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Bible API
- macarthy12 6y agoI keep getting NULL
- skissane 6y agoBook names are language-specific. So http://bible-api.com/Joannes+3:16?translation=clementine http://bible-api.com/Joannes+3:16?translation=clementine works but http://bible-api.com/John+3:16?translation=clementine 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
- battery423 6y agoSo absurd how people are really reading this. How can you take so much time on this Text while ignoring all issues this Text contains? All the contradictions? All the advise which is either sexist, rassist, homophobe, non homophobe etc.? I really really want to know, what other people think, when they read the bible every week like in a bible study, just to either: - Following it - Not following it but finding an excuse why certain things are ignored - Don't follow it and don't bring up any excuse. How many Christians do you know, who are dicks? How many people here are reading the Bible, believe in this stuff and don't get out and help others? Fuck you all hypocrites reading the bible, believing in god and doing shit for society because of a comfortable / easy living and shitty excuses.
- gboone 6y agoHave you actually ready it?
- RandomBacon 6y agoI don't think someone in OP's shoes even has to read it, they just have to have a fair and open mind and understand that it'a bunch of letters, poems, stories all written by different people at different points in time. I think it would help if such person after understanding that, did read it. Of course there is some stuff that doesn't make sense in today's world, but there is a lot that still does. As for OP's other arguement about being hypocrites, that's a rather poor one. Hypocrisy isn't unique. Everyone is human, and no matter their religious affiliation or lack thereof, are just as susceptible to "being a dick".
- zekrioca 6y agoIt is only interesting that someone comes to comment about morals for a text written almost 3000 years ago..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoReligious flamewar is not allowed on HN. I'm sure there are good reasons for why you feel this way, but you can't post like this to HN. It destroys the commons. We ban accounts that post like this, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- battery423 6y agoFair enough. Nonethless i'm still / always surprised to see religion in context of IT/programming.
- bobuk 6y agoIf 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 https://github.com/bobuk/holybooks/tree/master/EN
- coolgeek 6y agoThanks, but that could use some documentation. Directory names like "1CO" are completely opaque to me, and almost certainly others
- coronadisaster 6y agoDoes it let you compare against different revisions of the bible?
- INTPenis 6y agoWould be nice to have a list of all books and their verse numbers so you can make a random function.
- ykevinator 6y agoModern skills with a legacy philosophy is an interesting pairing (god is not real)
- brightball 6y agoPretty helpful. The more translations the better too. Cross referencing translations is always interesting for me.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> Cross referencing I see what you did there.
- brightball 6y agoI didn’t intended to do that, but I will be from now on.
- josh_fyi 6y agoNice 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.
- sb057 6y agoThe 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_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_texts_of_Shakespeare%27s...
- skissane 6y 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?
- sb057 6y agoI was speaking slightly out-of-hand, but it's the natural conclusion if you take the writings to have been authentically authored by Moses. Religious traditions place him in approximately the middle of the 2nd millenium BC, while secular scholarship, when they assume he even existed, put him in the 13th century BC. There are numerous scholarly sources attesting to the fact that Hebrew only began to exist as a language in about the 10th century BC. Ergo, Moses must have written in a pre-Hebrew language, which would have very likely been Ugaritic, or at least a related dialect. This is backed up by the fact that there are certain portions of the Old Testament that are written in a form of Hebrew which is comparatively archaic, such as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy and the middle chunk of the Book of Job. You can see this reflected in the 2nd century BC Greek translation, the Septuagint, wherein various chunks of these texts are skipped, apparently on account of the translators being unsure how to translate what would be comparable to Middle English to us.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TomMarius 6y agoMeh. I would really love to see the day when religion stops being more than a fantasy fictional story. The project is nice, but I dislike its promotion of religion, and christianity in particular. This story has caused way too much suffering already. I wonder who will first use this project for children indoctrination.
