I built John 1:1, a minimal Bible app for iPhone, to explore a new form of reading. The Bible is a particularly rich place to begin. It has been central to successive changes in how people read: early Christians’ adoption of the codex, Gutenberg’s Bible in Mainz in 1454–55, and Robert Estienne’s modern New Testament verse numbering in 1551. It remains widely read, with public-domain translations in many languages. And centuries of readers have traced its quotations, echoes, shared language, people, places, and themes. Few texts come with such a dense pre-existing network of relationships.
John 1:1 brings that network onto the phone through two directions of reading. Swipe up to read linearly: Genesis 1:1, then Genesis 1:2. Swipe sideways to read laterally: follow a connection to a passage elsewhere in Scripture. From Genesis 1:2, where the earth is “formless and void,” a swipe left brings you to Jeremiah 4:23: “I looked at the earth, and it was formless and void.” That movement crosses 19,049 verses—about 61% of the Bible. The app makes an echo immediately visible that might be easy to miss when reading straight through.
The current app helps readers examine those connections as well as follow them. It previews connected passages earlier and later in the Bible, brings two passages together for comparison, highlights shared wording where it appears in the selected translation, and shows the recorded basis for the relationship. Readers can open either passage in context and return to the comparison, or follow the connected verse and later return to their previous reading point. A reading path can be saved, revisited, and shared; switching translations preserves the path.
John 1:1 now includes ten translations in seven languages, including the Chinese Union Version in Traditional Chinese. Its common reference system contains 31,102 canonical verses, linked by 292,374 ranked, directed connections. Those are the connections bundled in the app, not the larger pool of more than half a million source cross-references from which the ranking draws. Individual translations retain their textual differences, including joined or absent verses.
The central design problem is still how to score, at build time, “a human will see why these two passages are related.” The current approach combines traditional cross-references with textual similarity, shared people and places, and topical indexes. Ranking gives weight to evidence and corroboration, rewards distinctive shared wording, and discounts opaque topical matches and nearby links that reveal little. The resulting graph is stored on the device; no AI runs while someone is reading. A connection is an invitation to compare the passages and judge the relationship. I’m interested in better ways to measure how readily a reader can recognize it.
John 1:1 is free, with no ads, accounts, or in-app purchases, and there are no plans to monetize it. The text and connections work fully offline. The app collects anonymous usage counts, as described in its privacy policy. The larger experiment is in lateral reading: navigating by a text’s relationships as well as its sequence. The same approach could apply to law, scholarship, and other fields with addressable passages and meaningful links between them—where close reading benefits from seeing how one passage speaks to another.