Bible API | Hacker News Reader

Bible API

bible-api.com

373 pointsotobrglez288 comments

One of the most interesting things to happen to the scriptures is their balkanization into verses. We generally don't atomize other writings that way, and when folks read the scriptures as a series of disconnected logical propositions all sorts of wackiness ensues. What would it look like to have an API for the collected works of Jane Austen that returned snippets (some of which are not even complete sentences)? How would that shape the way we read, say, Persuasion?

That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment that is diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures, which emphasizes their unity and their role in liturgical worship.

> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment that is diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures, which emphasizes their unity and their role in liturgical worship.

I just had to quote that sentence construction without comment.

But to reply to it more coarsely: who are you to define what a "Christian reading" of the bible is? As I see it, watching from outside the community, the piecewise selective quoting is very much a fundamental part of the practice of Christianity in the modern world -- especially of the evangelical Christianity that dominates in the USA.

I mean, I agree it's dumb. I just don't see why it's not "Christian". Christians are what Christians do.

Sure - by "Christian reading", I mean something like the practice of the ancient church that canonized the scriptures. That there should be normative Christian practice and reading is, perhaps, controversial, but a claim I'm happy to make. Modern American evangelicals who read the scriptures that way are doing it wrong and should knock it off.

The scriptures weren't atomized into verses until scholars of the 15th century wanted to work on them. The practice you see today is an outgrowth of that epistemology, and greatly to the detriment of Christian witness, theology, and practice.

> I mean, I agree it's dumb. I just don't see why it's not "Christian". Christians are what Christians do.

But American evangelical Protestants are a small minority of global Christianity. Catholics and Orthodox take a different approach, one which emphasises the binding role of church Tradition in interpreting the Bible, an idea which Protestants reject.

On the one hand, I think the Catholic approach is more correct than the Protestant one, but I think if the papacy hadn't been so authoritarian during the MIddle Ages and the period leading up to the Reformation that the Protestants wouldn't have felt the need to be able to argue scripture inch by inch by inch.

Counterargument: if they were upset by the behaviour of the Popes, there was always Eastern Orthodoxy – no papacy, and no arguing scripture inch by inch by inch either.

The real debate stems from information control. The Catholic church forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin into the local language (contrary to popular opinion, the majority of people could read even though spelling was not standardized). What happens when those people finally get a copy of the Bible based on the textus receptus and it has Jesus saying the Scripture is immutable and more important than tradition? What happens when they see clear and obvious contradictions between what He said and what their church was doing?

When Luther nailed the famous arguments on the church door (in common German so everyone could read them), he wasn't wanting to start up a new church. He was just pointing out the ridiculousness of buying forgiveness and the insane corruption and tradition over Scripture that had caused it. Instead of fixing the problems, the Catholic church doubled down and claimed the right to supersede even Jesus Himself. When they couldn't justify with words, they went straight to force.

Also keep in mind that the Catholic church was a political machine first and foremost. The Jesuit order in particular was so political that countries actually pushed the Pope so hard he issued Dominus ac Redemptor to completely suppress the entire order. It was rescinded 41 years later, but due to the internal political power of the Jesuit General, the cardinals refused to elect a Jesuit pope. Politically, the election of the first Jesuit pope in 2013 (199 years after the suppression was rescinded) hallmarked a very large political victory and unification of the Catholic church.

With that in mind, the Protestant Reformation, while primarily religious, was also political in nature.

> Christians are what Christians do.

This is generally not true. Try to replace "Christian" with "Atheist" or "Gnostic" and see how far this travels. While there are, I suppose, some distinctive practices that characterize various systems of belief (or disbelief), what distinguishes Christianity from, say, Judaism, is a set of irreconcilable beliefs (e.g., that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah). It is true that practices might distinguish religious groups (e.g., Orthodox Jews eat no pork, which is allowed to Christians), but those practices directly correlate to beliefs (Peter, citing Jesus, declares all meats clean in the New Testament).

No, religions are not merely practice: they are creedal, too. One who rejects the virgin birth is per se not Christian, at least if the word "Christian" means anything.

Lots of Christians reject the virgin birth. You can say they are not "real Christians", but they could say the same about you.

this sounds as plausible as saying that a lot of atheists believe in god. maybe it's a thing? but it's hard to imagine dropping someone in nicea in 380 and suggesting this. words mean things: Christians believe in more than the virgin birth but certainly not less.

why not less? I think many see the "facts" as different. Their approaches to the texts are different, but "Christians" align themselves in someway with a entity called "Jesus". Different sects of Christianity tend to have their own definitions of what they think being a "christian" means and there are commonalities from sect to sect, and even some groups of sects have lots of strong commonalties, but there are still many ways they have incompatible beliefs as well. wikipedia has a reasonable list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denomination... and I'm pretty sure some "christians" in one of the sects would go "They aren't christians!" when it comes to other sects in that list.

Liberal Protestantism generally does not consider the virgin birth a critical article of faith. You can believe it if you want but it is not heretical to not believe in it.

The meaning of "Christian" differs person-to-person and culture/tradition-to-culture/tradition, as well as over time. That Christ was born to a virgin, for example, was not necessarily agreed upon by early Christians, and it's certainly not agreed upon now. That Jesus was divine may not even have been universally accepted and also has its detractors today among Christians.

Both creeds and practices do tend to identify differences between religious groups, but those differences may not be so clearly cut in practice. At the same time, various sects may define the boundaries of the religion more narrowly than others.

I’m positive Peter is not citing Jesus when he said that all food is clean.

This is an excellent example of how Christians take one or a few verses out of context and let them tell a story. If you would read the full passage about Peter, you’d find that the meaning of it was that whatever Gd has made clean shouldn’t be declared unclean by man. He goes on to explain it by saying that the Jews in his time weren’t allowed to go to a gentile, but, because Gd never said (when you study the Pentateuch) that any man was either clean or unclean (except certain circumstances), Peter shouldn’t consider gentile unclean by them being non-Jew.

Much of this reasoning applies to Christians when explaining that Jesus freed them from the law (eating pork, keeping Shabbat, etc), by which they basically support the questioning of Him being the Messiah. Anyone who proclaims to not follow the law, cannot be the Messiah (Deuteronomy 18:20).

However, if you’d read the NT carefully, combined with the scriptures of the scholars of that time (Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel and more), you’d find that he’s a law obeying person, and encourages everyone to do so. Even stronger; He has much of the same understandings that the rabbis of his time have.

An example is Talmud (Shabbat 31a) where Hillel is asked to tell the Torah when the listener is standing on one foot. He answered by saying: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!

