Inject CSS class into paragraph via MD tab

I have lots of text content in my MD files. I would like to be able to stay clean and simply use a TAB at the beginning of any given paragraph to style it differently from the paragraphs around it. It appears this functionality exists!! If you TAB a paragraph in MD, the output result is CODE tag nested in a PRE tag. I would like to control this styling however, AND preferably simply inject a CLASS into a resulting PARAGRAPH block. I realize that I can use a shortcode around any given MD to achieve this, but given the volume of content it would just be easier to TAB the MD paragraphs. I have been researching the syntax highlighting, but am trying to avoid wrapping the MD content. Can someone tell me where to look?

I would follow this for now:

I personally wouldn’t want to use the code and pre elements as that is not syntactically correct. In the meantime, you could use <span> or whatever safe elements are allowed in MD.

Thanks for the reply. And thanks for the resource. If I can’t make this work, then I might-as-well wrap it in a DIV tag and manually add the CLASS which would be a pain.

BTW - I would be willing to hire someone who can implement the above for me.