What the links are

Scarlet Thread Map is a free map of the Bible’s cross-references, from the makers of the Christ Reels channel. No ads, no account.

What is a cross-reference?

A cross-reference points from one passage to another that sheds light on it: the same word, the same event told twice, a promise and its fulfilment, a quotation. Printed Bibles have carried them in their margins for centuries.

A link here is a reader’s judgement that two passages belong together. It is not proof that one writer had the other in mind, and a strong link is not a doctrine. Read both passages in context and weigh them yourself.

Where the links come from

All 344,799 links come from OpenBible.info, which draws mostly on the public-domain Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. Each link carries a vote count: OpenBible.info seeded the first votes from its own projects, and the counts have grown since. We rank links by those votes.

• By default we show the 154,237 links with at least 4 votes. The other 190,562 stay available and are marked as weak; 1,228 have a negative total.
• Links run one way. John 1:29 points to Isaiah 53:7 in the data, but Isaiah 53:7 doesn’t point back to John 1:29. Pages list both directions, labelled.
• We use the file OpenBible.info dated 2026-10-19, pinned by its checksum (SHA-256 5f61f4525156b7c7…), so every number on the site comes from one exact copy.

What the map’s filters show

The filter button under the map narrows the arcs down. Each choice is computed from the data, and here is exactly how. The numbers are for links with at least 4 votes.

• Reader votes: the default is at least 4. Slide left to see all 344,799 links, including those readers voted down, or right for only the strongest.
• Books: links that touch any of the groups you pick, at either end.
• OT ↔ NT: 34,018 links between an Old Testament verse and a New Testament verse, in either direction.
• Prophecy → fulfilment: 5,408 links between the Prophets (Isaiah to Malachi) and the Gospels and Acts. It picks links by book, so it is not a list of fulfilled prophecies: some of these links are about other things, and prophecies in the Law and the Psalms are left out.
• NT quotes OT: 1,284 links where the New Testament verse and the Old Testament verse share at least 4 words in a row in the BSB (at least 2 of them not common words like “the” or “said”, or 6 words of any kind). In a spot check it found 20 of 24 well-known quotations. It misses quotations the BSB words differently (the New Testament often quotes the Greek translation of the Old), and a few matches are common phrases such as “the kings of the earth”.

The Bible text

Every verse is quoted word for word from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), which is in the public domain. We use the publisher’s own plain-text edition (SHA-2562ac3af1de52d4e68…). We never type scripture by hand or generate it.

• The BSB leaves 16 verses out of its main text, for example Matthew 17:21. Their pages say so and show the BSB footnote about them.
• Verse numbers follow the KJV numbering that OpenBible.info uses (31,102 verses). Its 5 references to “3 John 1:15” point to 3 John 1:14, where the BSB and KJV print those words.
• Psalm titles (“A Psalm of David.”) are part of verse 1, as in the BSB, and are set in smaller type.

Who pays for it

Scarlet Thread Map is free and stays free, with no ads. For now the makers of Christ Reels pay the running costs, and giving opens soon. What it costs to run.

Privacy

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Credits and licences

• Cross-references: OpenBible.info, CC BY 4.0.
• Scripture: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
• Poetry lines, section headings and footnotes: the BSB as published by the Free Use Bible API.
• Typefaces: Outfit, Cormorant Garamond and Cinzel, under the SIL Open Font License.