Questions,answered plainly

I have never read the Bible. Where do I start?

Start with John. It is one of the four Gospels, the books about the life of Jesus, and it is a good first read because it opens at creation and then moves straight into who Jesus is. It is short, it tells a story, and you do not need any background to follow it.

Most people who give up started at Genesis and read straight through. That goes well until Leviticus, which is mostly law written for a world nobody introduced them to yet.

If you do want to read the whole Bible, there are two normal ways. Canonical order is the order the books are printed in. Chronological order follows when the events happened. We have a year-long plan for each, in reading plans.

Which Bible translation should I read?

Any modern one. Translations differ in how closely they stick to the original wording and how natural they sound in English. Older ones like the King James use English from the 1600s, which adds a hurdle you do not need at the start.

We carry the World English Bible, the King James Version and the American Standard Version, with the Berean Standard Bible arriving shortly.

No translation is the neutral one. Every team made choices, and those choices are often where the interesting questions are. We show you several side by side, and for any verse you can see the original Greek or Hebrew word it came from.

The Bible is huge. How do I read it without getting lost?

Read less, and slower. One verse understood well does more for you than three chapters skimmed.

You can read a single verse, or a passage, which is one complete train of thought. Either one is a full session. Start where you like and go as deep as you want.

You can see how a verse opens up on John 3:16, which is free for everyone.

I do not know the church words. Will I be lost?

No. Words like covenant, grace and atonement are explained right where they appear.

Tap any name or term in a verse and you get a plain explanation. You do not need to know the words before you start.

What is a commentary?

A commentary is a book that walks through the Bible piece by piece and explains it. What the words meant, what was happening at the time, and what the passage is doing. Some were written by one scholar, some by a team.

People have written them for centuries. They often disagree, and newer ones build on older ones. Reading two of them on the same verse is one of the fastest ways to see what is really at stake in a text.

What is the difference between the Old and New Testament?

The Old Testament is the older and much larger part. It was written mostly in Hebrew, before Jesus. The New Testament was written in Greek in the first century, about Jesus and the people who followed him.

Christians read them as one story. When a New Testament writer quotes or uses an Old Testament passage, we show you the link so you can go and read it yourself.

Do I have to be a Christian to use this?

No. Focus Bible is for anyone who wants to understand what the text actually says.

People read the Bible for all sorts of reasons: faith, history, literature, or to understand the people around them. It works for all of that.

How long does one verse take?

A few minutes, unless you want longer. Every verse opens with a short summary of what is going on. Everything below that is there if you want it and closed if you do not.

There is no required order. You can look up one verse, understand it, and get on with your day.

What do you believe the Bible is?

We believe it is the word of God. Not a collection of religious writing that happens to be old, and not a mirror for whatever we already think.

It reached us through people. Around forty writers across roughly 1,500 years, each in their own time and language, and Christians have held that God worked through them rather than around them.

That belief is the reason for the care. If this is God speaking, then getting the words right matters, the history matters, and what the original language actually said matters. It also means the authority sits in the text, not in us and not in the scholars we carry. Our job is to get you to it clearly and then get out of the way.

We hold back on some things and not on others. On a disputed passage, we will show you scholars who disagree and we will not tell you who is right. That is where we stay out of the way.

What the Bible is, we are not quiet about. We think it is worth your life.

Does the Bible contradict itself?

Some passages look like they conflict. Different accounts of the same event, different numbers, a different order. Scholars have discussed these openly for as long as commentaries have existed.

We do not settle it for you. Where a passage is disputed you see that it is disputed, who held which view, and what they based it on. Some scholars show how the accounts fit together. Others conclude the writers were doing different things. You get both, and the evidence behind each, to weigh and pray over.

What about the violence in the Old Testament?

It is there. It is also one of the most discussed problems in the history of interpretation, so you are in long company if it troubles you.

Context changes what you are looking at. These passages sit inside the story of God and his creation, and of what people did with it. Understanding that story is a large part of understanding how humanity got here, and not only for Jewish and Christian readers.