This is remarkably similar to what Jesus said when someone asked Him, and Jesus responded with something that was in his time spirit, but also written in Leviticus 19:18 (Matthew 22) 36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law? 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy Gd with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Also this very passage explains that Jesus didn't get rid of the law, even more so, He said that Love for Gd (in the ways mentioned and taken from the Sh'ma (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)) and love of your neighbour are the base on which you execute every law (and prophets) that's given. Without this base, everything you do is worthless, it's merely a disguise than being a righteous (Tsaddik)

The Bible was not written as single work the way novels like Persuasion are though. It is really a collection of books of very different origins and genre. Some books are laws where individual rules can be examined and there are collections of proverbs. But there are also parts which are longer narratives.

I think my point, though, that the unit of thought in the scriptures is not the atomic verse, still stands. If you'd like to emend "collected works of Jane Austen" to "collected works of 19th century authors", feel free.

I argue that in some cases the "units of thoughts" are verses (proverbs, laws), in other cases they are longer like psalms, sermons, chapters, letters or books. I totally agree taking a single verse out of a longer narrative rarely makes sense. But the bible is not like a novel or a collection of novels, although some of the books (like Job) is kind of like a novel.

Proverbs is certainly the book most amenable to division into verses.

A few things to consider:

1. Many of the writings are letters, and therefore short.

2. Many of the writings, though grouped together by books, their chapters really are often distinct documents written at different times. (some are even historical logs like Kings and Chronicles)

3. There are _many_ sections that really do break down by lines and sections. The best examples are Proverbs and Psalms.

4. It's a huge document, and much of it is useful to reference later, and having a system in place for this (of any kind) is helpful for many reasons.

Last, I agree with your general sentiment.

The first time I read sections of the bible without the artificial breaks and numbers getting in the way gave me a completely different perspective on the _content_. So I make a point to read like this when I feel the numbers may be in the way of comprehension.

Single sentences commonly span multiple verses which alone is enough to imply that cannot be true. I think very few who have read a Bible would come to the conclusion that verses are intended to be atomic.

No, but single narratives have been done -- Tolstoy's "The Gospel in Brief" is a nice example that both captures his interpretation of Christianity and ties explicitly back to the original verses. And its Tolstoy, so it makes a nice read :)

Is "balkanization" really a general term for "dividing into parts" ? I think some sort of both internal and geopolitical strife needs to be involved.

And verses are not disconnected logical propositions, they are a structure between a sentence and a chapter aka. a paragraph. If anything - the grouping of verses into chapters is far more arbitrary than that of sentences into verses.

I chose "balkanization" to connote the things you reference; the atomic quoting of verses of scripture does violence to the text.

Verses are definitely not functionally paragraphs. Some aren't even complete sentences!

At least in the old testament verses range from sentences to paragraphs, have any interesting examples of a non-sentence verse ?

Sure - take a look at the first chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. The sentence:

Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

is divided into three (!) verses. That sort of thing is pretty common with the periodic structure of Paul's sentences. English readers, with our weak clause boundaries, struggle with those sorts of sentences anyway.

Corinthians is not part of the old testament so I'm afraid its versing might not be per the union standards.

It is currently versed as:

  Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom.

  But we preach Christ crucified - A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

  But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Which seems like three complete sentences forming a paragraph to me even if not to any modern style guide.

Alternatively it could have been:

  Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom - but we preach [the words of] Christ crucified  !

  A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.

  But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

In both cases the logical structure remains the same and the three sentences form a larger idea.

Ah - apologies - I misread you. I'm not sure whether there are any mid-sentence verse breaks in the Old Testament. I'll look!

I believe the first verse in one chapter in Job is “he said”. However, it is generally not separated out. Instead one and two are typically combined together and the next number is 3, or something like that.

There are several chapters in Job with the first verse being roughly "And X replied, saying" with the rest of the chapter being their reply. Still very much a full sentence that identifies the speaker.

I was thinking of Job 3:2, which, in some modern English translations is simply rendered “He said:”. But the Hebrew is more complete.

King James version also gets it right, but even "He said:" is a complete sentence.

Correct, its very seldom indeed any other work - ancient or modern - is quoted in this way. You have entire generations of Christians thinking only in isolated "memory verses".

One wonders if this practice is connected to the degradation and commercialisation of worship and countless trivial splits. It just doesn't make for lucid thinking or deep understanding of any work.

It is worth noting that the chapter divisions came long before the verse divisions. For reading, the chapters are as helpful as they are in any other book. I recall the verses were introduced around the time of the Geneva Bible and were intended to cross-reference for the purpose of arguing doctrine. Perhaps useful for scholars - who'd already be deeply familiar with the text as a unit - but hardly a method for comprehension of the books as a whole.

Edit: This discussion reminds me of the so-called Reader's Bibles which were made a few years ago. They present the text as a flowing single-paragraph, with minimal distractions. One such example is the ESV Reader's Bible: https://www.bibledesignblog.com/2014/06/crossway-esv-readers...

I agree that it is a very interesting topic. Even the chapter breaks can be a real issue for a theologian. I believe there are some stories in the gospels which are consecutive in multiple books, but split by a chapter break in others. There are arguments in the epistles which span multiple chapters. But to the modern reader a chapter break implies a stopping point. Which might lead you to misunderstand the author’s intent.

tldr; Why not both?

I agree that it's odd that we have atomized the writings in the scriptures. You can find reader's editions if you want to remove the verses structure.

However, I don't agree that the verses are "diametrically opposed to a Christian reading of the Scriptures". I believe that there is room for both reading whole books and reading short quotes.

For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking John 3:16 out of context because it is a very straightforward verse. It's really nice to be able to share verses easily by giving a <Book> <Chapter>:<Verse>. There is danger though when we do that with all verses of scripture, and we should be careful to study the context for verses before coming to any conclusion.

The key is to actually study the scriptures, and not just take the easy route and find verses that make you feel good about yourself. But that's easier said than done.

So, having read the whole of what you wrote, the reason not to do both is that atomization promotes an epistemology that does grave violence to Christian belief. God's self revelation could have been a math textbook: a collection of independent propositions related by logical necessity. But it's not.

His self revelation is a person who has a story and who tells stories. When we atomize the scriptures, we're implicitly constructing an argument against the epistemology that God has revealed in the scriptures. That's the thing that Satan does in the wilderness when he puts Jesus to the test. We ought not lead others into that time of trial.

So the convenience of being able to cite a verse as quick shorthand comes at the price of a profound argument against the coherent truth of the scriptural witness.

While I would not go as far to say that having verses in scriptures is a tactic of the devil (note that in the wilderness, Jesus also quotes snippets of scripture back to Satan as a rebuttal), I can see your point that it probably does more harm than good.

I do wish that the standard was to not have verses, and have the verses version be the exception rather than the rule. I can see the benefit of having verses, but I think there is far more benefit from reading scripture as a whole instead.

