Bible: XML and JSON

"And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." — Matthew 24:14 (KJV)

Clean, per-verse structured JSON and XML — no HTML, no markup noise, no scraping artifacts. The same canonical book abbreviations are used across every language and version, so verses align out of the box for embeddings, RAG pipelines, fine-tuning, and cross-lingual alignment tasks. MIT-licensed code with permissively-sourced text, ready to feed straight into a dataset or a context window.

Do you want to create a Bible based app? What about an API for Bible verses search? Now you can do this, using sources in your very own language! The main objective of this project is to allow people to create Bible related apps using XML and JSON. Do you like this idea? Help us to go even further. Support this project! :)

The source files were generated using a Python based crawler. Therefore, these files may contain minor issues related to encoding and syntax.

Each entry's files are json/<code>.json and xml/<code>.xml (e.g. json/pt_nvi.json, xml/pt_nvi.xml). json/index.json lists this same catalog in machine-readable form.

• Russian (ru_synod): the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel are missing. The upstream data source does not publish standalone texts for these two books in this particular translation; both are traditionally presented within an expanded Greek text (interleaved with deuterocanonical additions) rather than as independently addressable books, and that alternate text does not fit this project's per-book chapter/verse structure. This is the only Russian-language translation available from the source, so no substitute could be used. See json/ru_synod.disclaimer.txt / xml/ru_synod.disclaimer.txt for details.
• English, Basic English (en_bbe) and French, Le Bible de l'Épée (fr_apee) are kept as previously published, unchanged in this update — the source used to refresh the other versions no longer offers these two translations.
• Three English editions available from the source were deliberately left out because the source's own data for them is broken or incompatible with this project's per-verse structure: American Standard Version Byzantine Text with Apocrypha (only one book has working chapter pages, the rest 404), Brenton English Septuagint, Updated (missing the Book of Nehemiah, due to a different Ezra-Nehemiah split in the Septuagint), and The Message (a loose paraphrase whose page markup omits per-verse boundaries for ~50 chapters scattered across the Bible, so individual verses can't be extracted there).
• A few versions were refreshed from their closest currently available equivalent, since the previous edition is no longer published by the source: Arabic (ar_svd → ar_kehm), Chinese Union Version (zh_cuv → zh_cunpss-shen, New Punctuation, Shen Edition), Spanish (es_rvr → es_rvr1960), German (de_schlachter → de_sch1951), Korean (ko_ko → ko_krv), Esperanto (eo_esperanto → eo_esp), Finnish (fi_finnish + fi_pr → a single fi_fb38, since both old codes referred to the same edition), Romanian (ro_cornilescu → ro_vdc), Russian (ru_synodal → ru_synod), Vietnamese (vi_vietnamese → vi_vie), and Modern Greek (el_greek → el_fpb, chosen because it is the only current Greek edition that includes the Book of Esther as a standalone book).
• Two languages available from the source were evaluated for this update but left out because every candidate edition has a substantial part of the Old Testament missing, with no complete alternative available: Dutch (gbv no longer resolves on the source; nld1939 is missing the entire Books of Esther and Daniel) and Indonesian (tsi is missing 18 books, ags is missing 39 books — both editions have large gaps scattered across the Old Testament, not a single fixable book).

The XML files are encoded using UTF-8 and built in the following structure:

<bible>
  <b id="abbrev" n="Book Name">
    <c n="1">
      <v n="1">Verse text</v>
    </c>
  </b>
</bible>

The JSON files are also encoded using UTF-8 and built in the following structure:

[
	{
	"abbrev": "abbrev",
	"name": "Book Name",
	"chapters":
		[
			["Verse 1", "Verse 2", "Verse 3", "..."],
			["Verse 1", "Verse 2", "Verse 3", "..."],
			["Verse 1", "Verse 2", "Verse 3", "..."]
		]
	}
]

You can get the number of the chapter and verse using the array index.

This project's code and data are distributed under the MIT License. All the Bible versions are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved to the owners.

You can review the code, enhance the structures or work on new versions. Every help is welcome! :)

Yes, you can! You can give a volunteer donation by PayPal.