API.Bible

@API.Bible search for verses containing 'faith' in the King James Version and summarize the top 5 results

I found 231 verses containing 'faith' in the KJV. Here are the top 5 results: (1) Hebrews 11:1 – 'Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' (2) Romans 10:17 – 'So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.' (3) Galatians 5:22 – 'But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.' (4) Ephesians 2:8 – 'For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.' (5) James 2:17 – 'Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.' These verses emphasize faith as foundational to belief and action.

This example demonstrates the search capability paired with AI summarization. You'll need a valid API key and the correct Bible version ID (e.g., 'de4e12af7f28f599-01' for KJV). Search results vary by query and version; large result sets may require pagination or filtering to avoid rate limits.

@API.Bible list all available Bible translations and tell me which ones include the Apocrypha

I retrieved 42 supported Bible versions from API.Bible. Here are translations that include the Apocrypha: (1) New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) – includes deuterocanonical books. (2) Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE) – full Catholic canon. (3) Common English Bible with Apocrypha (CEBA) – includes additional texts. (4) New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) – Catholic translation with complete Apocrypha. Most Protestant translations (KJV, NIV, ESV) do not include these books. Let me know if you need section details for any of these versions.

This example shows the catalog retrieval tool combined with AI filtering logic. The actual list of versions depends on API.Bible's current offerings and may change over time. No write operations occur here, so this is safe for exploratory queries without side effects.

@API.Bible get all sections in the book of Psalms from the English Standard Version and count how many are labeled as prayers

I retrieved 150 sections from Psalms in the ESV (Bible ID: '06125adad2d5898a-01'). After reviewing section titles and content metadata, 57 sections are explicitly labeled or thematically identified as prayers (e.g., Psalm 17: 'A Prayer of David', Psalm 86: 'A Prayer of David'). The remaining sections include hymns, laments, and wisdom literature. This breakdown illustrates the diversity of Psalms beyond its common classification as a prayer book.

This example combines the 'Get Sections' tool with AI analysis to extract thematic patterns. You must first obtain the Bible ID and Book ID before calling this tool. Section metadata quality varies by translation; some versions provide richer annotations than others, affecting classification accuracy.

When API.Bible beats manual concordance lookup for weekly prep

A 3-person church staff preparing Sunday messages spends 2-3 hours each week cross-referencing verses across translations. API.Bible's search and version tools let them query 20+ translations in seconds instead of flipping between browser tabs. The workflow: search a keyword or phrase, pull matching verses, then use Get Bible by ID to confirm translation metadata before citing. The trade-off: if your team only uses one translation (ESV or NIV), a static reference site is faster. But if you're comparing Greek nuances or preaching to a multilingual congregation, the API key setup pays off by week two. Best for teams that cite 5+ translations per message or run midweek studies where participants bring different Bibles.

Why this MCP is the right call for prototyping devotional features

A 2-person dev team building a daily devotional app needs structured Bible content without licensing a full SDK. API.Bible's 6 tools cover the core read path: list versions, get books, retrieve sections, search verses. They can prototype a "verse of the day" feature or topical search in a weekend sprint without negotiating publisher contracts. The catch: if you're shipping a production app with offline reading or custom formatting, you'll hit rate limits and need to cache aggressively or move to a licensed dataset. This MCP shines for MVPs, internal tools, or low-traffic side projects where you need canonical text fast. Once you're serving 10k+ daily users, budget for a commercial license and treat this as the scaffolding layer.

When API.Bible works for small-scale biblical corpus analysis

A graduate student analyzing word frequency across Bible translations needs programmatic access to multiple versions without manual copy-paste. API.Bible's Search Verses and Get Sections tools let them pull every occurrence of a Greek loanword (like "agape") across 15 English translations, then export to a spreadsheet for statistical comparison. The workflow is clean for datasets under 5,000 verses—run the search, parse JSON, done. The boundary: if you're analyzing the entire corpus (31k+ verses) or need lemmatized Hebrew/Greek, the API's rate limits and lack of linguistic tagging become friction. For thesis chapters or conference papers with targeted queries (under 100 API calls), this beats scraping BibleGateway. For dissertation-scale work, you want a downloadable corpus with morphological data.