Emmaus
What this is, and where it gets everything
Emmaus is an open-source study companion for reading the Bible. It is free, it is not run by a church, and it is not trying to keep you here.
A tutor, never an oracle
Emmaus explains evidence. It does not speak for God. You will never read “God told me” or “God’s plan for you is” here, because a study tool is not in a position to say either, and pretending otherwise would be a lie told to someone who might believe it.
Every substantive claim about Scripture carries a reference you can tap and check. If a claim has no citation, that is a bug in Emmaus, not a style choice.
Four labels, so you can tell what kind of claim you are reading
- explicit
- The text says it, in so many words.
- inferred
- It follows from texts, and the texts it follows from are shown.
- disputed
- Major traditions read it differently. Emmaus lays the readings side by side with their reasons and does not pick a winner. That is deliberate, not indecision.
- speculation
- The Bible does not say. Emmaus says so.
It is built to make itself less necessary
Emmaus has succeeded when you need it less: reading, praying and asking real people your hard questions, without opening this app first. So there are no streaks, no scores, no badges, and nothing that measures your standing with God. It records what you did — read, asked, prayed — and never what it thinks that means about you.
It is a study tool. It is not a substitute for your church, your family, your doctor, or anyone else who knows you. When something is heavier than a study tool should carry, Emmaus says so and points to people — how Emmaus handles distress and crisis sets out exactly how, and lists the crisis numbers it will show you.
What leaves this app
- Your questions and the passages retrieved for them are sent to the model provider this deployment is configured for — Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini) — when its key is configured. That is what produces an answer.
- Your journal and prayer text is never used for training, by anyone, and is not sent anywhere unless you put it in a question yourself. Anthropic does not train on API traffic. Google’s free Gemini tier may use prompts to improve Google’s products; its paid tier does not. Which one this deployment uses is stated in the provider list above.
- On a deployment running Gemini’s free tier, Gemini only ever answers a normal study question (tier 0); anything more sensitive is handled by Anthropic if configured, or by a scripted fallback reply, never by free-tier Gemini. The safety check that makes that call still sends Gemini your current message alone, never your fuller conversation history.
- Answers are generated, so they can be wrong. Every substantive claim carries a citation you can open and check against the text; that is the point of the citations, not decoration.
- If no API key is configured, the tutor is unavailable and nothing leaves the app at all.
You can download everything Emmaus holds about you, or delete it, from your settings.
How the written pages are made
Story arcs, theme pages and book profiles are written text, not model output at read time. Each one is marked either "reviewed by a person" or "drafted with AI assistance; not yet reviewed", and the page tells you which before you read it. Every claim-bearing paragraph carries its verse anchors, and interpretive sentences carry an epistemic label.
Sources and attribution
Emmaus reads only public-domain and openly licensed data. Every dataset below is recorded in the repository with its URL, licence, retrieval date and checksum. Nothing under a restrictive licence is used, and no Scripture text is included that its publisher has not released.
STEP Bible
Lexicon and morphology · CC BY 4.0
Tagged Hebrew and Greek texts (TAHOT, TAGNT), the translators’ lexicons (TBESH, TBESG) and the versification table (TVTMS), created by www.STEPBible.org based on work at Tyndale House Cambridge. The CC BY-NC portion of that repository (Tyndale translation tags for the ESV) is not used here.
https://www.STEPBible.orgOpen Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project
Original-language text · CC BY 4.0 (lemma and morphology); the WLC text itself is public domain
The Westminster Leningrad Codex with lemma and morphology tagging. Emmaus stores the Hebrew exactly as published, without Unicode normalisation, so the pointing you see is the pointing that was published.
https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhbSBLGNT — The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition
Original-language text · CC BY 4.0
© 2010 Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software. The Greek New Testament Emmaus reads from and cites.
https://sblgnt.comRobinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform
Original-language text · Public domain
An alternative Greek text kept alongside the SBLGNT so that where manuscripts differ, the difference can be shown rather than decided.
https://github.com/byztxt/byzantine-majority-textBerean Standard Bible (BSB)
Scripture text · Public domain
Dedicated to the public domain by BSB Publishing, LLC. No attribution is required; it is given anyway.
https://berean.bibleWorld English Bible (WEB)
Scripture text · Public domain
The World English Bible is in the public domain. "World English Bible" is a trademark of eBible.org, used here to name the translation and for no other purpose.
https://ebible.org/find/details.php?id=engwebpKing James Version (1769 text)
Scripture text · Public domain
The standardised 1769 text, with Strong’s numbers, via eBible.org.
https://ebible.org/find/details.php?id=eng-kjv2006American Standard Version (ASV)
Scripture text · Public domain
The 1901 ASV, via eBible.org.
https://ebible.org/find/details.php?id=eng-asvOpenBible.info
Cross-references · CC BY
The cross-reference dataset behind "see also" links, and the Bible geocoding data behind place coordinates. Cross-reference votes are shown as evidence, never as a verdict.
https://www.openbible.infoNave’s Topical Bible
Topical index · CC BY 4.0 (this edition)
The topical index that helps Emmaus find where a subject is actually discussed.
https://github.com/BradyStephenson/bible-dataTheographic Bible Metadata
People, places and events · CC BY-SA 4.0
Robert Rouse and contributors. Share-alike: every row Emmaus derives from it is tagged CC-BY-SA-4.0 in the database so it can be shared under the same licence or filtered out. See data/sa/NOTICE.md in the repository.
https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadataOpenStreetMap contributors
Map tiles · ODbL 1.0 (data); tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors
The base map on the Explore map screen. Map tiles are fetched from OpenStreetMap when you open that screen; no Emmaus data is sent with the request beyond which tiles are needed.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyrightNomic — nomic-embed-text
Processor · Apache 2.0
The open-weights embedding model behind passage search. It runs in Emmaus’s own embedding service; your text is not sent to Nomic.
https://huggingface.co/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5Kokoro-82M (hexgrad)
On-device processor · Apache 2.0 (model weights); kokoro-js, the library, is MIT
The optional on-device voice for Read aloud, off by default. When you turn it on, the ONNX build of the model (onnx-community/Kokoro-82M-v1.0-ONNX, ~92 MB quantised) is downloaded once from Hugging Face and cached in your browser; after that it runs entirely inside this browser. No answer text and no audio is sent anywhere to be spoken, to hexgrad, to Hugging Face or to Emmaus. Removing it again is a button in Settings.
https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82MAnthropic (Claude)
Processor · Commercial API — see Anthropic’s terms
One of the two model providers the tutor can run on, used only when an Anthropic key is configured for this deployment. What is sent, and what is not, is set out under "What leaves this app" above.
https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-termsGoogle (Gemini)
Processor · Gemini API terms — free and paid tiers differ
The alternative model provider, used only when this deployment is configured for Gemini. On Google’s free tier, Google states that prompts and responses may be used to improve its products; the paid tier does not. A deployment that uses the free tier should say so here. Owner decision: on the free tier, Gemini answers only tier-0 study turns — a tier 1-4 turn goes to Anthropic if configured, otherwise to a scripted pastoral fallback, never to free-tier Gemini. The safety classifier that makes that tier call still sends Gemini the current message (not the fuller conversation window an Anthropic classifier gets); a deployment can turn that classifier off (EMMAUS_SAFETY_CLASSIFIER=none) at the cost of treating every uncertain turn as tier 2.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms
Licences
Emmaus’s own code is MIT. Its authored content — story arcs, theme pages, book profiles and prompts — is CC BY 4.0. Sources keep their own licences, listed above.