The verse structure's practicality as a reference mechanism far outweighs its downsides.

It's a bit of a stretch to indict the verse structure for the general decline in Biblical literacy in Christians.

It's entirely possible to quote a verse with correct contextual interpretation that conveys its meaning; if we're looking for a culprit for declining Biblical literacy I'd be much more apt to blame loose translations and paraphrases like The Message and The Passion Translation than the concept of verses.

What are the upsides? What are the downsides? (And to whom?)

Note that I'm not saying the downside is "declining Biblical literacy" - by many metrics I'd imagine that's increasing? I wonder how you'd measure that? And I wonder whether whatever scheme you came up with wouldn't presume some hermeneutic and really just measure the extent to which people buy into that hermeneutic? For example, who is more Biblically literate? The person who can quote, verbatim, with correct citation 100 verses of scripture, or the person who can re-tell in paraphrase the story of Jesus forgiving Peter after the resurrection?

I'm saying the downside is a transformation in what it means to read the scriptures.

Are you aware of any movements that aim at solving the problem you are referring to?

I am not a chapter and verse person, and almost my entire understanding of the Bible comes through my own remembrances, all paraphrasing now, of what I learned when I was younger.

I often wonder if there's a great many people out there like myself. Seems like there is?

Sure - there are lots of folks aiming at a more authentic reading. In general, the older a church, the more it aims at a reading that avoids the modern atomizing impulse. The Catholic and Orthodox churches do some good work on that score, as do Anglican and Lutheran theologians.

I upvoted one of your earlier comments because it was a thought provoking and interesting criticism that I didn't know about and will keep in mind. So thanks for that!

Even though there are Lutheran and Anglican theologians that aims at what you call authentic reading, I would be surprised if that has a real impact of the members of these churches, and for me that is really were the focus should be.

According to: https://anglicancompass.com/scripturelessons/ "Anglicans read four passages of Scripture during Sunday worship. Out loud.

So do some other traditions, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutherans and others."

I would be surprised if the next week's passages would follow this week's passages, so I assume that this "ritual" will atomize the Scriptures either if they are divided into verses/chapters or not. (There are of course a lot of other parts of the life in these churches as well; but the Sunday service is still an important part).

I am used to a progression in Scripture readings, where each Book is read chronologically (with input from other Scriptures that does not follow chronologically as well), but that has little to do with if the Book is divided into verses/chapters or not. So for me personally, I doubt the atomizing of the Scriptures has a great impact.

I'm glad you found it thought provoking. The liturgical churches tend to follow a lectionary, which, as you say, excerpts from the scriptures. The RCL has some passages that I think are cut poorly, but generally keeps the unit of thought at the level of the particular story or argument.

I would blame nefarious church leaders who should know better but deliberately misrepresent the scriptures to their own end. The verse structure does facilitate this.

For example: Leviticus 18:22 seems quite popular amongst homophobes, but I don't see many of them killing adulterers (20:10) or burying blood (17:13), plenty of them oppress foreigners (19:33) and hate their gay relatives (19:17). They don't seem to be as keen on burning people who engage in a sportsman's double (18:14) as they are about waving "God hates fags" placards.

I'd be surprised if the same people who picket gay weddings and funerals chain themselves to combine harvesters with Leviticus 19:9 placards, or harass people going to real estate agents' offices with Leviticus 25:23 signs.

I would like to reply positively to what it is you are insisting that chapter and verse does to the Holy Scriptures. Your reply is beautiful and it is helping me reflect on how I will be presenting information in a forthcoming book on ancient biblical history.

To the defense of the creator(s) of this web application, I feel that the chapter and verse divisions have been in existence, and problematic, for a very long time.

For certain reference work this is a wonderful tool.

Good observation, but I think it's overstated. I don't know many people who read the bible as a series of disconnected logical propositions, they mainly read it in much longer sections covering some topic.

Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.

In this usage, it's very similar to the way we cite Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Milton, etc. For example, the St. Crispin's day speech in Henry V is at IV.iii.18-67, and any Shakespearean actor, fan, or scholar knows what that means, but that notation doesn't force them to think of the play as merely a set of disconnected speeches.

I'm thinking, for example, of the RCL, which often breaks passages mid chapter and occasionally omits individual verses. What sort of Christian community do you mostly know?

If you said "The St. Crispin's day speech" I'd immediately know what you mean. I'm definitely a Shakespeare fan, but would have no idea which act, scene, &c. that speech occupies. I'd wager that's much less true of the scriptures in many circles.

To some extent probably, but I wonder if that's as true as you assume.

I'd guess that many people in vaguely Christianized communities would be familiar, to some degree at least, with passages like "Daniel in the Lion's Den", "The Sermon on the Mount", "The Plagues of Egypt", "The Good Samaritan", and so on, without being able to tell you the chapter and verse (or even book) in which they're found.

Perhaps! I've encountered lots of fellow Christians who construct arguments by taking individual verses from everywhere in the scriptures and arranging them into an argument assuming that all the terms are equivalent and that the context doesn't matter. It particularly perplexes me when someone will cite, say verse x and then immediately after it cite verse x-2, reordering them in a way that destroys the sense of the passage, but supports some argument.

Perhaps there's an uncanny valley between people who are familiar with the broad strokes and people who argue contextually.

This practice is usually called "proof-texting" [1] and perhaps surprisingly it's not confined to one particular kind of Christian. For example, the very conservative evangelicals I grew up with were extremely anti proof-texting and decontextualized reading, to the point that they rarely read from the Bible (in church or otherwise) unless they're reading a whole chapter. On the other hand, the conservative evangelical Dwight Moody is often accused of promoting exactly this hermeneutical approach. In my experience, a certain class of the "reformed" are often guilty of it.

To be clear, I certainly think the people I grew up with were guilty of their own particular hermeneutical weaknesses, this is just about proof-texting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prooftext

[2] Can't find a ready source for this, could be the result of some infighting.

You make a good point, but I think your making the academic argument rather than the practical argument. Yes, scholars and avid Bible readers understand the exact location of a verse based on its Biblical coordinates, but plenty of others don’t. In practice, it is far more common to see the Bible quoted as a small snippet meant to re-enforce some other point. The Twitter feed of Senator Marco Rubio is a good example.

  In practice, it is far more common to see the Bible quoted as a small snippet meant to re-enforce some other point.

Any seriously complex work is very often quoted/cited as a small snippet meant to re-enforce another point. Speeches, books, statistics, other religious doctrines. In all of these cases, you can easily misinterpret the quote if you don't understand its origin.

The only reason the Bible is slightly different in this context is because the reference system has been formalized as being the best selling book in history means sometimes font sizes are gonna change.