- bcgraham 6y agohttp://bible-api.com/ecclesiastes%203:7 http://bible-api.com/ecclesiastes%203:7
- TomMarius 6y agoI don't take advice from a book that has caused so much physical and mental pain, ruined lives and families.
- chippy 6y agoThere is a theory that much of what we think are universal human values such as morality or justice or democracy comes from the book. Indeed many would support the idea that all utopian movements such as the The French Revolution or Communism have their philosophical roots in the book and Christianity. Humanism and the notion of Progress, could be based on the Christian idea that we are morally autonomous beings and completely different from other animals and that the idea that progress is towards something better is fundamentally Christian. Ironically, much of modern atheism has assumptions about human beings which base themselves on Christian philosophy. Many would say that you do take advice from such a book even if you don't know that's where the advice you value originates.
- jacquesm 6y agoI beg to differ. I don't believe in God and see him as a man made concept, but I do believe it is possible to have ethics and morality outside of religion. Proof of this is that there are many cultures, historical and present day that do not share this book or any other and that do possess ethics and morality, besides the obvious counter example of atheists.
- paulcole 6y agoYou 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.
- JoBrad 6y agoHowever certain I want to be that this would never happen, this is hilarious.
- lordleft 6y agoThis 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 6y agoNIV specifically is owned by Biblica, Inc. and requires you ask them about licensing: https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/how-do-i-license-the-niv/ https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/how-do-i-licens...
- Intermernet 6y agoApparently, 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." <confused face emoji>
- jerkstate 6y agoNietzche originally published the words "Gott ist tot" in 1882, so the copyright would have expired on or before 1952.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoI expect that translating a work gives you a claim on the translation, which is a creative work. (Mechanical translation doesn't have this effect)
- hprotagonist 6y ago“it is my sincerely held religious belief that no translations in fact happened...”
- saos 6y agoAwesome! Would love NLT or NKJV translation.
- NobodyNada 6y agoUnfortunately, 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 6y agoSeems to be some extra whitespace on the text of the example you provided. http://bible-api.com/john%203:16?translation=kjv http://bible-api.com/john%203:16?translation=kjv
- CivBase 6y agoI 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 6y agoThere’s unfortunately not a lot of public translations available outside of KJV.
- jasonjayr 6y agoZondervan owns and strongly protects the copyright they own on the most recent English translations
- jacquesm 6y agoWouldn't it be awesome if copyright kills religion due to a lack of holy books? This is quite hilarious, some of the oldest books in the world and their translations are subject to something invented more than a millenium later. I'm sure Zondervan never peeked at earlier translations during their 'creation'. In the beginning (C) Zondervan.
- umvi 6y agoEh, 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 6y agoI 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.
- natch 6y agoEdit: my bad, I literally clicked on an example link provided in the page, which clearly shows the same URL format I used in my post, and edited the URL to have the strings for the Luke passage. I see that's the wrong syntax. Safari must be doing something funny… nope, that wasn't it. It was me, not noticing that %20 was an encoded + since it was mashed together with another number which threw me off. Earlier question was asking why a controversial passage was not found. Corrected URL: http://bible-api.com/luke+14:26 http://bible-api.com/luke+14:26
- millerm 6y agoWould be nice if The Skeptic's Annotated Bible could be added to the API. Doubt that though. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/
- Damorian 6y agoOof, 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 6y agoI 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.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoIt 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.
- jacquesm 6y agoSpending 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.
- wcarey 6y agoOne 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 6y 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.
- wcarey 6y agoSure - 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.
- dilandau 6y agoI 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 6y agoBTW, the publishers of the ESV host an official API (although the terms of use are somewhat restrictive): https://api.esv.org/ https://api.esv.org/
- sb057 6y agoNET as well: https://labs.bible.org/api_web_service https://labs.bible.org/api_web_service
- catsdanxe 6y agoHas anyone trained GPT2 on the Bible? I think it could create some interesting stories.