So we give you the historical setting, what the Hebrew words carry, and how interpreters from very different traditions have wrestled with it. We do not soften it and we do not hand you a tidy answer.

Why do Christians disagree so much about what the Bible says?

Two reasons, and the second is bigger than people admit.

First, interpretation involves real judgment. What a word meant at the time, what kind of writing a passage is, how much the surrounding context changes it, and how one passage should be read next to another.

Second, most Christians have never studied it. Many have not read the whole Bible, and fewer have looked at the history, the culture, or the original words. That is not a character failure. Studying properly has been slow, expensive and hard to get at.

We built Focus Bible to change that.

Is the Bible reliable?

The real question is whether the Bible we read today says what it said when it was written. On that, the evidence is strong.

The clearest case is Isaiah. Until the 1940s our oldest complete Hebrew copy was from around AD 1000. Then a scroll of Isaiah turned up in a cave by the Dead Sea, copied more than a thousand years earlier, around 125 BC. A thousand years of hand copying, and the two are substantially the same book. The differences are spelling and word order, not message.

The New Testament is the best attested text of the ancient world by a wide margin. Fragments survive from within a century of the events, and thousands of copies allow scholars to compare them against each other.

There are differences between copies, and we do not hide them. Almost all are spelling, word order, or a slip of the pen. Where a difference actually changes the sense of a verse, the commentaries here name it and argue it out.

What does the Bible say about slavery?

It addresses the practice in several places. What those passages meant in their own world, and how people later used them, are two different discussions and both are worth having.

This is exactly the passage where one modern summary is the worst thing to read. Read several interpreters who disagree, with their reasoning in front of you.

How do I read the Bible alongside science?

Our own view is that they work together. We read the Bible as the account of God and what he has done, and science as the study of what he made. That is our position, and plenty of thoughtful people hold a different one.

The real argument is narrower than it looks, and it is worth knowing where it actually sits. Most of it comes down to what kind of writing the opening chapters of Genesis are. Read as a chronological record, they raise one set of questions. Read the way other ancient writing from that part of the world worked, answering who made the world and why rather than explaining how it was assembled, they raise a different set. Christians who take both Scripture and the evidence seriously land in several places on that.

So we do here what we do everywhere else. You get the Hebrew, the genre question laid out, and interpreters across traditions arguing it with their reasons attached. We show you the options and who holds them. We do not tell you which to take.

Is doubt a failure of faith?

Scripture is full of people questioning God, and it does not treat them as failures.

Job argues with God for chapters. The Psalms ask how long God will look away. Habakkuk opens by demanding an answer. Thomas says he will not believe without evidence, and Jesus gives him the evidence.

Go and read them rather than take our word for it.

Will this tell me what to believe?

No. That is the line we hold most carefully.

We give you the passage, the original words, and what scholars have believed and debated, with names attached. Then you pray it through and consider it.

This is not us keeping an answer to ourselves. We have questions too. Some things in Scripture you have to take to God, and we would rather bring you to that point well equipped than pretend the work is already done.

What do I do with a passage that disturbs me?

Go further into it. Sometimes a passage unsettles us because something is missing: the history, the culture, what the words meant, or who was being spoken to. With that in place, some passages read very differently.

For those passages you get the setting, the original words, how scholars across traditions have read it, and how people from different backgrounds hear it, including Jewish, Muslim, atheist and new Christian perspectives.

And some passages still sit heavily after all of it. That is all right. We are not meant to reshape Scripture until it is comfortable. We come to it to be changed by God, not to remake him into a shape we like.

Who actually wrote the Bible?

Around forty writers over roughly 1,500 years, in three languages, on three continents. Some books name their author. Some do not, and the traditional attribution is something scholars have debated for a long time.

Moses and the first five books, whether one Isaiah wrote all of Isaiah, who wrote Hebrews, how the Gospels relate to each other: these are live questions with real evidence on more than one side.