You might have well just said:

  In practice, it is far more common to see [anything] quoted as a small snippet meant to re-enforce some other point.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

The center cannot hold

The better angels of our nature

I think what you're saying is right on. But I do know the occasion where someone will take a verse by itself and consider it a single logical unit where they get all meaning, understanding, etc. from that one verse and nothing else. It's just a learning point is all. I've always been taught to take the scripture as a whole and not just take one verse for understanding.

I know a lot of them, most notable one being: Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Or: Matthew 15:11 Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

> I don't know many people who read the bible as a series of disconnected logical propositions

It's common to quote short passages (1-3 verses) in society, either to prove a point (often missing context) or in a "thought for the day" manner. Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.

also true of Shakespeare, e.g. unironically quoting Polonius. I feel like the implied point of parent was that things which are referenced often probably tend to accrue/emphasize increasingly granular hooks for doing so. Whether the tail ends up wagging the dog is an interesting question, but it's also worth sussing out whether it developed more as pragmatic device than ideological imposition

  Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.

People quote literature they haven't read all over the place[1]. Implying its unique to the Bible means you probably haven't done your research either.

[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/68007/50-famous-misquota...

The difference being that for the Christian (a presumption when you see someone quote scripture) the Bible supposedly defines their worldview, as opposed to various pieces of literature.

Usually the Bible is taught via stories, especially the Gospel stories, rather than individual verses and the verses are quoted to make points.

While there are, e.g., yearly Bible plans to read everything, not many people these days have the patience to read all the numbers in Numbers and there's an incredibly limited theological value in knowing how many there were of the tribe of Napthali or what have you unless you're trying to pass a Bible quiz.

I mean, why would a modern day Christian want to memorize all the rules on kosher food when Paul explained at length why they're irrelevant to us now? Or the rules on making a potion out of the dust of the Temple floor of a temple that's no longer standing? Or the rules about wearing clothing with multiple materials?

Yes, there are yet some principles that might be extracted of some of these--take for example, not muzzling the ox while it's treading the grain as an exhortation to take care of your animals and anyone who serves you. Or the prohibition on harvesting the last bits of crop at the edges of your fields, which were then reserved for the poor, to always reserve something for the poor among you.

But these things tend to be explained elsewhere and it ends up as trivia that doesn't matter much unless someone is insistent that a Real Christian [TM] must know whether the witch of Endor is from Samuel, Sirach or Star Wars... which in turn depends on whether she's named Charal or not.

Yes, really -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_of_Endor https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Charal

>> One of the most interesting things to happen to the scriptures is their balkanization into verses. We generally don't atomize other writings that way, and when folks read the scriptures as a series of disconnected logical propositions all sorts of wackiness ensues.

> Chapter and verse come in when you want to quote something, or shorthand something, or refer someone to a specific and narrow section.

It's also worth noting that the Bible is a text that pre-dates the printing press. Modern citation technology (cite edition and page number) depends on having standardized, mass-produced editions. It makes sense that closely-analyzed texts that only appeared in hand-made bespoke editions would need a different system.

Edit: This is a pretty interesting topic. Looks like the chapter/verse divisions were standardized after the printing press, but had roots in earlier systems of division [1]. Plato and Aristotle also got standardized sub-page-level citation systems around the same time [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapters_and_verses_of_the_Bib...

[2] https://getproofed.com/writing-tips/citing-plato-and-aristot...

While the chapter and verse were only introduced much later, the Judaic explanation of the scriptures, especially the Pentateuch, has been referencing parts of it by naming every passage (of 3-5 chapters) by the first meaningful word. This was done in writing as early as the Babylonian exile, as can be found in the Babylonian Talmud. Even now in traditionally written Tora scrolls, there are no chapters and verses, but one searches for the name of that Parasha to find the relevant portion

> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world

On the contrary, the atomization and recombination of the text into new meanings is highly characteristic of Midrash. Of course, this isn't the same as the "prooftext" hermeneutic I think you're criticizing.

Fascinating! Do you have a good book recommendation that introduces that? It's not something I know much about.

Here is a typical example (from Genesis Rabbah)

> And Cain rose up against his brother Abel. [...] With what did he kill him? R. Simeon said: He killed him with a staff: And a young man for my bruising (Gen 4:23) implies a weapon which inflicts a bruise. The Rabbis said: He killed him with a stone: For I have slain a man for wounding me (ibid) indicates a weapon which inflicts wounds. R. 'Azariah and R. Jonathan in R. Isaac's name said: Cain had closely observed where his father slew the bullock [which he sacrificed, as it is written], And it shall please the Lord better than a bullock (Ps 69:31), and there he killed him: by the throat and its organs.

From a Christian perspective, a more interesting example might be the Gospel's atomization/recontextualizations of text as Messianic prophecy ("out of Egypt I have called my son", "behold, a virgin shall be with child").

Even Jesus himself often referred to specific verses in the Old Testament: "Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7; cf. Luke 4:12)" "“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’” (Matthew 5:38)" So the Scripture must have been "Balkanized" before Christianity existed. Which is not so strange given that it served both as religion and as a code of law.

> You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’”

That's a great example, because that verse is saying only punish an eye for an eye, and not a life for an eye. It's a verse requiring proportional punishment. (On top of that it means the value of an eye, not an actual eye.)

So quoting it that way actually does remove necessary understanding, which is making the OP's point.

The example shows that even Jesus quoted single verses out of context. So the assertion that this didn't happen in antiquity is clearly wrong.

Not sure I understand what you mean? Jesus was known as a rabbi and well-versed in the Scriptures. I don't think he was misconstruing the text he was citing. Here he is contrasting his view of justice ("turn the other cheek") to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace.

My main point is that Jesus was probably not the first one to use this form of argumentation. He likely imitated other rabbis who had taught him to speak in this way.

The meaning for the "eye for an eye" verse is well known, it's talking about proportionality in justice.

It's a pretty strange choice to use when talking about "turn the other cheek".

> to the legal norms of the time under which feuds and exacting revenge were commonplace.

But that's exactly what "eye for an eye" attempts to stop. It's instructing people to seek appropriate justice, and not just attack people who hurt them.

Using that verse, rather hurts his message amongst those who understand the verse.

But it's a great way to show verses used out of context!

> was probably not the first one to use this form of argumentation. He likely imitated other rabbis who had taught him to speak in this way.

But they only spoke this way to other Rabbi's, never to people who did not already understand the meaning of the verse.

I think more so what Jesus is calling Christians to do is to be forgiving of others in the way God is forgiving to man. Which can often be more difficult of a thing to do than to always seek proportional judgement. I do not think in other words his reading of that verse is all that different from yours.

Somewhat related to this conversation but this reading is clear in my view if you continue to read what Jesus says in this passage :)

> The meaning for the "eye for an eye" verse is well known, it's talking about proportionality in justice.

