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Does anyone know if there is a site that let's you search the (Christian) Bible and also provides an API to their search? Preferably free but not mandatory. Support of the NIV would also be ideal.

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7 Answers

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Logos.com (publisher of Bible software) offers a Reftagger API that provides an instant popup of a verse's text when you have the verse reference listed. It looks to be a nice alternative to just having the text listed straight away.

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Ask for one thing, get something better! Drupal module for the win! NIV support and everything. Works great! This is perfect. – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 17:40
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BibleSearch has a pretty solid API with lots of popular versions. It's also free and has loads of ongoing developer support. http://biblesearch.americanbible.org/pages/api

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For clean Bible reading and sharing comments with fellow Bible students: http://www.cloudstudybible.com/

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up vote 3 down vote

eBible.com exposes an API.

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+1 here also. This looks good and supports NIV. I'll keep this one in mind for the future as Reftagger did what I was planning on doing anyway. This might come in handy for future, more advanced projects! – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 19:43
up vote 2 down vote

I love Bible Gateway. The URLs are easily replicable, and they have a variety of translations, including the NIV.

I don't know if this qualifies as an API, per se, but it's how I do automated searches.

Example searches:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%204&version=NASB

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%201:21&version=NIV
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Thanks, warren. I also love this site for general usage but was hoping to get something where I don't have to craft URL's manually. – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 17:51
up vote 3 down vote

Bible.org has a nice API that will allow you to pull text to embed directly on your site. It is using standard web requests, so it shouldn't be anything difficult to implement. I'm not quite sure what version they are using.

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+1 Nice. Digging around I found that it uses the NET Bible which is a new translation. bible.org/article/preface-net-bible-first-edition – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 16:50
Intriguing, I'll have to check out the aspects of that translation. Thanks for digging that up squillman! – Dillie-O Jul 27 '10 at 17:27
NET bible rocks. Very precise and tons of translator notes for difficult passages. – Epaga Jul 28 '10 at 9:10
up vote 6 down vote

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are after but I found ESV's web service to look pretty good:

http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/share/services/

Hope that helps

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+1 That is near perfect! ESV is not a bad alternative, but I'm going to hold out for NIV for a day or so. If nothing pops up than I'll accept your answer. – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 15:11
After a little more research and finding a couple other API without NIV I see that the NIV is under copyright and so unless someone with a license develops this API (And I'm assuming developing such an API would break the copyright license) unfortunately it might be tough. Hopefully someone else can find something though. If I did anything like this I'd love to use the NKJV but I believe that is also copyrighted. – Deane Venske Jul 27 '10 at 15:22
Yeah, I know of the NIV copyright which does make it hard. Was hoping to find someone that has worked with Zondervan in this area to get the licensing for it... I've see it done for other open source projects, but not sure what the authors had to go through to get the license. – squillman Jul 27 '10 at 15:39

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