- gchamonlive 6y agoWe could make a religion out of this
- bufferoverflow 6y agoWorked for Mormons.
- csours 6y agoReference (short version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMStODromg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMStODromg8 Long version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs
- tiborsaas 6y agoGreat idea, just remove the versioning from GPT otherwise it will get out of control fast :)
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's been done.
- tekknik 6y agoYou 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?
- gchamonlive 6y agoFirst, stop projecting. Second, I am not disrespecting anyone. There is no reference to any particular religion so I don't see how I am offending this class of people. Third, I should be free to create any system of belief I want, if that somehow makes me feel like I am reconnecting to a higher power. If I feel like creating a religion based on machine generated quotes learned from scriptures, what is the problem with that?
- ggcr3ss 6y agoI stitched together a King James Version Bible app in 2018 without any ads and with the entire Bible available in one scroll. The website got taken down with a notice claiming the domain was expired as of "2021" which of course the year hasn't passed yet. It was a pretty big eye opener for me. Don't play with the Bible. I was also baited by the San Jose Police department earlier this year. Ever since I posted that app my life has gone south. I think I pulled a King James on myself. After all the last passage of the says "If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." It's really not a joke especially with the whole end of the world thing. I think the dns providers were telling me something with that message. Something is scheduled for 2021. The site was hosted with NetworkSolutions btw.
- cylinder714 6y agoJohn 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 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>
- biolurker1 6y agoSociety is going backwards. Entering the dark ages soon.
- smitty1e 6y agoMeh. "Society" is the mental crutch we all use. We are born and are judged as individuals, achieving greatness or ignobility as we do. Don't buy into the corporate piffle.
- biolurker1 6y agoSaid the molecule of water in the sea
- smitty1e 6y agoOnly if you think a three-atom molecule capable of awareness.
- dang 6y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- elwell 6y agoNot sure if I'm more surprised about the support for Cherokee or JSONP.
- stephenhuey 6y agoYes, 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 6y agoMostly 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/ https://www.translationcore.com/
- programmarchy 6y agoIs 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 6y agoA similar thing has existed for the Quran for some years now http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp?chapter=1&verse=1#(1:1:1) http://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp?chapter=1&verse=1#(1:...
- davidwparker 6y agoA decade ago (!) I worked on parsing bible searches. https://www.davidwparker.com/2010/03/04/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 6y agoWell, this is the reason there are so many versions. Copyright on the best seller book of all time.
- tekknik 6y agoCopyrights didn’t exist when most were written (not many people use NIV versions) so what are you on about?
- taborj 6y ago> (not many people use NIV versions) [citation needed] NIV is always on the list of most popular bible versions, and is in heavy usage. KJV is by far the most popular, but NIV is still very popular.
- hajile 6y agoI'd also add that the very popular New King James Version (NKJV) is both copyrighted and uses different source material from the KJV which means that differences in wording are not just old to new English, but also differences in meaning.
- taborj 6y agoGood point, and I didn't know that about NKJV. Very interesting.
- 6y ago
- biolurker1 6y agoHow can a programmer believe in god is beyond me.
- flatfilefan 6y agoHow 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 6y agoYou 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?
- biolurker1 6y agoI 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 6y agoI'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.
- shp0ngle 6y agoHow is it related?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThis guy had something to say about religion. You may have heard of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_a_Computer_Scientist_Rarely_Talks_About https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_a_Computer_Scientist_Ra...
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI 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.
- Jaruzel 6y agoI 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.
- Meph504 6y agoI 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.
- schappim 6y agoI just hit the API up and it errored with http status code “777 - Act of God”.
- abiogenesis 6y agoYou are lucky, it could've been a 666.
- shp0ngle 6y agoAs 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.)
- chr15m 6y agoEnglish Bible versions in mysql, sqlite, xml, csv, json. https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases Used it to build https://wordbibleaddin.com https://wordbibleaddin.com
- vmception 6y agoAbout 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 6y agoProtip: 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.