How passages are linked to verses
Every passage is a paragraph of the writer’s own work, from a public-domain edition, kept with the place it comes from — so any passage opens in its book. Each link between a passage and a verse says how the passage speaks of it.
The six kinds of link
| Kind | What it means | Links |
|---|---|---|
| Citation | The writer names the verse — “John iii. 16”, “Joh 1:3”, “Ps. cii. 27” — in any of the ways references have been written over the centuries. | 343,688 |
| Quotation | The writer quotes the verse: at least six words in a row as the King James or Douay-Rheims has them when they stand in quotation marks or the writer names the verse beside them, and eight otherwise — in the spelling of either age (“all you that labor” and “all ye that labour” alike). Words two verses share go to the verse the writer names, or to the one the surrounding words belong to. | 275,903 |
| Sermon | A sermon preached on this text — Spurgeon’s printed sermons each name theirs. | 3,413 |
| Commentary | The passage sits in the part of a commentary that treats these verses — Matthew Henry’s “The Divinity of Christ”, Calvin’s “John 1:1–5”, Augustine’s “Tractate II”. Where a scanned edition has lost its headings, each note is placed by the words of the verse it opens with and the verse numbers it prints. | 199,081 |
| Editor’s note | The nineteenth-century editors of the Church Fathers identified quotations in their footnotes; those identifications are kept, and marked as theirs. | 54,992 |
| Chapter | A reference to a chapter as a whole (“Gen. i.”). | 13,289 |
Citations, quotations and sermons are explicit: the writer names or quotes the verse, or preached on it. Commentary and chapter links follow where a passage stands in its book. In Settings you can choose to see only the explicit kinds, the standard set, or everything — which adds 58,960 links from scanned editions that rest only on a passage’s place in its book, marked as uncertain.
Only the writer’s own words
A passage is always the writer’s own prose. Editors’ introductions and summaries, translators’ notes, indexes, tables of contents and other authors’ pieces bound into a volume are left out. What a writer quotes from someone else — a creed expounded, a poet’s lines, the sayings Spurgeon gathered in The Treasury of David — stays in its place in the book, set off as a quotation, and is never counted as the writer’s own.
The texts
The reading texts are three public-domain Bibles, each set as its edition sets it — paragraphs, lines of poetry, section headings, psalm titles and, in the King James, the words its translators supplied, in italics. The writers’ 126 works come from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and Documenting the American South; the credits page lists every edition and licence.
| 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 |
Good to know
- Scanned editions. Passages from scanned books are marked from a scanned edition; their letters may hold small slips from the scan, and the original page is a tap away.
- A commentary’s section covers its verses together. A paragraph in the section on John 1:1–5 is about those verses as a whole, not necessarily about each one.
- Psalm numbers. Writers who read the Latin or Greek Bible sometimes number the Psalms one apart; the main ones are converted.
- More to come. Works on file only in Latin, Greek, German, Dutch or Danish wait for a public-domain English translation.
- Something wrong? Every passage has Report a problem, and every report is read.