> It's a pretty strange choice to use when talking about "turn the other cheek".

The phrase "an eye for an eye" puts an upper bound on retributive justice. That is, if you have been fouled, this is the maximum amount of punishment that you are allowed to inflict upon the perpetrator. Don't do as Lamech and kill the one who wounds you because that is not proportional.

Consider the context of Jesus speech. He was speaking to peasants in the Galilee for whom eternal feuds must have been commonplace. They must have been aware of the harmful effects of seeking revenge to everyone involved but unable to put an end to it. That is why one of his examples is a slap. There is and was no legal recourse for slap except for slapping back. Jesus asks his followers to "let it go."

Dear lovely @ars, thankyou for your comment. I agree it is strange. Context:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

So I think Jesus is agreeing with your comments. Interestingly verse quotations are prefaced with something like "It is written". Yet here 'hate your enemy' is not a biblical verse, and it is prefaced with "You have heard that it was said" -- Jesus was speaking to a crowd here, and contrasting what they had heard, with what his message

One of the implications is he is saying proportionality of justice is a start, but is not nearly enough. For instance, he ends:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect

> But they only spoke this way to other Rabbis

He extremely strongly disagreed with the Rabbis. See Matthew 5 for context

It probably began as a reference scheme for scholars, by scholars. The same thing has happened to other ancient texts, like the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer.

You can refer to The Republic 327a1, or Book 1 line 230 of The Odyssey, and people who study ancient Greek texts will immediately figure out which line you're talking about. Those references aren't complete sentences, either. Apparently it didn't matter to the people who first came up with the numbering scheme. The Plato reference format is actually nothing more than the page, column, and line number of a particular edition that happened to stick.

Indeed - and I'd say that the division of those sources has been broadly restricted to scholars, and that those scholars broadly also read those ancient texts in the enlightenmenty way that I'm suggesting does violence to them.

This is exactly it. The chunking of chapters and verses was so monks could verify their copies. Imagine a monastery, with 100 scholars who are tasked with copying the entire bible, with duplicates. The best way to verify that it was copied correctly is to do spot-checks where the source and transcribed documents are compared on certain chapters and verses.

At this point, I don't think it's necessary to split them up for making copies. That said, a lot of churches have integrated chapter/verse look ups as part of their service/sermons/bible studies, so it would be very difficult to remove them now.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Think of it as a map, and similarly, the map is not the territory.

Shakespeare comes to mind for balkanization.

The First Folio followed the KJV by a dozen years, and the two dominate English.

In contrast to Jane Austen, both the KJV and the Folio are collections of other works.

Thus they may lend themselves ore than novels to being served frgmentally.

The NT authors are constantly quoting snippets from the OT.

Well, some books of the bible are more aphoristic, like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, as are plenty of other ancient texts like the Quran or the Sutras or the Tao te Ching. There's also Jewish numerology, and the mystical(?) idea that the arrangement of the letters in the Pentateuch is only one of many possible perfect combinations. The concept of divine infallibility definitely has a lot of weird implications, or semi-implications that people just run with. Conversely, the cipher-like quality of the scriptures is what makes them so hermeneutically fun, especially for all those violent little cults that have a way of taking over the world.

Ecclesiastes is very easy to take out of context. Individual verses seem like nice aphorisms, but the book as a whole is actually quite skeptical and even critical, at least of certain worldviews. In some ways, it's a series of rejections of easy answers.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if the verse structure helped with copying, like some sort of primitive coding standard.

> and when folks read the scriptures as a series of disconnected logical propositions all sorts of wackiness ensues.

Most people reading the bible don't do this. This would be very very odd.

John Walker (of Autodesk fame) has provided the KJV, Latin Vulgate and Hebrew Bibles for some time now:

Bible

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Bible.html

King James Version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:

    <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Luke.html#10:27>

A decade ago (!) I worked on parsing bible searches.

https://www.davidwparker.com/2010/03/04/parsing-bible-search...

It was a neat little project at the time, but due to copyrights, I didn't get as far as I would have liked... I had planned on making a `diff` tool for bible verses between versions.

Well, this is the reason there are so many versions. Copyright on the best seller book of all time.

Copyrights didn’t exist when most were written (not many people use NIV versions) so what are you on about?

> (not many people use NIV versions)

[citation needed]

NIV is always on the list of most popular bible versions, and is in heavy usage. KJV is by far the most popular, but NIV is still very popular.

I'd also add that the very popular New King James Version (NKJV) is both copyrighted and uses different source material from the KJV which means that differences in wording are not just old to new English, but also differences in meaning.

Good point, and I didn't know that about NKJV. Very interesting.

Here you both go:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299402/preferred-bible-v...

Does anybody actually keep statistics on this? I’ve never seen it used, and I’ve been to probably 15 different churches in 2 geographical regions. Most of the churches I got to say avoid anything new and copyrighted. So no I don’t have citation but I ask you for the same. Let’s see some citation that both NIV and NKJV are the most popular.

Most people read KJV, which version are you trying to use where copyrights exist?

NIV is a very popular version, and is copyrighted, as is NASB, ESV, etc.

I know about NIV, but I’ve never actually seen one being read or used. In fact most places I’ve worshiped they have specifically said avoid NIV

I just hit the API up and it errored with http status code “777 - Act of God”.

You are lucky, it could've been a 666.

Nice API. Still, it's a little like a Shakespeare API that supports only Portuguese and Chinese. It would be great to include the original languages.

There's a ton of work getting the data into the correct format for this API. I, too, would love to have Greek and Hebrew available, but I'm glad that we have at least as much as this.

For Hebrew, you can try using some of the data here: https://github.com/Sefaria/Sefaria-Export.

I agree. What use is a Shakespeare API that doesn't include the original Klingon? [0]

[0]https://youtu.be/HsCVuO1yeJc

The problem (which Shakespeare also has[1]) is that there are numerous versions of the texts in their original languages, with no particularly definitive or even consistent editions of the Old Testament in Hebrew or the New Testament in Greek AFAIK. Not to mention, the original Mosaic writings have been completely lost to time, having been written in Ugaritic and not Hebrew.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_texts_of_Shakespeare%27s...

> Not to mention, the original Mosaic writings have been completely lost to time, having been written in Ugaritic and not Hebrew.

Where did you get the bit about the Torah originally being written in Ugaritic? What scholarly sources say that?

I was speaking slightly out-of-hand, but it's the natural conclusion if you take the writings to have been authentically authored by Moses.

