About the data

Where the connections come from

The connections are the "Bible Cross References" dataset published by OpenBible.info, which says the data comes mainly from public-domain sources, "especially the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge", a nineteenth-century reference work. The site also used its own Topical Bible and Twitter Bible Search "to seed the initial votes". Version used: #www.openbible.info CC-BY 2026-10-12.

Licence and attribution

OpenBible.info states: "Unless otherwise indicated, all content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License", linking to CC BY 4.0. We credit it wherever the connections are shown. Changes we made: references with zero or negative votes are left out; for each verse we keep the 30 with the most votes in each direction; identical references are merged; a range that runs into another book keeps its first verse; we add the reverse direction ("points here").

OpenBible.info: Bible Cross References · CC BY 4.0

The cross-reference data and the Bible texts are licensed separately. Each translation shown beside the connections has its own licence, shown with the text. All sources and licences

What the votes mean

Each reference carries a vote count from OpenBible.info readers. We show it as "readers' relevance votes": a rough sign of how many people found a link useful. It is not a measure of certainty, and a high count is not proof of anything about inspiration. Many true connections have few votes. The dataset does not label quotations, allusions or types; we never invent those labels for it.

What is covered, and what is not

The dataset covers the 66 books of the Protestant canon. The Orthodox Old Testament also includes Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and others (the Anagignoskomena, the "readable books"). They appear on our canon map, hatched, as "no data in this dataset". That means no data, not no connections. Our editorial journeys include some of them.

Verse numbering

The dataset uses English (KJV-style) numbering, which follows the Hebrew Bible for the Psalms. The Septuagint and some other translations number some chapters differently (Psalm 22 is Psalm 21 in the Greek Psalter; much of Jeremiah is in a different order). When you read a connection in such a translation, we map Psalms, Joel and Malachi verse by verse. Elsewhere, if that translation's chapter differs from the English one, we do not guess: we show the passage in an English-numbered translation, say so, and keep the source reference.

Direction

The dataset lists references for each verse: "this verse points to that one". We show that list as "points to" (above the line on the map). We also show the reverse, every verse whose list includes the current one, as "points here" (below the line). When two verses list each other, both lists mark it.

Counts

In the version we use, the dataset has 344,799 references; 341,295 have at least one vote, and 3,504 with zero or negative votes are left out. The counts on each page say how many are shown and how many exist, and change with your filters.

Editorial journeys

The journeys are written by our editors, separately from the dataset. Labels such as "Quotation" or "Shared wording" appear only there, only where the Bible text itself shows it, and the wording is checked automatically against the texts on this site. Quotations from the Church Fathers are copied from the published translation, with a link to it.