Bible API

http://bible-api.com/

by otobrglez • 6 years ago

373 200 6 years ago

bible-api.com

INTPenis• 6 years ago

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

brightball2• 6 years ago

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

dane-pgp• 6 years ago

Cross referencing

I see what you did there.

brightball2• 6 years ago

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

josh_fyi2• 6 years ago

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.

jaspax• 6 years ago

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.

isaachier• 6 years ago

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

baryphonic• 6 years ago

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

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

sb0574• 6 years ago

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...

skissane4• 6 years ago

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?

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

dilandau3• 6 years ago

What, Aramaic? The Vulgate? Wycliffes?

nwatson• 6 years ago

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

paulcole• 6 years ago

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.

JoBrad2• 6 years ago

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

lordleft• 6 years ago

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??

judge2020• 6 years ago

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...

Intermernet2• 6 years ago

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."

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

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)

natch• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

jerkstate• 6 years ago

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

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

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.

shp0ngle3• 6 years ago

It's the translation where copyright applies.

protomyth• 6 years ago

Look at question 6 from the USCCB FAQ

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

saos• 6 years ago

Awesome! Would love NLT or NKJV translation.

NobodyNada• 6 years ago

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.

benbristow• 6 years ago

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

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

CivBase3• 6 years ago

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.

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

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

jasonjayr• 6 years ago

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

umvi• 6 years ago

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!

thomasqbrady• 6 years ago

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.

JoBrad2• 6 years ago

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

CivBase3• 6 years ago

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

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

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.

CivBase3• 6 years ago

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.

millerm• 6 years ago

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

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

Mediterraneo10• 6 years ago

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.

jacquesm4• 6 years ago

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.

Damorian• 6 years ago

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.

dwaltrip• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

newacct583• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

skissane4• 6 years ago

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.

memling2• 6 years ago

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.

goto115• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

catawbasam• 6 years ago

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 :)

seemslegit5• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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!

HeckFeck• 6 years ago

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...

mxcrossb• 6 years ago

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.

shampto32• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

karaterobot• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

take_a_breath• 6 years ago

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.

Phylter• 6 years ago

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.

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

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.

ardy42• 6 years ago

> 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...

eeereerews2• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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

bjourne3• 6 years ago

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.

kijin• 6 years ago

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.

wcarey19• 6 years ago

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.

mrozbarry• 6 years ago

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.

dilandau3• 6 years ago

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

smitty1e• 6 years ago

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.

yters• 6 years ago

The NT authors are constantly quoting snippets from the OT.

samirillian• 6 years ago

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.

humanrebar• 6 years ago

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.

analog31• 6 years ago

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

chooseaname• 6 years ago

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.

dilandau3• 6 years ago

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.

geofft• 6 years ago

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

sb0574• 6 years ago

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

catsdanxe• 6 years ago

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

gchamonlive3• 6 years ago

We could make a religion out of this

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

Worked for Mormons.

csours• 6 years ago

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

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

tiborsaas• 6 years ago

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

jacquesm4• 6 years ago

It's been done.

tekknik8• 6 years ago

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?

macarthy12• 6 years ago

I keep getting NULL

djxfade• 6 years ago

Sounds like an enhancement

skissane4• 6 years ago

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

bobuk• 6 years ago

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

coolgeek• 6 years ago

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

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

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

cylinder714• 6 years ago

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>

elwell• 6 years ago

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

stephenhuey• 6 years ago

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.

elldoubleyew• 6 years ago

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/

programmarchy• 6 years ago

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?

aerodog• 6 years ago

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

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

davidwparker• 6 years ago

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.

duemti• 6 years ago

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

tekknik8• 6 years ago

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

tekknik8• 6 years ago

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

taborj4• 6 years ago

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

biolurker12• 6 years ago

How can a programmer believe in god is beyond me.

flatfilefan• 6 years ago

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?

battery423• 6 years ago

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?

biolurker12• 6 years ago

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

disordinary• 6 years ago

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.

shp0ngle3• 6 years ago

How is it related?

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

This guy had something to say about religion.

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

schappim• 6 years ago

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

abiogenesis• 6 years ago

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

chr15m• 6 years ago

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

https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases

Used it to build https://wordbibleaddin.com

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

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.

Jaruzel2• 6 years ago

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.

taborj4• 6 years ago

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.

Meph504• 6 years ago

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.

shp0ngle3• 6 years ago

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.)

vmception• 6 years ago

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.

zornado• 6 years ago

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.

Bible API

Related Stories