Crazy Image of Bible Cross References

Chris Harrison created this image with Christoph Römhild. He states, “Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. He had already done considerable work visualizing the data before contacting me.”

This graph shows you how one part of the Bible is linked to another place in the Bible to find the same or similar topics and information. Cross references show how the Bible speaks for itself

So what is this really showing?

Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter.

Harrison usually leads a research team for computer human interaction and learning. Who said data can’t be beautiful?

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