Introducing Pristine Grace Bible Software

The Word at Your Fingertips: A Bible Study Platform Built from Scratch

I have wanted to build something like this for a very long time.

For nearly 30 years, Pristine Grace has been a place where believers come to hear the Gospel preached, to read articles grounded in sovereign grace, and to find rest in the finished work of Christ. But one thing always nagged at me. When a preacher referenced a passage, or when an article quoted a verse, you had to leave the page to look it up. You had to open another tab, navigate to some third-party Bible site, find the verse, and then try to get back to where you were. The sermon stopped. The flow broke. The moment was lost.

I kept thinking... there has to be a better way.

So I built one. From scratch. Over 15,000 lines of hand-written code, and I am thrilled to finally share it with you.

📖 What Is It?

At its core, this is a full-featured Bible study application that lives inside a modal window accessible from anywhere on the site. Press Ctrl+B (or Cmd+B on Mac), click the search icon in the navigation bar, or simply hover over any Scripture reference on the page, and the Bible opens instantly. Right where you are. No page reload. No navigating away from the content you're reading or the sermon you're listening to.

That last point is worth emphasizing. You never leave the page. You can look up a verse while a sermon is playing and the audio keeps going. You can follow along in a different translation, check a cross-reference, read a commentary, and return to the sermon, all without a single interruption. It's the experience of sitting in a church pew with a study Bible, a concordance, and a shelf of commentaries, all condensed into a single window.

🌐 19 Bible Translations

The platform includes 19 English Bible translations spanning from the 1599 Geneva Bible to modern translations. Six public-domain translations are available to all visitors. Members have access to the full library, including copyrighted modern versions.

📜 Public Domain Translations (Available to All)

KJV (King James Version, 1769), AKJV (American King James Version, 1999), ASV (American Standard Version, 1901), Darby (Darby Translation, 1890), GNV (Geneva Bible, 1599), and YLT (Young's Literal Translation, 1898).

Switching between translations is instant. A single click from the dropdown and your passage re-renders in the new version, with your place and settings preserved.

📑 Parallel Translation Comparison

Want to see how different translations render the same passage? Enable Parallel Mode and select up to five translations to view side by side. Each version is clearly labeled, and the layout adjusts for readability. This is an invaluable tool for word studies and for getting a fuller picture of the meaning behind the original language.

🔤 Strong's Concordance Integration

When reading the King James Version, you can enable Strong's Mode to see the underlying Hebrew and Greek words linked to their Strong's Concordance entries. Click any word in the verse text to see its definition, transliteration, and original-language form. A word study panel shows every other verse where the same Greek or Hebrew word appears, giving you a powerful concordance tool without ever leaving the page.

✍️ 9 Classic Commentaries

Below every passage, a tabbed commentary panel gives you instant access to nine historic commentaries from trusted expositors. The commentary loads automatically for whatever passage you're viewing, with in-text search to find specific topics within the commentary.

The included commentaries are Gill's Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, John Gill's thorough verse-by-verse exposition from a Reformed and Baptist perspective with embedded cross-references; Calvin's Complete Commentary, John Calvin's extensive verse-by-verse work covering most of the Bible; Matthew Henry's Complete Commentary, the beloved practical commentary covering the entire Bible with over 7 million words of devotional exposition; Poole's Concise Commentary, Matthew Poole's brief but insightful annotations on every passage; Hawker's Poor Man's Commentary, Robert Hawker's warm, Christ-centered commentary written for everyday believers; the Geneva Bible Study Notes (1599), the original marginal notes from the Bible of the Puritans and the Reformers; Luther on Galatians, Martin Luther's landmark commentary and foundational text of the Reformation; Mahan's Bible Class, Henry Mahan's warm, accessible expositions from his Bible class teachings; and Fortner's Commentary, Don Fortner's pastoral commentary rooted in the doctrines of sovereign grace.

The active commentary tab is remembered between sessions. If you prefer Gill, the platform will always open Gill first, falling back to the first available commentary if Gill doesn't have coverage for the current passage.

🔗 344,800 Cross-References

Every passage includes a cross-reference panel powered by a database of over 344,000 verse-to-verse connections. Click any cross-reference to jump directly to that passage, and use the back button to retrace your steps. It's a chain-reference Bible that never runs out of margin space.

🌅 Daily Devotionals

The Bible modal includes a dedicated Devotional tab with eight daily reading sources. You'll find Spurgeon's Morning & Evening, his classic paired daily devotional with separate morning and evening readings; Spurgeon's Faith's Checkbook, brief daily meditations on God's promises; Philpot's Daily Portions, J.C. Philpot's "Ears from Harvested Sheaves" compiled by his daughters from his sermons; Philpot's Through Baca's Vale, daily readings for Zion's wayfarers from Philpot's sermons and writings; Fortner's Grace for Today, daily devotional readings from Pastor Don Fortner; and Winslow's Morning & Evening Thoughts, Octavius Winslow's paired morning and evening devotional from his published works.

