Where We've Been and Where We're Going


A spiral of stained glass.

The Big Idea: Hundreds of millions of people read the Bible online, looking for truth, meaning, and help. We are working to make the world's most truthful, meaningful, helpful Bible Study site.

Our project team is building a site that helps you go to the Lord's Word in a comfortable language, and - while you're there - get insights into its real inner meaning. Then, you can get ideas about how to use those insights to live a better life.

Here are 7 of the key pieces:

1. A nice, clean, friendly user interface, in 26 languages so far.

2. The Word, in 80+ translations, in 40+ languages so far. You can compare translations side by side, lookup the Hebrew and Greek text, and see related passages, articles, stories, and videos.

3. Swedenborg's theological works, including his masterful Bible exegesis (now up to 520 translations in 26 languages, plus 56 original texts in Latin)

4. Explanations. We offer 14,000+ explanations of Bible chapters, stories, words, and spiritual concepts - with something for everyone!

5. The New Christian Chatbot. We harness the power of ChatGPT, and join it to the content of our big database of Bible texts, Swedenborg's theological works, and related articles -- and we bring you a chatbot that gives you good answers to tough questions, and a list of linked sources. We just launched the third-generation chatbot; it's getting really good!

6. The Swedenborg Reader app. People want to be able to read and search on their phones. So... we made an app for that, for Android and iOS. And It's really good, and it keeps getting better. Fast.

7. A unified clearinghouse/toolkit. We have brought together many of the pieces of the eco-system of New Christian thought -- the texts, media, research tools, classes, church branches and congregations, publishers, writers, translators, artists, musicians, and more. It's a place where people from all over can learn, and contribute their own talents, to make a vibrant hub.

Is this working? Yes! We welcomed more than 2 million visitors in the past year from all over the world. More and more, we're seeing people get engaged. They tell us how this project has helped them. They ask good questions. They're volunteering to help, too, and it's really heartwarming to see the love and talent and insight that people bring to the table.

We're happy with the results we're seeing, AND we still have many things that we need to do.

Here's what we're hoping to do next:

- We want to make the meanings of Bible symbolism clearer. The Bible was written using correspondences -- where literal stories contain deeper spiritual meanings. We can readily see this in many parables, but in other places, it's harder to discern. We just finished another phase of this work, taking all the words for people, places, and tribes in the Word, and finding the matching words in each language, highlighting them in the text, and explaining their symbolic meanings. We've found that AI is really good at matching conceptually, so we can readily find the text for, say, Abraham, in all the languages we support. If you ripple that across thousands of words, in thousands of verses, in scores of translations, it's VERY useful.

- We are preparing to make new translations of the Bible - modern but accurate ones - in all the major languages. In them, we will try our best to preserve the correspondences that are in the text -- so that readers can really connect with the internal sense of God's Word. The Kempton Translation and the Pentateuch are the two New Christian translations that we have in our current collection, and they will serve as models for ones in other languages.

- We're going to keep working to create good, well-researched, approachable chapter summaries for every Bible chapter. We're about 70% of the way towards this goal now, and it's coming along nicely. The commentaries on the Four Gospels by Ray and Star Silverman have just been finished as of this writing, in December 2024; be sure to check them out.

- We have exciting translation projects going in Japanese, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Czech, and many other languages! We work closely with the translators to get the texts clean and cross-linked, and get them online.

- We have cleaned the scanned text of The Swedenborg Concordance -- a massive 6-volume reference work. It has been a tough climb, but it's been inspiring, too. We've had a team of 20 volunteer editors who pitched in, ploughing through the task of correcting many thousands of errors a very messy text. We started the main wave of crowd-sourced editing in February 2024, and finished it in June. It's December 2024 at this writing, and we've closed out more than 200 issues that have come up as we've prepare to parse the data into our main database. We're almost ready. Will we make it by year end? Maybe. It'll be close.

- We have been helping Novi Jerusalem - Balkans, a promising missionary, translation, and publishing effort based in Montenegro, and extending to Macedonia, Albania, and Croatia. We've provided starter texts and scaffolding, and publishing a whole series of translations that they've been producing. There's a real thirst for true Christian religion in that part of Europe, and we're excited to be helping to satisfy it.

- There's much more, too. We're working hard on many fronts to help people encounter and engage with the true ideas and good loves of the New Christianity.

We have a small team of contract software developers who a lot of the core work, and volunteers who help with writing, editing, coding, audio content, video content, art selection, text markup and importing, scanning -- many things! We've also had great help from student workers; it's been a real team effort.

We are very grateful to the many generous donors who have financially supported the project. With no endowment, it's been... interesting... at times, but it's working, and people have been impressed with what we've been able to accomplish so far.

If you like what we've done, and where we're headed, please consider making a donation.

Give to the New Christian Bible Study Project