Religious traditions place him in approximately the middle of the 2nd millenium BC, while secular scholarship, when they assume he even existed, put him in the 13th century BC. There are numerous scholarly sources attesting to the fact that Hebrew only began to exist as a language in about the 10th century BC. Ergo, Moses must have written in a pre-Hebrew language, which would have very likely been Ugaritic, or at least a related dialect.

This is backed up by the fact that there are certain portions of the Old Testament that are written in a form of Hebrew which is comparatively archaic, such as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy and the middle chunk of the Book of Job. You can see this reflected in the 2nd century BC Greek translation, the Septuagint, wherein various chunks of these texts are skipped, apparently on account of the translators being unsure how to translate what would be comparable to Middle English to us.

The earliest parts were written in a early form of Hebrew which existed roughly at the same time as Ugaritic, a closely related language. However, this early Hebrew was not Ugaritic, which had sounds, words, and grammar that was quite distinct from any historical or pre-historical Hebrew.

The gold standard for the Greek text of the New Testament is the critical edition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece) published by Nestle-Aland.

True, but that raises the question as to what to do with the various footnotes other variant-related snags. It's just not particularly suited for something like an API for verses.

It is, as you say, not particularly suited for something like an API for verses.

Gold Standard? Hardly. It is barely more than a regurgitation of the older Wescott-Horte manuscript.

They decided to use the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus. These are of very questionable origin and the presence of forgeries like Tobit in the Siniaticus throw them into serious doubt (and that's before looking at the poor quality of the copy, erasures/replacements, etc).

Another point of contention is the dating. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Church of Rome was at open war with other Christian factions over both doctrine and the Bishop of Rome's desire to coalesce political power. They seem to support the Bishop of Rome's claim to power rather well (as well as supporting their side of the doctrinal dispute).

While they may be the oldest Bibles with that much intact, they are hardly the oldest manuscript in general and the Textus Receptus seems to agree much better with the body of work (something like 95+% of all found texts agree with the Textus Receptus). These works were known and rejected by Protestant translators because of their dubious origin and low quality.

I agree with holding it as a translation of interest, but it is hardly a gold standard of anything.

Which critical edition do you prefer?

What, Aramaic? The Vulgate? Wycliffes?

While not an API with multiple translations, there are sophisticated desktop software packages like "Accordance Bible" (https://www.accordancebible.com/) that will let one view any chosen, supported, English translation side-by-side with the original language (usually Hebrew or Greek) for that same passage. The software also will follow quasi-word-for-word the text your cursor hovers in one view to the analog in the other view it's translated from or to. This shows there's been considerable effort in mapping the translations and original languages back and forth and making them easily accessible.

For an example of a direct use of this feature, reference Chris Roseborough's "Fighting for the Faith" YouTube series where he often uses this feature of Accordance Bible, along with his knowledge of the original languages and the built-in original-language dictionaries and thesaurus to analyze heretical or erroneous interpretations and applications of biblical text made by what he deems the myriad "false teachers" in current "evangelical" preacher-dom. For example of use of this particular word-for-word feature look at the video shortly after https://youtu.be/tFeF04F8Tf8?t=828 (a critique of Joel Osteen's "prosperity preaching"). At around 14:01 in the video you'll start seeing the Greek text analogs highlight as the cursor drifts around the English text. In this section of the video he's not explicitly using the feature, but he often does ... hmmm, at around 16:30 or so he does, showing the original text for "I AM" and "do not be afraid."

In any case, there's been much work in software such as "Accordance Bible" and others to make "translation mapping" more apparent, and to expose any "translation issues" ... this necessarily would require the user to be very familiar with the original languages.

Chris Roseborough himself is very conservative (young-earth creationist; women should not be pastors; ... etc., many views that would not be popular). The most frequent targets of his criticism are those who preach "prosperity gospel" (e.g. Joel Osteen); those who believe apostles and prophets still exist and can write "scripture" today with as much authority as the original Hebrew and Greek texts (e.g., New Apostolic Reformation / NAR / Bethel / Hillsong); those who believe they can "decree and declare" God to steer hurricanes, heal people of their sicknesses (I don't think C.R. would object to the possibility of healing, just that there are no guarantees this side of eternity and God's purpose isn't to alleviate all suffering here and now), cause career success and wealth, and that believe if you aren't blessed you don't have enough faith.

EDIT: clarification, deleted repeated phrase

I don't understand the utility of an API for this beyond APIs generally being fun to build.

All of the work is in formatting the data to be machine readable, and each bible is <5mb. If you needed this, you could also just download the open source bibles it uses and crawl it yourself which is surely superior in 99% of use cases.

I wondered the same thing. Surely a useful API is for data that changes, and the recipient doesn't want to manage the content themselves? An API for searching static data seems only useful as a learning exercise.

Or if said static data is a huge data set and unwieldy to maintain.

Or if that data is copyrighted, but allows free usage of small selections.

Both valid points. Thanks!

I think the use case for a lot of churches and personal sites is they can do things like "random verse" or "daily verse" with just a small bit of copy and paste java script. Granted the same thing could be done, by pulling the files, but its a lot of overhead for something like that.

I think this is more akin to the old silly services of the web and not something that would be evaluated as commercially meaningful.

If you’re looking for ready to use data instead of API, there’s prepared jsons for you

https://github.com/bobuk/holybooks/tree/master/EN

Thanks, but that could use some documentation. Directory names like "1CO" are completely opaque to me, and almost certainly others

Book names are language-specific. So http://bible-api.com/Joannes+3:16?translation=clementine works but http://bible-api.com/John+3:16?translation=clementine doesn’t

Is there an API to get the names of the books?

Vulgate appears to be missing the Deuterocanonical books

Has anyone trained GPT2 on the Bible? I think it could create some interesting stories.

We could make a religion out of this

Worked for Mormons.

Reference (short version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMStODromg8

Long version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

Great idea, just remove the versioning from GPT otherwise it will get out of control fast :)

It's been done.

You do realize you’re disrespecting an entire class of people right? Or let me guess, it’s acceptable because you don’t agree with their beliefs right?

First, stop projecting.

Second, I am not disrespecting anyone. There is no reference to any particular religion so I don't see how I am offending this class of people.

Third, I should be free to create any system of belief I want, if that somehow makes me feel like I am reconnecting to a higher power. If I feel like creating a religion based on machine generated quotes learned from scriptures, what is the problem with that?

You don’t get to say when you’re offending people, others do. I’m religious and you have offended me.

Create whatever you want but if you’re goal is to poke fun at a group of people realize you’re one of the problems people keep pointing to in this world. Instead of saying anything you could’ve simply ignored this post but you had to make your ridiculous and pointless statement that does nothing but spread hate.

I have offended you by proposing a system of belief? Isn't this a little intolerant?

> but if you’re goal is to poke fun at a group of people

Aren't you assuming too much?