The devotional uses your local date and time, so the morning reading is ready when you wake up, regardless of your time zone. Navigate between days, switch sources, and mark readings as complete. A badge on the Devotional tab reminds you when today's reading is waiting. Your preferred devotional source is saved, and the system remembers whether you last had the Devotional or Bible tab open.

🏷️ The Scripture Tagger

One of the most technically ambitious parts of this project is the Scripture Tagger, a system that automatically scans every page on the site and converts plain-text Bible references into interactive links.

When you read an article that mentions "Romans 8:28-30" or "1 Corinthians 2:14," those references become clickable. Hover over one and a tooltip shows the verse text instantly. Click it and the full Bible modal opens to that passage with all of the tools described above.

This sounds simple, but the engineering behind it was anything but. Bible references are wildly inconsistent. People write "John 3:16" but also "Jn. 3:16" and "Jn 3.16" and "John 3:16-18" and "John 3:16, 18, 20-21" and "1 Cor. 13" and "First Corinthians 13" and "Galatians 3:29-4:7." The tagger recognizes all of these forms and more. Numbered books like 1 Corinthians and 2 Timothy create ambiguity that the system resolves intelligently. False positives are eliminated through a whitelist of over 300 recognized Bible book names and abbreviations. The DOM is walked carefully, skipping script tags, form elements, code blocks, and already-tagged content. Continuation references like "John 3:16; 5:8" are split into two separate clickable links, each carrying its own data attributes for independent lookup.

I had to build the tagger entirely from scratch because nothing suitable existed. Two separate regex patterns handle numbered and non-numbered books, each supporting chapter-only references, chapter and verse, verse ranges, discontinuous verses, cross-chapter ranges, and continuation references.

Very few websites on the internet offer anything like this. Most Bible sites require you to navigate to a separate page to look up a verse. Some offer basic linking via third-party services. But a fully integrated, self-hosted Bible modal with tooltips, multiple translations, commentaries, Strong's numbers, cross-references, devotionals, and automatic page-wide reference detection, all running locally with no external dependencies... that is something you simply do not see elsewhere.

💾 It Remembers Everything

One of the design principles behind this platform is that it should feel like picking up your Bible from where you left it. Nearly every preference and state is saved. Your selected translation persists across pages and sessions. Your display preferences (verse numbers on or off, paragraph mode, Strong's mode, font size) are all remembered. The last passage you looked up is restored when you reopen the modal on any page. Your last search query and results are restored if that was your last action. The commentary panel state and your preferred commentary tab are preserved. Your Devotional vs. Bible tab selection is saved. Parallel mode settings and selected comparison versions persist. Your devotional source preference and font size are saved independently. Even your search scope (Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Pauline Epistles, and more) is remembered between searches.

All of this happens instantly on the client side with no server round-trips, so the experience is seamless.

🔍 Search the Entire Bible

The platform includes a full-text search engine across all 19 translations with three search modes: exact phrase, all words, and any word. Results are grouped by book with collapsible sections, highlighted matching terms, and surrounding context verses. You can narrow your search by scope, including Old Testament, New Testament, Pentateuch, Gospels & Acts, Paul's Epistles, Poetry & Wisdom, and more.

🎛️ Every Display Option You'd Want

You can toggle verse numbers on or off for distraction-free reading. Paragraph mode lets you view the text in paragraph format with indentation, the way it was written, rather than as individual verse lines. Paragraph breaks are derived from the KJV tradition and applied to all translations. Font sizing offers seven steps from 80% to 140%, persisted between sessions. Full dark mode support extends across every component, including the modal, tooltips, commentary, search results, and devotionals. Copy to clipboard supports multiple formats including plain text, with verse numbers, Markdown, or with commentary included. Chapter navigation buttons let you read straight through a book. And of course, the Ctrl+B keyboard shortcut (Cmd+B on Mac) opens the Bible from anywhere on the site.

📱 Mobile Optimized

On phones and tablets, the modal becomes a full-screen experience with a three-panel layout: Find, Browse, and Results. Touch targets are sized for fingers, tooltips adapt to tap-based interaction (tap once for the tooltip, tap again to open the full modal), and the entire interface scales gracefully from a phone screen to an ultrawide monitor.

🛠️ Built, Not Bought

This entire system, over 15,000 lines of hand-written code across PHP, JavaScript, SQL, and CSS, was developed from scratch specifically for Pristine Grace. It does not depend on any external Bible API, any third-party JavaScript library, or any hosted service. The verse data, the commentary text, the Strong's concordance, the cross-references, the devotionals... everything runs on our own servers. That means it's fast, it's private, and it's not going anywhere.

I built this because I believe the Scriptures deserve better tools than what's typically available on the web, and because the people who come to this site to hear the Gospel preached deserve to have the Word of God at their fingertips while they listen.

The Bible study platform is available now. Press Ctrl+B from any page to try it, or click the search icon in the top navigation bar. Registration is free and unlocks the full translation library.

Soli Deo Gloria.