An evidence atlas of the New Testament world
Startingโฆ
Everything currently on screen, and what it is licensed under. Populated from the data, never hardcoded.
Walk the world of the New Testament in three dimensions โ from the Sea of Galilee to the roads of Rome โ and move through four centuries of it. Every marker, border and date traces to a named source, and where the evidence is thin, the atlas shows you the doubt instead of hiding it.
A 3D globe with satellite, terrain and historical bases. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, right-click + drag (or Shift + drag) to tilt and orbit the terrain, and use the top-right toolbar to tilt, rotate, zoom, toggle 3D, or press Auto to return to the canonical view. The left sidebar holds Search, the Bible reader, and the layer panel; the status bar at the bottom counts what is actually on screen and what the time filter is hiding.
A compact year control in the top bar โ the current year with โ โถ to step, ยซ ยป to jump, and a density strip showing where the dated evidence actually lies. Choose Instant (one year), Window (a span) or Play. Marks render as ghosts when the date is approximate: the shape of what is known is visible rather than a false precision. Everything โ claims, finds, coin hoards, shipwrecks, borders, peoples โ obeys the year you set.
The default layer is every place a verse names, drawn as teardrop pins whose tip stands on the location. Where scholarship disagrees โ Emmaus, Bethsaida, the Gerasenes โ every candidate is drawn, with a count badge on the contested ones; identifications sitting on the same spot are folded into one pin, because they are one place under two names. Nothing is asserted: a claim is what a source says, and the pin is where that source puts it.
One box for verses, places, people, journeys, years and questions. Type Mark 5:1 to open the text,
a year like AD 30 to travel there, or a phrase to find the cited span. Results carry their confidence
and their source; contested places advertise their candidate count before you click.
165 translations in 84 languages, with a second one in parallel. Two layouts: Reading (continuous prose, verse numbers inline โ the way the text is read) and Study (one verse per row, actions on each). Adjustable text size, a serif toggle, search within the chapter, and a research rail listing the places and people the chapter names.
Greek, right there. Press ฮฮ and the word-by-word Greek (MorphGNT / SBLGNT) appears under each verse. Press any word and a bubble gives its lemma, transliteration, morphology, lexicon gloss and Strong's number โ you never leave the sentence you were reading.
Notes under the verse. The magnifier on a verse opens 1,460 sourced notes in place, grouped by kind โ Greek, culture, history, manuscripts, archaeology, geography, person, disputed โ each with its citations. The toolbar magnifier opens every note in the chapter at once.
Cross-references are doors. 244,470 cross-references across 29,228 verses, each pressable, each leaving a โ back arrow to the verse you were reading.
Book context. The ๐ button beside the chapter controls opens a large overlay for the book: who wrote it and why that is disputed, when, where, to whom, why, how it is structured, what it argues, key passages, people and places, the earliest manuscripts with their shelfmarks, how it reached the canon, sourced facts and photographs.
32 of the great manuscripts โ P52, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Diatessaron โ on a shelf that stays visible in both tabs. The catalogue gives each one's date and how the date is fixed, its contents, its findspot, its significance and its pages, clickable to full size.
The Interlinear tab shows only what the selected manuscript actually contains: choose P52 and you get John 18:31โ33 and 37โ38 and nothing else, with the published basis for that coverage on screen. Choose an Old Testament witness and it says plainly that there is no New Testament interlinear for it. Press a Greek word to look it up; press it again to leave it highlighted.
82 congregations and church sites in an index grouped by the churches of Acts, the seven of Revelation and the wider early church. Press one for its full document: dates and how they are fixed, every scriptural and patristic reference, the story, the people, what survives on the ground, and photographs.
315 people in the database. The Connections room holds an interactive network web and hand-built family and dynasty trees โ the Herodian royal house, the Julio-Claudians, the high priests, the apostolic line โ plus the complete index, which holds every person in the database so nobody is missing from it. Real portraits where a likeness survives, later icons and scenes where it does not (labelled as such), and an honest note where no likeness exists at all.
Click anything for a card with a fixed header โ title, confidence and Open in details stay put while the body scrolls. Drag it by its top strip anywhere on the page, resize it with โ / +, and pin it in place so it stops following the marker. Press ร or Esc to close.
