Christian Open Library
- About 4,600 works
- 7 Bibles
- Public domain
- Open code
A free collection of about 4,600 public-domain Christian books that you can search from Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. Ask a question in your own words, and your AI app finds the passages in the library and quotes them with the author and title.
How it works
- Copy the address below.
- Add it to your AI app's settings (instructions for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini).
- Sign in with your email address. You'll get a short code. No GitHub account needed.
- Ask a question.
https://mcp.christianopenlibrary.org/mcp Questions you can ask
- What did Matthew Henry say about Romans 8:28?
- Find where a Puritan writes about assurance of salvation.
- Which older writers quoted Isaiah 53?
- What did Spurgeon preach on Psalm 23?
- What does the Westminster Confession say about the Sabbath?
It searches by meaning as well as by exact words, so you can describe a passage you only half remember. It also has seven Bible translations, Bible dictionaries, and Greek and Hebrew study helps.
What's in the library
- Theology and devotion: the Church Fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans, Edwards, and the historic creeds and confessions.
- Commentaries: Calvin, Matthew Henry, Gill, Poole, Keil and Delitzsch, the Expositor's Greek Testament, and Greek and Hebrew lexicons.
- Sermons: Spurgeon, Whitefield, M'Cheyne, Chalmers, and Simeon's 2,500 sermon outlines.
- Journals: the Princeton Review (1831–1929), with Charles Hodge, the Alexanders, Warfield and Machen.
- Poetry, fiction and philosophy: Herbert, Milton, Donne, George MacDonald, Chesterton, Plato, Aristotle, Kant and others.
- Reference: seven Bibles, classic Bible dictionaries, and The Fundamentals.
Only public-domain and openly licensed works are included, so there are no modern books. You can also download the books as plain text files.
Checking the answers
Your AI app writes the answer, and it can summarize badly or quote from memory. So the library gives every passage with its source, and says so when it has nothing. Before you print or preach a quotation, check it. You can also see how well it finds things.
Who runs it
I'm Matt Miller, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (First Presbyterian Church, Louisville, Mississippi). The library is my personal project. It is not a ministry of my church, my presbytery or the PCA, and none of them directs or endorses it. It has no ads and no trackers, and nothing is sold.
Write to me at hello@christianopenlibrary.org if it missed a book, quoted something wrongly, or has a book that shouldn't be there.
Supporting the library
The library is free. It costs a little each month to run, and if it's useful to you, you can give through GitHub Sponsors, monthly or once. Gifts go to me personally to support this work and are not tax-deductible.
Credits
Many texts come from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin University, which asks that its files not be sold. This library is free and sells nothing. Others come from the Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP and ECCO-TCP), the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. Every book's file names the page it came from.
The Greek and Latin texts of the Church Fathers and Philo, and Yonge's English translation of Philo, come from the Open Greek and Latin Project at the University of Leipzig, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. They were converted from TEI XML to Markdown, and the library's copies are shared under the same license.