bible-mcp

# bible-mcp

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.

## What's in it (v0.14)

| 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 | — |
| **Easton's Bible Dictionary** (1897 3rd edition, 2,491 entries) — a full corpus document like the PD classics above: searchable (`search(version="EASTON")`), readable (`read_work("EASTON", ...)`), embedded for semantic search | Theographic's structured JSON re-derivation | Public Domain |
| **OT+NT concept graph**: 5,673 concept nodes (theological themes + lexical keywords, seeded from Easton's Bible Dictionary) and 171,000+ typed/associated edges (`broader`/`narrower`/`causes`/`part_of`/`symbol_of`/`fulfills`/`associated`) linking concepts to each other, to entities, and to verse anchors across both Testaments; ~440 typed edges hand-reviewed against cited evidence (Phase 5/6), the rest mechanical `associated` overlap counts. Live via `get_concept`/`concepts_in_passage`/`get_concept_relations`, see DESIGN.md §5 | derived from corpus + Easton's Bible Dictionary | — |

All in one SQLite file (`db/bible.db`, ~400MB) with FTS5 full-text search. Prose works are addressed as `WORK.chapter.paragraph`. See DESIGN.md for the architecture rationale.

## Tools

- `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`.
- `get_concept(name, concept_type="")` — Look up a theological concept or lexical keyword in the OT+NT concept graph (seeded from Easton's Bible Dictionary); returns its definition, verse anchors, instantiating entities, and a relation-count summary. `concept_type` optional: theme | keyword. Also accepts a Strong's number.
- `concepts_in_passage(reference)` — Theological concepts and keywords linked to a verse or chapter, e.g. `Genesis 15`. Complements `entities_in_passage`.
- `get_concept_relations(name, verb="", limit=20)` — Typed relations for a concept: `broader`/`narrower`/`causes`/`part_of`/`symbol_of`/`fulfills`/`contrasts`, hand-reviewed against cited evidence. Excludes the much larger mechanical `associated` tier by default — pass `verb="associated"` to include it.
- `read_work(work, chapter=1, start=1, end=5)` — Read a prose work by paragraph range (CONFESSIONS, IMITATION, PILGRIM, PRESENCE, JULIAN, ORTHODOXY, 1CLEMENT, BARNABAS, EASTON, 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.

## Prompts

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.

## Setup

```bash
pip install -r requirements.txt   # core: just `mcp`
pip install fastembed numpy       # optional semantic tier (semantic_search, find_similar)
python3