The Heal Your Church Website has the plugin Scripturizer which allows the linking of scripture texts. As stated in some of the comments there is a problem when you put the scripture reference in parenthesis. On that page there is a patch that tells you how to fix this. I had a terrible time getting it to work but after much guessing (I don’t know perl) I got it to work correctly.
Find the following text in the perl module scripturizer.pm:
# don't just match, replace
$text =~ s/
(?:($volumes)s*)* # any number of vols.
s*
($books) # the book
s*
( $verses (?: s* , s* $verses)* )
/$passage = ($1 ? "$1 ":"").($2 ? $2:"").($3 ? " $3":"");
" <a href="$link".encodePassage($1,$2,$3)."" title="Bible Gateway">$passage</a>"
/gcex;
return $text;
Replace that text with the following:
# don't just match, replace
$text =~ s/
(?:($volumes)s*)* # any number of vols.
(s*)
($books) # the book
s*
( $verses (?: s* , s* $verses)* )
/$passage = ($1 ? "$1 ": "") . ($3 ? $3 : "") . ($4 ? " $4" : "");
"$2<a href="$link".encodePassage($1,$3,$4)."" title="Bible Gateway">$passage</a>"
/gcex;
return $text;
the Great Lands 
Thanks for the great help. It works much better now!
Scripturizer plugin
The Scripturizer plugin for Movable Type is very nice. Any time you type a Scripture reference in your blog, it automatically changes it to a link, like this: John 3:16. You can also enter multiple verses like John 3:14-17 and…
I have been trying to install the Scripturizer. I really need someone who remembers how to talk to a non-Geek like me, to give me very specific instructions how to make it work. I can’t make it work according to the minimal instructions I have seen so far. And I’ve been leaving comments and emails in my ‘surf-wake’; no one has responded thus far. Can you help me? wpeters at wernerpeters dot com.
I’ll have a new version out Sunday. It’ll include a variant of your fix, along w/abbreviations (on steriods), XHTML compliant ampersands, and an nice little flip-flop for those who prefer the ESV Bible.
BTW, thanks for your input!