About this project
A map of the Bible for people teaching it and people meeting it for the first time.
What it is
Every book of the Bible arranged as a periodic table: 80 cards, 66 of them the canonical books and the rest the deuterocanonical writings. Colour marks the kind of writing. Position marks roughly where a book falls in the story — the Old Testament grows from the top-left, the New Testament fills in from the right, and Revelation is the capstone in the bottom-right corner.
Behind each card is a page giving the shape of that book: who it is traditionally credited to, when it was written, how long it is, where it sits in the wider story, and where to go next.
What it is for
Most people who want to read the Bible do not lack a copy. They lack a map — some sense of what a book is, where it fits, and why it is there at all. That is the gap this fills. It is a starting point and a signpost, and it is not a substitute for reading the book itself. If a page here sends you to the text, it has done its job.
Where the facts come from
Authors and dates follow traditional attribution. That is a deliberate choice and it deserves to be stated plainly, because it is not the only defensible one. Serious scholarship disputes the authorship or dating of a good many books, and where a question is genuinely contested the book's page says so rather than presenting one view as settled.
Chapter and verse counts follow the common English versification, which differs slightly between traditions.
How the links are chosen
Each book page carries links under two headings, and the split is deliberate. Go deeper holds resources written from within the Christian tradition — overviews, the text itself, and study material.Other resources holds reference works written from outside it, such as Wikipedia, which are valuable for historical and encyclopedic background but may carry viewpoints that do not share the faith. You should be able to tell which kind of source you are opening before you click it.
Every link was checked to make sure it resolves. Coverage is uneven by necessity: most Christian study sites stop at the Protestant canon, so the deuterocanonical books have fewer links rather than invented ones.
On the deuterocanonical books
Catholic and Orthodox Christians receive most of these books as scripture, though the two canons are not identical and a few titles sit outside both. Protestant Christians value them but do not treat them as canonical, and most Protestant Bibles omit them. That difference is old, real, and held sincerely on both sides, and this site does not take a position on it.
They are included because most of them are scripture to a large part of the Christian world, and because several of them illuminate the centuries between Malachi and Matthew. They sit in their own block below the main table — which is the one place the periodic metaphor does some real work, since that is exactly where a chemistry chart puts the lanthanides.More on the deuterocanonical books.
Printing it
There is a printable edition: the table on one page, a page explaining how to read a book page, then a full page for each of the 80 books. The book pages print without a background so they can be run on coloured stock, one shade per category, matching the key on the overview.
A note on what this is not
This site aims to sit inside the ground Christians hold in common — the faith expressed in the historic creeds — and to be usable whether you are Methodist, Baptist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran or Catholic. Where those traditions genuinely differ, it describes the difference rather than settling it. It is not a commentary, not a statement of doctrine, and not a replacement for a church.