Old Testament and New Testament

In the canon this site uses, the Old Testament contains 39 books written over roughly a thousand years, largely in Hebrew with some Aramaic. It is substantially the same collection as the Hebrew Bible, arranged in a different order.

It contains law, national history, poetry, wisdom writing and prophecy. Genesis to Deuteronomy are the law; Joshua to Esther are largely narrative; Job to Song of Solomon are poetry and wisdom; Isaiah to Malachi are the prophets.

The New Testament contains 27 books written in Greek within roughly a century, and is much shorter.

Four Gospels give accounts of Jesus; Acts describes the spread of the early movement; twenty-one letters address particular communities and individuals; Revelation is a symbolic vision.

How the two testaments relate is one of the oldest questions in Christian thought, and traditions answer it differently — on how the law applies, on how prophecy should be read, and on the relationship between Israel and the church.

This site does not adjudicate any of that. What is uncontroversial is the sheer density of connection: the New Testament writers quote the Old constantly, and where a passage is a direct quotation, this site records it as a related passage.

Different Christian traditions recognise different numbers of books. Roman Catholic Bibles include seven books, and additional material in Esther and Daniel, that Protestant Bibles place in an appendix or omit. Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox canons differ again, and include books not found in either.

This site uses the 66-book Protestant canon, because that is the canon of the public-domain datasets it stores. That is a practical constraint, not a judgement about which canon is correct, and it is stated openly on the methodology page.