The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Bible MCP listing page.
An MCP server for Christian scholarship and research. Non-commercial, aiming to become a public resource. See corpus-survey.md for the full source/license landscape and ROADMAP.md for direction.
| Data | Source | License |
|---|---|---|
| Berean Standard Bible (66 books) | berean.bible | Public Domain |
| World English Bible, Ecumenical (83 books incl. Apocrypha) | ebible.org | Public Domain |
| Septuagint (Brenton translation, 1851) — OT + Apocrypha, incl. Susanna/Bel and the Dragon/Epistle of Jeremiah as separate books; Psalms remapped to standard English/KJV numbering (LXX's own numbering diverges throughout most of the Psalter — verified verse-by-verse against WEB); Jeremiah, Daniel-Greek, Exodus, Job, Esther-Greek, and Baruch retain Brenton's native LXX chapter/verse structure, which differs from BSB/WEB in these books (reordering and/or length, not just numbering) | ebible.org | Public Domain |
Septuagint, Greek text (Swete edition, Cambridge 1887–1894) — Genesis through Malachi plus Apocrypha, Theodotion Daniel/Susanna/Bel; same Psalms remap and native-structure caveats as the English Brenton text above. Word-level (surface form only, no lemma/Strong's/morphology), powers get_interlinear alongside the Hebrew/Aramaic OT and Greek NT | Open Greek and Latin Project / First1KGreek, via github.com/nathans/lxx-swete | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| 613,690 original-language words: Greek NT + Hebrew/Aramaic OT with lemmas, Strong's, morphology, glosses, semantic domains | MACULA (Clear-Bible/Biblica) | CC BY 4.0 |
Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906, 9,290 entries) + Strong's Hebrew Dictionary (1890, revised, 8,674 entries) — full scholarly entries (etymology, sense divisions, verse citations) keyed by Strong's number, including BDB's own lettered homographs (e.g. H2617a "lovingkindness" vs H2617b "reproach" — genuinely different words, same spelling); surfaces in word_study alongside the existing short gloss | OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon | CC BY 4.0 (markup; underlying BDB/Strong's text is Public Domain) |
| Abbott-Smith's Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922, 517 entries) — same treatment for Greek NT words | First1KGreek / Open Greek and Latin Project, via github.com/biblicalhumanities/Abbott-Smith | Public Domain |
| ~345,000 ranked cross-references | openbible.info | CC BY |
| ~4,800 people/places/events/groups + 53,000 verse links | Theographic Bible Metadata | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Six PD classics: Augustine's Confessions, Imitation of Christ, Pilgrim's Progress, Practice of the Presence of God, Julian's Revelations, Chesterton's Orthodoxy | Project Gutenberg | Public Domain |
| The Apostolic Fathers, ten works: 1 & 2 Clement, Epistle of Barnabas, Polycarp to the Philippians, Martyrdom of Polycarp, Epistles of Ignatius (shorter recension), Martyrdom of Ignatius, Epistle to Diognetus, Pastor of Hermas, Fragments of Papias | ANF (Roberts-Donaldson-Crombie), Project Gutenberg #77576 | Public Domain |
Irenaeus: Against Heresies, Books I–V + Fragments — 806 sections addressed as IREN-AH<book>.<chapter>.<section> so standard citations (AH 3.3.4) resolve directly; 1,598 tier-1 scripture citations | ANF vol. I (Roberts-Rambaut), Wikisource transcription | Public Domain |
| Justin Martyr: First Apology, Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho, Martyrdom of Justin — 423 sections, ~408 tier-1 citations | ANF vol. I, Wikisource transcription | Public Domain |
| Tier-1 citation graph: scripture citations extracted from the translators' own footnotes across the patristic shelf (see DESIGN.md §4) | — | — |
| Versemap: 988 empirically derived MT/NA ↔ English verse alignments across 31 books (Joel 2–4, Malachi 3–4, Hosea, Isaiah 64, Kings/Chronicles/Nehemiah seams, 3 John, Acts 19, Rev 12…), gloss-validated; plus the Psalms superscription offsets | derived from corpus | — |
Research outputs layer (layer='output'): Layer 0 corpus surveys + Layer 2 research briefs for potter-and-clay, living water, wilderness — searchable, embedded, with draws_on links back to their grounding refs | generated in-project | — |
| ~112,400 embeddings (verse/window/paragraph) for semantic + hybrid search across every layer | bge-small-en-v1.5, generated locally | — |
All in one SQLite file (db/bible.db, ~370MB) with FTS5 full-text search. Prose works are addressed as WORK.chapter.paragraph. See DESIGN.md for the architecture rationale.
