Here is how the glossary and study Bible you're using come to be — plainly.
This Scripture glossary and study Bible are a project of Fortt Media, created and edited by Jon Fortt — a business journalist — who is solely responsible for the content. Together they offer a readable Bible with word-level study tools and a connected reference of the people, places, terms, and doctrines of Scripture.
Everything begins with the biblical text itself — offered in two public-domain translations, the Berean Standard Bible and the King James Version — read verse by verse, alongside a shelf of trusted, largely public-domain references: Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) for descriptions; the STEPBible TIPNR dataset (CC BY 4.0, Tyndale House Cambridge) for Hebrew and Greek names, their meanings, and first references; Matthew Henry's Commentary for passage-level exposition; Strong's for the original-language word tagging; and Webster's 1913 Dictionary for archaic vocabulary. No article rests on an AI's open-ended memory — each rests on those sources.
The study Bible is built around the two translations above, which a reader can switch between at will. Both are tagged word by word with Strong's numbers, and that tagging powers the study features:
Tap any word. In the default reading view, tapping a word opens a lookup that searches the glossary's people, places, and terms — aliases included, so “Cephas” finds Peter. When a word isn't in the glossary — often archaic King James vocabulary — the panel falls back to Webster's 1913 Dictionary, a public-domain dictionary bundled for exactly that purpose.
Study mode & the concordance. Switching a chapter to study mode underlines every word that carries a Strong's number; tapping one opens the Hebrew or Greek lexicon — lemma, transliteration, gloss, and usage — turning ordinary reading into original-language study. Because several English words can render a single original word, adjacent underlines quietly show where the underlying Hebrew or Greek is one word.
Major passages. Some 590 significant passages are marked in the margin with a green range bar, so the shape of a book's major moments is visible as you scroll.
Bookmarks & notes. Any verse can be bookmarked and any lookup saved as a note, gathered in a bookmark browser for return visits.
Every one of these rests on a named, public-domain or openly-licensed source — the translations, Strong's, the Hebrew and Greek lexicons, and Webster's — not on generated text.
Those references are prose; a glossary needs structure. Fortt Media built a dataset out of them — every person with their parents, spouses, siblings, and children; every place with its coordinates, original-language name, and first appearance; every group with its members; and a map linking thousands of passages to the people, places, and terms that appear in them. That relational data existed in no single source. Assembling it from the text and the references is what turned a shelf of dictionaries into a connected reference — the spine of both the glossary and the study Bible's word lookups.
The work is written the way a journalist works — it describes rather than preaches. Its wording does not assume the reader embraces any particular denomination or doctrine. Where Scripture has been faithfully read in more than one way, an entry lays out the main readings and says whose they are, instead of asserting one as the reader's own — the way the entry on Gehenna sets eternal conscious punishment, conditionalism, and the AD-70 reading side by side.
The aim is a reference a Catholic, a Protestant, an Orthodox Christian, a Jewish reader, or a curious outsider can each use without being told what to conclude — grounded in the text and in scholarship, and leaving the judgment to the reader. Holding to that discipline is one of the things the audits below are built to check.
Assembling data introduces mistakes, so Jon Fortt conceived and designed a set of deterministic audits — repeatable checks, built and run with AI's help — that both fill gaps and clean what's already there. Each targets a specific failure mode:
Coverage audit. An automated pass over all 31,102 verses pulls out every proper noun — including multi-word names like “Mount Hermon” — and flags any the glossary doesn't yet cover, so real people and places don't slip through. It yields a prioritized list of what's missing.
Genealogy audit. A book-by-book trace of every genealogy — the “begat” chains — to find the people who belong here and to repair broken family links. Each relationship is stored both ways (a father points to the child, and the child back to the father), and existing detail is never overwritten with something weaker.
Disambiguation audit. Scripture is full of shared names — two Ramahs, more than one John, more than one Mary. When passages were first linked to entries by a plain name match, the wrong twin could be chosen silently. This audit surfaces every such case with the surrounding textual evidence and a suggested fix, for editorial review and approval — so “Ramah” beside Samuel is read as Ramah in Ephraim, not a different town of the same name.
Relationship & integrity audits. Automated checks catch the quiet corruptions — a link pointing the wrong way, a gender mismatch, a one-sided family tie, a name that doesn't resolve to a real entry.
Persona audit. The work is stress-tested through the eyes of demanding readers — a textual critic, a systematic theologian, a Jewish scholar, a working pastor — each grounded in real scholarship, to catch overstated claims, bias, anachronism, or jargon before a reader sees them.
Two things happen across these passes at once: old reference works are turned into new, structured data, and that data is cleaned — over and over.
AI is used to help draft and organize this material from that sourced data — to turn a structured entry and its Scripture references into clear prose, to run the audits above, and to keep hundreds of interlinked articles consistent. AI is a drafting and checking tool here. It does not invent doctrine, it does not settle contested theological questions on its own, and it is not the final word. Where faithful readers disagree — on the nature of final judgment, say — the work lays out the options rather than choosing for the reader.
The work is edited and reviewed under Jon Fortt's oversight: batches are spot-checked before and after they publish, errors are corrected, and every reader who flags a mistake is doing the project a favor. The Bible has been read carefully for millennia; this project aims to be careful with it too.
Please say so — it's the same form the interactive glossary uses, and it goes straight to Fortt Media. Report a correction →