How this works
Cloud of Witnesses puts two thousand years of Christian readers beside the text of Scripture — never paraphrased, never generated, always traceable to the page they wrote.
The rule
Nothing shown as a writer’s words was written by a machine. Every passage in the database is a paragraph copied from a public-domain edition of the writer’s work, stored with the file and line where it sits, so any quotation can be checked against the archived text. What the pipeline adds is only the link between a passage and a verse — and each link says how it was found:
| Kind | Meaning | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Citation | The writer cites the verse explicitly — “John iii. 16”, “Joh 1:3”, “Ps. cii. 27”. Read by a parser that understands the reference styles of every century. | 343,688 |
| Quotation | At least six consecutive words identical to the King James or Douay-Rheims text when they are in quotation marks or the writer names the verse beside them, eight otherwise — read in today’s forms where an edition modernised them (“all you that labor” for “all ye that labour”), and in the eighteenth-century printings whose long s the scan reads as f (“fhall”), as s. Words that two verses share go to the verse the writer names, the verse a commentary’s note is on, or the one the surrounding words belong to, and a short match inside a longer quotation must be borne out by its context. | 275,903 |
| Commentary | The passage sits in the section of a commentary that treats these verses (Matthew Henry’s “The Divinity of Christ”, Calvin’s “John 1:1-5”, Augustine’s “Tractate II. Chapter I. 6-14”). In scanned commentaries whose headings the OCR lost (Clarke, Barnes, Keil & Delitzsch, Westcott on John, Hodge on Romans, Luther on Galatians), each note’s own words — “A handful of the flour]” — are matched against the King James text to find the verse, reading Keil & Delitzsch’s verse numbers, in their notes and their references alike, as the Hebrew Bible counts them, and their page heads (“CHAP. XIV. 1-32.”) for the chapter. Owen on Hebrews and Ryle’s Expository Thoughts are read by the heads of their sections (“Ver. 4, 5.”, “JOHN XX. 1—10.”). | 199,081 |
| Sermon | A sermon preached on this text (Spurgeon’s 3,500 printed sermons each name theirs). | 3,413 |
| Editor’s note | The nineteenth-century editors of the Church Fathers identified quotations in footnotes; those identifications are kept, and marked as theirs. | 54,992 |
| Chapter | A reference to a chapter as a whole (“Gen. i.”). | 13,289 |
The first three kinds are explicit: the writer names or quotes the verse, or preached on it. The others are positional and can be wrong more often. A further 58,960 links, not counted above, come from scanned editions and rest only on where a passage sits in the book: the scan lost the headings, so they are often wrong, and they are hidden unless you ask for them. In Settings you can choose Explicit only, Standard (the default) or Everything. No allusions are inferred by a language model in this version. That is the next step — and when it comes, model-found links will be labelled as such and kept apart from the evidence above.
How accurate is it?
We check by sampling. 50 links of each kind below were drawn at random (sample 2026-10-01b) and read one by one against the passage and the verse; each was marked correct, wrong verse, wrong writer, garbled, or not a reference. The figures are the share marked correct, with a 95% confidence interval. The samples are small, so read the intervals, not the points.
| Kind | Correct | 95% interval | What went wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Citation 343,688 links | 96% (48/50) | 87%–99% | 2 wrong verse |
| Quotation 275,903 links | 98% (49/50) | 90%–100% | 1 garbled |
| Commentary 165,249 links | 94% (47/50) | 84%–98% | 2 garbled, 1 wrong verse |
| Commentary scanned, placed by the note 24,563 links | 100% (50/50) | 93%–100% | — |
| Commentary scanned, placed by its section head 9,269 links | 92% (46/50) | 81%–97% | 1 wrong writer, 2 wrong verse, 1 garbled |
| Sermon 3,413 links | 100% (50/50) | 93%–100% | — |
| Editor’s note 54,992 links | 98% (49/50) | 90%–100% | 1 wrong verse |
| Chapter 13,289 links | 86% (43/50) | 74%–93% | 2 garbled, 4 wrong verse, 1 wrong writer |
Weighted by how many links of each kind a reader sees by default, about 96% are correct (95% interval 94%–99%); of the 400 links read, 382 were correct. Reviewed by Claude, the developer’s AI assistant (not yet checked by a human reviewer) on September 30, 2026. The stratified sample 2026-09-30c (seed 20261014, drawn on build 71 of 30 September 2026) carried onto the database of 1 October 2026 (build 74): every sampled link that is unchanged keeps its verdict, and the 13 that changed on the way were drawn again and reviewed afresh. Reviewed by Claude, the developer’s AI assistant, with helper agents that read each passage in its source; not yet reviewed by a person. Fixed since the sample was drawn: the titles of 155 sermons in Spurgeon’s early volumes, which had run on under the sermon before; 1,161 chapter titles in the Fathers’ volumes that run over several lines; scanned notes placed in another chapter when the OCR misread their number (Clarke on Psalm 56:2, Keil on Genesis 43), now checked against the notes around them; Keil and Delitzsch’s references to a verse of the chapter in hand, now shown (93% right in a separate sample of 60), with the forms the scans misread left out; lists of references running on into other chapters (“Hos. iv. 15, ix. 15, xii. 12”, some 7,000 more citations, 99% right in a sample of 134) and Psalms 88 and 138 in Roman numerals, which were never read; and Jonathan Edwards’s own lists of references, which had been labelled as an editor’s notes, with 516 entries of his Notes on the Bible and Miscellaneous Observations that had been left out. What remains is mostly an edition’s own misprinted references, OCR-damaged numbers, torn scraps of scanned pages, and Bible text a scan prints so damaged that it is not recognised as Scripture. Every passage has a Report button; reports go to a review queue.
