Biblical literacy is the difference between knowing that a story is in the Bible and knowing where it sits: who else was alive, what empire was pressing on the border, how many years separate it from the story before it. Most readers never get that footing, and it is not their fault. The tools that would give it to them are either locked behind scholarship they cannot read or flattened into charts that hide every place the experts disagree. The projects on this page are my attempt at better instruments.
The Denomination Alignment Assessment
Twenty questions about authority, grace, sacrament, and church government, scored against twenty-five Christian traditions at once. It reports where your answers land, which specific bodies sit closest, and the sharpest point where you and your leading tradition part company.
It takes about six minutes. Everything is scored in your own browser, so nothing you answer is sent anywhere or stored.
The interactive Bible map and database
The larger project is a sourced, cross-linked database of the biblical text presented four ways: as a map, as a timeline, as a directory of people, and as a directory of events. It will live on its own site rather than here, built as an application over a structured data repository, working from the Protestant sixty-six book canon and showing competing chronologies side by side instead of choosing one quietly.
The order of work is deliberate. Build the data first and the site second. In this field the projects that last are the ones that give their data away: the best geographic resource in the field earns roughly eight hundred thousand visits a month on exactly that model, while prettier projects that keep their data closed sit at a fraction of it. So the dataset will be open, licensed freely, and served through a permanent static interface that anyone can build against.
Why chronology is the open problem
Maps and genealogies have already been done well, several times over, on the same shared open dataset. Chronology has not. No one has published a sourced, confidence-scored, machine-readable biblical chronology that treats scholarly disagreement as data rather than as something to resolve before publishing. The largest open people dataset in the field carries a birth year for seventy-five of its three thousand entries. The page currently ranking first for “bible timeline” is a static table with no sourcing on any single entry.
That gap is the reason this project exists. Where four respected chronologies place a king’s reign in four different decades, the right answer is to draw all four and let the reader see the spread, not to pick one and present it as settled.
Where the build stands today
More of it is working than not. The pieces currently built and running:
- An identifier crosswalk linking the field’s major datasets: 3,244 people and 1,364 places.
- An interactive map covering 1,342 places, each with its own page.
- A chronology of the divided monarchy built from 858 individually sourced claims across 39 kings.
- 104 complete reigns drawn across four competing scholarly chronologies, spanning 932 to 586 BC, with the timeline rendering agreement as a solid bar and disagreement as a visible fray.
- A static data interface, so the underlying material is usable by anyone rather than readable only on our own pages.
Every claim in the chronology carries a verification tier recording whether someone actually opened the source it cites, and only claims verified against a readable source are allowed to publish. That gate is enforced by the pipeline rather than trusted from a self-report. Under it, 95.8 percent of the claims cite a source that can be opened, and 80.5 percent cite the primary source itself.
What has to happen before any of it goes public
A verification rate measures process, not accuracy. It counts how many claims cite something a reader could open; it says nothing about whether the claim reports that source correctly. Only a person reading both can answer that, so the next step is a hand audit of sixty-two claims, drawn to be representative and seeded with two contradictions the corpus is already known to contain. If a claim-by-claim read misses errors we planted, the method is too shallow to trust on the remaining eight hundred.
Alongside that sits a review queue of eleven findings the pipeline surfaced in its own work, including a date filed under the wrong scholar’s name and several co-regencies recorded as sole reigns. None were corrected automatically, on purpose. A contradiction between two sourced claims is information worth keeping, and deciding which of two rows is wrong is an editorial judgment that propagates if it is made carelessly.
Nine closed books stand between the current corpus and full sourcing. When the audit is worked and those sources are read, the site gets a name, a domain, and a publication date. I will post it here first.
Status as of September 2026. This page is updated as the work moves.