Every card carries more than the name:
ยท ๐ธ The nearest photographs โ up to four geolocated photographs within 25 km, with distance, year
and the direction the camera faced.
ยท ๐ What this place was โ a summary joined from the Pleiades gazetteer, with the match distance and a
warning wherever the identification is a rival reading.
ยท ๐ Named in these verses โ press a reference to open the reader at it.
ยท ๐ช Money of this place โ the currencies that circulated and the hoards found nearby.
ยท ๐บ Found near here โ catalogued archaeological finds within 25 km, with dates and citations.
ยท ๐๏ธ Look around it ยท walk through it โ 3D models and 360ยฐ photographs (below).
Where a real immersive view exists, a strip of thumbnails offers it โ for cities, ruins, buildings and objects. Two kinds, and each says which it is:
ยท 360ยฐ photographs (๐ท) are rendered by the atlas itself: drag to look, scroll or pinch to zoom,
arrow keys to turn. They are photographs of the site today.
ยท 3D models (๐ง) open the model in a first-person viewer โ W A S D or the arrow keys
to walk, the mouse to look, one finger and a pinch on a phone. Each is labelled scan, reconstruction
or model, with the author, the licence and a note on what it actually shows.
Nothing is downloaded until you press one, and closing releases the viewer completely.
Open in details takes a pin into the full record, beside the map, in the same reading order every time: what it is, why it matters, the encyclopedia record, then the modern context, the money, the finds, the photographs, the sources โ and the people last. There is a โ back arrow for the records you arrived from. The same surface holds a person's profile, a church's document, a coin's record, a shipwreck, a hoard, a climate station, a curated place and the book-context overlay.
67 layers in 11 groups, in four classes: base imagery, overlays, data, and the confidence filter. Searchable, with opacity sliders on the raster layers, legends that say what the shapes mean, and a provenance note on every one โ what it is made of, who made it, and what it cannot tell you. Warnings are shown, not buried.
7 one-click presets switch a whole argument on at once: The evidence, Kingdoms & empires, The Roman world, Land, rain & harvest, Trade & money, Sky & calendar, Clear. Under them: the claims layer, the 1,290-name biblical gazetteer, journeys, the early churches, the catalogue of inscriptions and objects, photographs; polities, world empires and ancient peoples & cultures across eight periods; the Itiner-e Roman road network (7,764 alignments), the Pleiades gazetteers and the historical maps warped from georeferenced scans.
Each place carries the currencies that circulated there โ 61 currency maps and 74 hoards โ with the coin's metal, weight, issuer and dates. Press a coin for its own record and a โWhat it was worthโ section: what a denarius or a drachma actually bought, anchored to the passages that name it. Coin images are clickable to full size.
Rainfall and temperature for 70 stations from the 1991โ2020 reanalysis, month by month, drawn as a chart with highs and lows; ancient farming districts; and a computed lunar calendar that puts Passover, Tabernacles and the sailing season on the right days for the year you have chosen. NASA satellite products โ true colour, vegetation, land cover, night lights โ can be draped by month to read the ground the past happened on. Every chart names the dataset it came from and where the sources disagree.
19,928 geolocated photographs plotted where the camera stood, each with the direction it faced โ press Look this way to stand there and see what the photographer saw. Every photograph in the app can be clicked to full size and zoomed (scroll or pinch, drag to pan, arrow keys, Esc to close), whether it is in a popup, a record, the manuscripts room or a panorama.
1,350 places (1,290 from OpenBible and 63 curated), 225 catalogued inscriptions and objects, 358 dated shipwrecks, 32 manuscripts, 82 churches, 315 people, 108 claims, 1,460 study notes. Four rules hold everywhere: no fact without a named source; uncertainty is rendered, not hidden; a claim is what a source says, not a verdict; and contested things name both sides. Where the atlas cannot know something, it says so โ a findspot is not a provenience, a market object is drawn hollow and faint, and a reconstruction is never shown as a photograph.
In the reader: โ โ to change chapter, / to search, Esc to clear. In the lightbox: โ โ between images, + โ to zoom, 0 to fit, Esc to close. Share scene copies a link that restores the exact view; Attribution lists every source and licence currently on screen; Report an error is on every record and pre-fills a report with the scene. The interface is available in English and Portuguese.