The links hidden by default were checked the same way: 58% correct (29/50; interval 44%–71%; 17 wrong verse, 4 garbled). That is why they appear only when you choose Everything, marked as uncertain.
Attribution
A second check looks for passages that are not the writer’s own prose: index entries, tables of contents, editors’ and translators’ apparatus in the multi-author volumes, and the quotations of other authors printed in Spurgeon’s Treasury of David. Of the 485,494 passages in the database at the last scan (September 27, 2026), none matched: such material is dropped at build time rather than credited to the writer.
The texts
Three public-domain Bibles are the reading texts, and every verse can be compared across them in the verse panel. Each is set as its edition sets it — paragraphs, lines of poetry, the section headings and psalm titles it prints, and in the King James the words its translators supplied, in italics — taken from the editions’ own markup as eBible.org publishes them. Quotations are matched against the King James text and, since the Catholic writers quote it, the Douay-Rheims (Challoner); the Douay-Rheims is used only for that and is not shown.
| Text | Language | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Berean Standard Bible (BSB) | English | Public domain (2023) |
| King James Version (KJV) | English | Public domain (US) |
| World English Bible (WEB) | English | Public domain |
The writers’ works come from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Project Gutenberg, scans at the Internet Archive and, for Richard Allen, Documenting the American South — 126 works by 89 writers so far. Scanned books carry OCR errors; passages from them are marked from a scanned edition, and their positional links are given lower confidence. Full details and licences are on the credits page.
The works themselves can be read in full under Works — 127 of them, set as their editions set them: the headings, the footnotes (numbered on each page), the Scripture a commentary prints and the hymns a preacher quotes. Only what the writer did not write is left out, as for the passages: the editors’ introductions and summaries, other writers’ pieces bound into a volume, tables of contents and indexes. What others wrote that the writer himself sets down — a creed he expounds, a poet’s lines, the notes Spurgeon gathered in the Treasury of David — stays in its place, set off as a quotation and never counted among his passages. The Scripture a writer cites or quotes is linked to the verse, and “Read in the book” on any passage opens its work there.
Search
The whole Bible in every text, and every passage of every writer, are indexed for full-text search: phrases in quotes, -word to exclude, predestin* for word beginnings; endings are matched automatically. A reference typed anywhere — Rom 8:28 — opens the reader.
Offline
You can save things to read without an internet connection:
- A book of the Bible, with what the writers you have switched on say about it.
- A work, or one volume of a long one.
After you have read a little of a book or a work, the app offers to save it. You can also save, update or remove things in Settings. Nothing is downloaded until you ask. Pages you have opened recently also stay on your device for a while, so they open offline too.
What to expect, honestly
- Attribution. Multi-author volumes are split by line ranges; editors’ introductions, indexes and the other authors’ notes printed in Spurgeon’s Treasury of David are dropped rather than credited — but a stray editorial paragraph can still be credited to the author of the volume.
- Scans without structure. A scanned book loses its running heads and chapter lines, so a note’s place in the book is a poor guide to its verse. Clarke’s, Barnes’s and Keil & Delitzsch’s notes are placed by their own words and verse numbers instead (Keil & Delitzsch’s by the chapter their page heads print, too), as are the notes of Spurgeon’s Treasury of David that quote their verse; Owen on Hebrews and Ryle’s Expository Thoughts by the verses their section heads print. Everything else from scans that rests on position alone is hidden unless you choose Everything, except Keil & Delitzsch’s references by verse or chapter alone (“ver. 7”, “chap. iii. 16”), which a check against the scans found as reliable as the links shown. John Gill’s Exposition is linked only through his explicit citations and quotations.
- Old numbering. Writers who used the Vulgate or Septuagint sometimes cite Psalms by the old numbers. The Summa, Thérèse and à Kempis are converted, as are Keil & Delitzsch’s Hebrew verse numbers; others may be off by one in the Psalms.
- Structure links are approximate. A paragraph in the section on John 1:1–5 is about those verses in general, not necessarily about each of them.
- Not yet included. Works on file only in Latin, Greek, German, Dutch or Danish await a public-domain English translation; the Catena Aurea awaits an attribution parser. A writer the collection links to no verse is not listed: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems quote none word for word, and his prose was first published after 1930, too late to be in the public domain in the United States.
Most-referenced verses
Across every writer in the collection, selected or not:
Credits and privacy
Portraits are from Wikimedia Commons; each figure’s page names the artist and licence, and the credits page lists them all with the texts and typefaces. There are no accounts and no trackers; what little is stored is described in privacy & terms. Built September 30, 2026.