The First Hyperlinked Book: Seeing Every Cross-Reference in the Bible at Once

By Bobby Macintosh · Updated October 2026

In October 2007, a Lutheran pastor in Germany named Christoph Römhild emailed a Carnegie Mellon PhD student called Chris Harrison. Römhild had been assembling a dataset of biblical cross-references, the small marginal notes in many Bibles that point you from one verse to another. He’d already done considerable work trying to visualise it, and he wanted help.

What the two of them made has become one of the most widely shared images of the Bible ever produced. We’ve now rebuilt it here on AI Prompt Theory as something you can explore and question for yourself: The Hyperlinked Book. This article tells the story of the original, explains what our version adds, and reflects on what the picture says about Scripture.

The original: beauty ahead of function

Harrison and Römhild had 63,779 cross-references to work with, and they struggled to find a form that could hold them all without collapsing into noise. What they settled on was disarmingly simple. Lay all 1,189 chapters of the Bible along a horizontal line, left to right, Genesis to Revelation. Draw every cross-reference as a single arc joining two chapters. Colour each arc by how far it reaches.

The result is a luminous, rainbow-coloured dome. Harrison has been open that they “set our sights on something more beautiful than functional,” while still wanting a picture that “honored and revealed the complexity of the Bible at every level” (Harrison, Bible Cross-References). In 2008 it received an honourable mention in the illustration category of the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, run by the US National Science Foundation and the journal Science (Christianity Today, “Reference Rainbow,” 2008).

Since then it has turned up in lecture slides, sermon decks, textbooks and online threads, often without credit. Harrison notes on his site that the psychologist Jordan Peterson used the graphic in a lecture series discussing how the Bible could be considered “the first hyperlinked book.” That phrase gives our page its name.

What a poster can’t do

A printed image, however beautiful, can only be looked at. You can’t ask it which chapter is most connected. You can’t strip away the thousands of short arcs between neighbouring chapters to see only the links that leap across the whole Bible. And you can’t click an arc and read the two passages it joins.

So we rebuilt it as something you can interrogate. In The Hyperlinked Book you can sweep across the chapters to light up their connections, filter by how far the links reach, restrict the view to the Old Testament, the New, or the links between them, and open the verses themselves.

The design is Harrison and Römhild’s, and we want to be unambiguous about that. The arc form, the chapter axis and the colour-by-distance idea are theirs. What our version adds is motion, filtering, and the ability to read what the arcs actually connect. If you love the original, prints are available from Harrison’s site, and they’re worth owning.

What’s underneath

The connections aren’t generated by AI. They come from the cross-reference data published by OpenBible.info, which draws mainly on the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. That’s a nineteenth-century index compiled by hand, published by Samuel Bagster around 1830 from the work of earlier Bible editors, and later widely promoted by the American preacher R. A. Torrey. OpenBible describes its set as “about 340,000 cross references,” released under a Creative Commons licence.

Gathered up to chapter level, that’s 328,531 references linking 141,763 distinct pairs of chapters, and 43,491 of those pairs cross between the Old and New Testaments. Harrison and Römhild worked from about 63,000 references, so the modern set is several times larger.

Scripture text is fetched live from the Free Use Bible API, using the Berean Standard Bible and the King James Version, both in the public domain. Full passages open on Bible.com in whatever translation you prefer.

Three things you only see when it moves

The long arcs. Raise the minimum-reach filter and the dense body of the dome falls away, leaving a thin arch of links that span a thousand chapters or more: Genesis to Revelation, Exodus to Hebrews, the Psalms to the Gospels. They’re comparatively rare, which is why they tend to be drowned out on the static poster.

Hebrews 1 is a fan. Open that chapter and you see a tight spray of arcs reaching back into the Old Testament. In the space of a few verses (Hebrews 1:5–13), the writer strings together a series of Old Testament quotations, usually counted as seven, to make a single argument about who the Son is. You can see the shape of the argument before you read a word of it.

The first garden and the last city. In Genesis 2, “the tree of life was in the midst of the garden” (2:9). In Revelation 22, “on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit… The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (22:2). The tree, the river and the presence of God, lost at the beginning, are given back at the end. On the diagram it’s one of the widest arcs in the whole field.

Why this belongs on an AI blog

Because the Bible was a citation graph long before anyone had the word.

Much effort in AI today goes into retrieval: indexing documents so that a model can find the passage that bears on the one in front of it. The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge is that same idea, carried out by hand, on paper, by generations of careful readers. (I’ve written about semantic search, a modern cousin of the cross-reference, in Searching Scripture by Meaning.)

And the material they were indexing is remarkable. The books of the Bible were written over many centuries, by many authors, in three languages. The later writers constantly quote, echo and build on the earlier ones. Christians see in that unity the work of one divine Author speaking through many human voices. Whatever view a reader brings, the dome is worth looking at, and the connections are worth following.

How to use it in your own study

• Start from a passage you’re studying and follow its arcs. Read the linked verses in context, not just the snippet.
• Remember what cross-references are. They’re human judgements, made by careful readers, not inspired links. Some connections are strong; others are loose. Weigh them.
• Use it with your Bible open. The point of the picture is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.

Explore The Hyperlinked Book →

Frequently Asked Questions

Who made the original Bible cross-reference visualisation?
Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild, beginning in 2007. It received an honourable mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Where does the cross-reference data come from?
From OpenBible.info’s dataset, drawn mainly from the nineteenth-century Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

Is the data generated by AI?
No. The connections were compiled by human readers, and the tool simply draws them.

Can I use the tool for teaching?
Yes, it’s free to explore. Please credit Harrison and Römhild for the original design, and OpenBible.info for the data.

Sources and Further Reading

• Chris Harrison, “Bible Cross-References” (project page).
• Christianity Today, “Reference Rainbow” (November 20, 2008).
• OpenBible.info, “Bible Cross References” (data, CC BY).
• Free Use Bible API (Berean Standard Bible and KJV text).

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Accessed via Bible Gateway.

Keep reading on AI Prompt Theory: The Hyperlinked Book · Searching Scripture by Meaning · Tracing Biblical Motifs with AI