> You don’t get to say when you’re offending people, others do

You are right, I apologize for my phrasing. I actually wanted to know how that could be offending, because I could not see this.

And you continue the offense by throwing in the stereotypes. These days claiming a religious person as intolerant is on par with saying asian people like rice or some other equally nonsensical stereotype. You called religion a collection of stories. If you want to think my defending of ALL religions is somehow intolerant then you are free to do so, but when you reduce religions to a “collection of stories” this is where the offense comes.

A similar thing has existed for the Quran for some years now

http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp?chapter=1&verse=1#(1:...

Pretty helpful. The more translations the better too. Cross referencing translations is always interesting for me.

> Cross referencing

I see what you did there.

I didn’t intended to do that, but I will be from now on.

You could easily monetize this by adding sponsored content to every nth request. Something like I can do everything through Dannon® Oikos® Greek Yogurt who gives me strength.

However certain I want to be that this would never happen, this is hilarious.

About a decade ago I did something like this on an app where the client wanted people to find hidden passages in religious texts

Riding the Da Vinci and Nostradamus sentiment

I could see that coming back, people flock to these kinds of things in periods of uncertainty.

English Bible versions in mysql, sqlite, xml, csv, json.

https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases

Used it to build https://wordbibleaddin.com

This is neat. This makes me curious about the licencing around popular translations, like the Jerusalem Bible or the NIV; is it not legal to post those translations??

NIV specifically is owned by Biblica, Inc. and requires you ask them about licensing: https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/how-do-i-licens...

Apparently, the Bible is the Word of God. I'm not sure if copyright applies.

Romans 13:1-2 says: "Obey the government, for God is the One who has put it there. There is no government anywhere that God has not placed in power. So those who refuse to obey the law of the land are refusing to obey God, and punishment will follow."

Acts 5:29 says: "Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!""

The US copyright act (chapter 3 section 302) states: "Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation and, except as provided by the following subsections, endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death."

I expect that translating a work gives you a claim on the translation, which is a creative work. (Mechanical translation doesn't have this effect)

“it is my sincerely held religious belief that no translations in fact happened...”

While there are sects that consider certain translations to be special, or even divinely inspired, it’s usually pretty old ones which are out of copyright anyway.

that was my point, but i should have made it more explicitly.

I think a translation is a derived work, thus coming under the copyright of the original owner, not the translator. Not sure how that applies to translations of public domain works. I can assure you though that I am not the copyright holder of a Mickey Mouse translation in French just because I've translated it from English to French.

Copyright is different from patents in this way: I can own a patent on an extension of an invention that you hold a patent on. I can't own the copyright to a derived work of a work you own the copyright to. In fact, you automatically own the copyright of the derived work that I produced (e.g. Fanfiction)

Isaiah 64:8

But now, O Lord, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand.

Yes, exactly. Here’s what BibleGateway says about it: https://support.biblegateway.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001403...

Additional edit: removing somewhat off-topic discussion that was replying to an example in the above comment, and discussion of whether a controversial passage was censored.

And no, it was not censoring it (thanks to all of you who replied below pointing this out!). The issue was my incorrect editing of the URL without accounting for the fact that the URL contained URL-encoded characters, namely + as %20.

The documentation is pretty clear: http://bible-api.com/luke+14:26

It isn't censoring anything. Your url is incorrect.

It's not censored. You just have to use the correct URL.

https://bible-api.com/luke%2014:26

As others have mentioned your url is incorrect. FWIW, I was always taught that this verse meant that, since God is love, if one loves God first, it will improve ones love for family, etc. Also that when one does love their children, etc, even if they don’t realize it they are participating in God’s love. Take it or leave it, but not really as unpopular or controversial as you posit.

Generally translations are subject to copyright and not considered inspired by Christians. There are a small minority of folks who consider the KJV an inspired translation, but that translation is too old for copyright law to speak to it.

Nietzche originally published the words "Gott ist tot" in 1882, so the copyright would have expired on or before 1952.

For the purposes of copyright, the author is whoever translates/compiles it.

This isn’t just an issue for the bible; if you want the uncensored version of Samuel Pepys’ diary, for instance, you have to pay for it; it needs translation from shorthand, and the 19th century translations are censored.

It's the translation where copyright applies.

Look at question 6 from the USCCB FAQ

http://usccb.org/bible/understanding-the-bible/faq.cfm

Not sure if I'm more surprised about the support for Cherokee or JSONP.

Yes, fascinating - it was translated into Cherokee back in 1860. According to Wycliffe Bible Translators, 3384 languages have some Scripture translated for them. Of those, 698 have the complete Bible and 1548 languages have a complete New Testament.

Mostly unrelated, but I did a summer internship for Wycliffe my sophomore year of college. We created an app that allowed non-technical speakers of a more obscure language to review and make suggestions on draft translations of scripture [1]. It would actually tie their native language translation to a "bridge language" (usually english) and then also show the original Hebrew/Aramaic which they could reference through a built in dictionary. As a language nerd it was a really interesting project to work on.

AFAIK the app is still being used in the field and maintained (my internship was over 4 years ago). This was a rare case of hiring interns to build something and it actually working out.

[1] https://www.translationcore.com/

Would be nice to have a list of all books and their verse numbers so you can make a random function.

As a Catholic, I feel bad that there is no freely available and open English translation that's also approved by Church, but what to do.

Maybe if I could get the 1950 version of Knox Bible somewhere. (Not the republished, 2012 version, that's on NewAdvent.)

Awesome! Would love NLT or NKJV translation.

Unfortunately, you run into copyright issues very quickly when republishing modern translations. This site only provides “public domain and freely licensed bibles,” which includes neither NLT or NKJV.

BTW, the publishers of the ESV host an official API (although the terms of use are somewhat restrictive): https://api.esv.org/

NET as well: https://labs.bible.org/api_web_service

I find it strange that you have a default translation. I expect the sort of crowd who would most likely use this will also be very particular about which translation is being served.

There’s unfortunately not a lot of public translations available outside of KJV.

Zondervan owns and strongly protects the copyright they own on the most recent English translations

Wouldn't it be awesome if copyright kills religion due to a lack of holy books? This is quite hilarious, some of the oldest books in the world and their translations are subject to something invented more than a millenium later. I'm sure Zondervan never peeked at earlier translations during their 'creation'. In the beginning (C) Zondervan.

Eh, I think it's fine as it reduces friction to getting the data. People particular about using KJV or whatever can easily switch. I'm more surprised Cherokee is one of the supported languages!

I used to work a a Bible software company, many, many years ago, and had to write a similar API. The surprise challenge I ran into, as that API was meant to support multiple translations, was that they don’t all agree on where chapters and verses start/stop. Some translations include or leave out a verse or two compared to others, and in some cases will number verses oddly to show it (like skipping from verse 20 to 24 because the translation chose to leave out 21-23), which could cause “verse 24” to refer to different verses depending on the translation.

