About
Biblical Connections draws every documented cross-reference in the Bible as a single web — one arc for each link between two passages — so the structure of Scripture is visible at a glance, and traceable verse by verse.
The cross-reference data
The connections come from the OpenBible.info cross-reference dataset — 344,799 references drawn primarily from the public-domain Treasury of Scripture Knowledge and refined by reader votes. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. In the verse explorer, each cross-reference is ranked by those votes, so the strongest, most widely-recognized links surface first.
The scripture text
Verse text is the King James Version, which is in the public domain — so it can be shown in full, freely, beside every reference. Book and chapter structure follows the standard 66-book Protestant canon: 1,189 chapters, roughly 31,102 verses.
How the visualization works
The 66 books are laid end to end along the base, left (Genesis) to right (Revelation), one segment per chapter. Each cross-reference is drawn as an arc joining the two chapters it connects. The main map aggregates references to the chapter level and weights each arc by how many references join those chapters, so denser relationships glow brighter. Hovering or tapping a book highlights only its connections; the verse explorer drops to the individual-verse level, where you read a passage beside every cross-reference in full.
Honest limitations
Cross-references are interpretive, not absolute — they reflect generations of readers noticing shared words, themes, events, and fulfilled prophecy, refined by community voting. Reasonable people disagree about individual links. The main map aggregates to the chapter level for legibility, so it shows the shape of the connections rather than exact verse endpoints (the explorer is where you see those). Versification follows the KJV; a small number of references that don't map cleanly onto KJV verse numbering are shown by reference label without text.
Credit
The arc-diagram approach was pioneered by Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild in their 2007 work Visualizing the Bible. Biblical Connections rebuilds that idea on the full, current dataset with an interactive, verse-level explorer.
Explore the map →