Christian Scripture
The Christian Bible: the Hebrew scriptures together with the writings of the early church.
What it is
The Christian canon joins the scriptures that Jesus and his first followers already read to a second collection written in the decades after his death. Its shape settled gradually over the first four centuries, through use and argument rather than by a single decision, and the branches of the church have never entirely agreed on it.
It holds law, chronicle, poetry, prophecy, letters and gospel narrative, set down across roughly a thousand years by many hands. Much of it was composed to be read aloud in company, and the Psalms in particular have been used as prayer, inside worship and outside it, for most of that history.
Where these words come from
How a passage reaches you
What you write is read for its sense and its feeling, then matched to a place in this canon: a book, a chapter, a verse. The words themselves are never composed for you. Our code fetches them from the edition above and shows them with that edition named, and a reference it cannot find there is dropped rather than filled in.