Often or always(??) it is caused by word ordering requirements in the language -- think subj-obj-verb

When translating orally, it sometimes means a translator has to pause, or guess at how the speaker is going to end sentences/paragraphs. This is because the other language requires an ending element to come earlier

This also has a fun impact on jokes. Sometimes the punch line needs changing, or other jokes become possible -- because the sentence ending gives a different denouement

Biblical Greek tends to use word order for emphasis, but still with an overall sentence structure very similar to English. So (as far as I know) the issue is mostly hidden for English speakers

Should it just return a 400 if you don’t provide a translation?

I'd suggest making it part of the path. A translation is parent to a verse.

For example

http://bible-api.com/kjv/john 3:16

I think a default does actually make sense: if you don’t provide one, people will start by getting confused, and if they get past that will try to decide which version they should use, and probably go with the KJV as a name that they recognise—but the KJV is simply not a good translation any more, mostly because English has changed and it hasn’t but also by reason of its textual sources. The WEB family¹ is superior in both these regards and not obviously inferior in others, while remaining public domain, so defaulting to it does people a service. (Note that in all this I’m assuming that any default will be English. I think that’s a reasonable assumption because of the shape of both the world and the internet.)

¹ “Familiy” because the WEB also has a British/International spelling edition, not present through this API. If anything I think it would make a better default than the American spelling edition. Matches the spelling used by more of the world, and lines up with the KJV better.

Your post is a perfect example of why I think it's a bad idea to have a default. There is a lot of debate over which translations are the most valuable and very little concensus. A lot of organized denominations still lean heavily on KJV, regardless of its relative accuracy. A lot of them take strong opposition to KJV. Even if we all agreed KJV was bad, what do we use instead? NIV? ASV? WEB? There is no sensible default.

Besides, just as a verse is part of a book, so is a book part of a translation. It makes as much sense to declare which bible to query a verse from as it does to declare which book or verses to query for.

If considering all English translations, you would certainly get a wide variety of opinions about what should be the default for everyone, if default there be; yet I suspect that the substantial majority of informed opinions would support the KJV, NIV and ESV, with all others trailing far behind. As regards user-facing systems, BibleGateway.com has long used the NIV as its default. I certainly wouldn’t; I’m not fond of what the NIV has become. All in all, for an API I would agree with you and recommend no default.

But for a site like this, you’re only considering public domain translations. Given that, I think that the WEB is a reasonable default, specifically because of the paucity of available options. And when you have fewer options, I think a default is more useful—“you don’t have the one I want, so what should I use instead?” will cause paralysis that a default resolves.

On the available public domain English BIbles: you’re generally limited to the KJV, a variety of more obscure translations older than the ASV, the ASV, and the WEB. (Fun fact: the old testament of the RSV and the first edition of the new testament are now public domain for most of the world, including Australia where I live. I grew up with the RSV and still use a second edition RSV as my primary Bible.) Out of these, I don’t think there’s much contest: the KJV is popular for historical reasons but a poor default for the aforediscussed reasons; of the obscure translations, most or all are either unconventional in some significant way, or would be widely acknowledged to be superseded by the ASV, by direct or indirect lineage; that leaves the ASV and the WEB which is mostly just a linguistic update of the ASV. That leaves the WEB as a sensible default public domain translation.

Is there a programmatic way to split books into chapters and verses? Verses don't seem to simply be divided by sentences; there can be multiple sentences in a single verse. But is there a well-defined metric that could be used to apply to other books?

Seems to be some extra whitespace on the text of the example you provided.

http://bible-api.com/john%203:16?translation=kjv

Would be nice if The Skeptic's Annotated Bible could be added to the API. Doubt that though.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

It has been years since I last looked at the Skeptics Annotated Bible, but when it launched there were a number of claims based purely on the standard English translations of the Bible. I remember especially how it was claimed that Jesus was "disrespectful of his mother" (and therefore not a morally good person) by addressing her as "woman", even though gunê in Greek was a totally normal form of address with no disrespectful tinge to it at all. (We know a lot about forms of address in Greek and Latin thanks largely to the work of Eleanor Dickey).

I mentioned this to the creator of the website, but he said he lacked any academic background and could only base himself on the English. Consequently, I wrote the site off as more a knee-jerk response to religion instead of any rigorous challenge to the claims of Christianity.

Spending time on annotating it either in English or the original is giving it too much credibility to begin with. If we're going to go to the source let's look at the Torah instead, not at a bunch of pull requests with bug fixes against the original.

Please, Jacques, this is pure flamebait. Please don't.

As you wish.

Oof, just started reading through and this is pretty cringeworthy. It seems the author has a made a few blog posts of your typical, infantile criticisms of religion that they simply link to throughout the text, which is deliberately taken out of context at every possible point and mocked inline. "Advice about avoiding prostitutes? That's anti-woman, sexist absurdity! Why doesn't it mention male prostitutes?" If you're looking for good critique, you will not find it here.

I just browsed for a good 15 minutes. It isn't a collection of the strongest critiques I've ever seen, but what I saw was certainly of higher quality than the quote you've provided.

Protip: Add Cloudflare (CDN) to provide caching and https for the api. Makes it faster, reduces traffic on the endpoints, and makes them secure.

Also try to host it as a lambda function.

I keep getting NULL

Sounds like an enhancement

I wrote a bible desktop application and pulled in a bunch of translation and commentary from the swords project. I recommend looking into it if you're after the underlying data, nicely structured.

Does it let you compare against different revisions of the bible?

How can a programmer believe in god is beyond me.

How cannot he when the “logos kyrie o teos” is mentioned e.g. in Iesekiel as the self -description of the divine, meaning roughly “the master of putting thoughts into words”. Doesn’t this sound like a very description of a programmer to you?

You talk about a book.

A book written by people 2000 years ago.

There is not a single proof in existence, that this book is not more then a story equivalent to Harry Potter or any other Fairy tale.

And then the issues just start...

A omnipotent she/he/it who thought 'yeah going to earth 2000 years ago is the perfect and only timing i will ever go to earth', then creates humans (which are much older than that and we know that well enough) and then never comes back and helps us?

Whats that for a shitty leader?

I publicly bet $100 that you are not employed as a medior or senior developer. It just can't happen, you need greater mental capacity for that. My account will be banned probably but that's just insane what's happening in HN lately

I've worked with some very good programmers who happen to be devout Christians. I got over my prejudices quickly - it doesn't make sense to me but I don't have to understand it, just accept it.

How is it related?

This guy had something to say about religion.

You may have heard of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_a_Computer_Scientist_Ra...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com