get_passage(reference, version="BSB") — Bible text for a reference, e.g. John 3:16, John 3:16-18, Genesis 1. Versions: BSB, WEB (Apocrypha requires version="WEB").search(query, version="BSB", book="", limit=20) — Full-text search, stemmed and ranked (BM25). Supports quoted phrases and AND/OR/NOT, e.g. faith AND works NOT law. version also takes any prose work id. Note: stemming conflates related surface forms (e.g. "desert" also matches "deserted") — quote exact phrases or add AND-terms to disambiguate.semantic_search(query, top_k=12, kind="", hybrid=True) — Meaning-based search across the whole corpus (scripture + prose), hybrid-fused with keyword search (RRF) by default. Finds passages on a theme even with no shared words, e.g. "divine self-emptying". kind optional: verse | window | paragraph.find_similar(reference, top_k=10) — Nearest passages by embedding to a given verse or prose paragraph, across scripture, Apocrypha, and the classics. Powers parallel-finding across corpus layers.word_study(query, language="", limit=15) — Original-language word study by Strong's number (zero-padding optional), lemma (pointed or unpointed), Hebrew/Aramaic transliteration (e.g. miqweh, macrons optional), or English gloss. Returns occurrence counts, gloss range, book distribution, a full scholarly lexicon entry when available (BDB/Strong's for Hebrew, Abbott-Smith for Greek — richer than the gloss, truncated to ~700 chars), and sample verses. Lettered homograph variants (e.g. H4723 vs H4723a — same written form, different word) are surfaced together. language optional: grc | hbo | arc.get_interlinear(reference) — Word-by-word original language for a verse or short range: surface form, lemma, Strong's, gloss, morphology (Hebrew/Aramaic OT, Greek NT). Versemap-corrected across all books, not just Psalms. For OT verses also shows Septuagint Greek surface text where available (no lemma/Strong's/morphology in that source).get_cross_references(reference, limit=20) — Cross-references for a verse (OpenBible.info, ranked by community votes), with the target text included.get_citations(reference, limit=20) — Where a verse is cited by name in the patristic corpus, extracted from the translators' own footnotes (tier 1). Complements get_cross_references (scripture→scripture); this is patristic text→scripture. Coverage is sparse by design — an empty result doesn't mean uncited; full-text search within the patristic works is the thorough probe.get_entity(name, entity_type="") — Look up a biblical person, place, event, or people group by name (Theographic knowledge graph); returns details and where they appear. entity_type optional: person | place | event | people_group.entities_in_passage(reference) — People, places, and events linked to a verse or chapter, e.g. Genesis 14.read_work(work, chapter=1, start=1, end=5) — Read a prose work by paragraph range (CONFESSIONS, IMITATION, PILGRIM, PRESENCE, JULIAN, ORTHODOXY, 1CLEMENT, BARNABAS, and others — see corpus_info() for the full list). Use search(version=<WORK>) to find passages first.compare_versions(reference) — A verse or short range in BSB and WEB, side by side.corpus_info() — What's in the corpus: documents, layers, licenses, and counts.The server also exposes the synthesis pipeline as MCP prompts, generated from .claude/skills/ (the source of truth): corpus_survey(theme) — Layer 0 raw reading discipline; corpus_composer(theme) — Layer 2 research-brief composition. Any MCP client that installs bible-mcp gets the discipline bundled with the data.
The first semantic query downloads the embedding model (~65MB, one time). Without fastembed/numpy installed, all non-semantic tools work normally. See DESIGN.md for architecture decisions (model choice, chunking, hybrid retrieval).
Claude Desktop / Cowork — add to MCP config:
This is a non-commercial public resource. Licensing is layered — sources keep
their own licenses (all PD / CC BY / CC BY-SA); the code is PolyForm Noncommercial
1.0.0; the compilation and derived data (versemap, citation graph, embeddings,
outputs layer) are CC BY-NC 4.0. Full details: LICENSE.md, attributions in
NOTICE.md.
Three ways to use it:
https://bible-mcp-server.fly.dev/mcpdb/bible.db from the latest GitHub
Release (or rebuild from data/sources/), add the config above.Dockerfile ships the Streamable-HTTP server; see DEPLOY.md.Gen.1.1) everywhere; every table keys on them.versemap (all books) + psalm_offsets (superscriptions) align MACULA's MT/NA numbering to English. Both derived empirically from the corpus's own two witnesses and validated by gloss-text overlap; the table schema is TVTMS-compatible so the STEPBible data can extend it to other traditions (LXX, Vulgate) later.layer='output'), and can never be confused with primary sources; draws_on links tie each artifact to its grounding refs.