the Notes in a Study Bible

If you refer in your paper to the commentary-style notes in a study Bible, you should credit the author of the notes. There will typically be a list of contributors in the book's front matter, which will identify who wrote the introduction and notes to each biblical book. Here is an example of a first footnote and subsequent footnote for

1 Mark E. Biddle, Notes on Jeremiah, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (augmented 3rd ed., NRSV, Michael D. Coogan et al., eds., Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1142.

3 Biddle, Notes on Jeremiah, 1144.

For your bibliography, assuming you are using that version of the Bible for all the biblical references in your paper, you only need to cite the version of the Bible -- you do not need a separate bibliographic entry for the author of the study notes.