Where a book's authorship is disputed, the commentaries that argue it are here, with their reasons. It is a good thing to dig into rather than a problem to be managed.

Is there evidence for Jesus outside the Bible?

Yes, though the sources are fewer and more argued over than either side of the debate usually admits. The Jewish historian Josephus refers to him twice, and the Roman historian Tacitus refers to his execution under Pilate. Those two are the solid ones.

Two others get cited and should be handled more carefully. Pliny the Younger describes Christians worshipping Christ rather than describing Jesus himself. Suetonius mentions disturbances stirred up by one Chrestus, and whether that is Christ at all is genuinely disputed, since Chrestus was a common name in Rome.

One of the two Josephus passages is also widely thought to have been embellished by later Christian copyists. None of that is hidden, and it is a better starting point than a confident line from either direction.

We would rather you saw that argument than a confident line from either direction.

What does the Bible say about hell?

Less uniformly than most people expect, and the words underneath the English are a large part of why.

In older translations like the King James, the single English word hell stands in for several different original words: Sheol in Hebrew, and Hades, Gehenna and Tartarus in Greek. They do not all mean the same thing, and most modern translations now keep them apart. Gehenna was a real valley outside Jerusalem before it was anything else.

Christians who read the same passages have reached different conclusions about duration, about what the imagery is doing, and about who is in view. Open any of those verses and you can see the original word, what it carries, and the interpreters arguing it out.

What does the Bible say about LGBTQ people and same-sex relationships?

A handful of passages address it directly. They are here, and you can search for them and read them the same way you would read anything else: the original words, the historical setting, and what the commentaries say about them.

Two words in Paul's letters carry a contested range of meaning, and that is worth looking at closely rather than taking anyone's summary for it, including ours.

This is not the only place in Scripture people find hard, and we treat it the way we treat the rest. We give you the text and the scholarship. You do the studying and the praying.

What does it mean to be saved?

It is the heart of the New Testament and it is worth understanding properly rather than absorbing by osmosis. The short version most Christians would agree on: being rescued, by God, from sin and its consequences, and brought into relationship with him through Jesus.

Underneath that there is real depth and some real disagreement. What faith is. What repentance is, meaning turning away from the wrong and back toward God. How grace, which is God giving what was never earned, relates to the things we do. What happens at the moment of belief, and what happens across a lifetime.

Start at John 3:16, which is open to everyone. From there, Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23 and Romans 10:9 are where most people are pointed next, and they are worth reading in that order.

Why are there four Gospels and not one?

Because four accounts of the same events, written for different readers, tell you more than one would. Matthew writes for a Jewish audience and keeps pointing back to the Hebrew Scriptures. Mark is short and moves fast. Luke researches and orders it for a Greek reader. John is later, more reflective, and covers different ground.

Where they overlap, the differences between them are among the most studied questions in the New Testament. Where they diverge, you learn what each writer wanted you to see.

Open any verse in one and follow the cross references to the parallel accounts in the others.

Why do most Jewish people not accept Jesus as the Messiah?

Largely because of what was expected and what did not visibly happen. Jewish expectation drew on passages describing a figure who would restore Israel, gather the exiles and bring lasting peace, and none of that arrived in the first century.

Christians read the same Scriptures and see a suffering servant first and a returning king later. That reading is not obvious from the text on its own, which is why the argument has run for two thousand years.

The passages at the center of it, especially in Isaiah and the Psalms, are here with the Hebrew, and the commentaries argue them out. Worth reading rather than being told about.

Why do Catholic Bibles have extra books?

Because Catholic and Protestant Bibles inherited different lists. The extra books, called the Apocrypha or the deuterocanonical books, were in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that the early church mostly used, but not in the Hebrew canon that Jewish authorities settled on.

The Reformers went back to the Hebrew list. The Catholic Church affirmed the longer one. Orthodox churches carry a longer list still.

We carry the Protestant canon. We also carry Haydock's Catholic Commentary, so you can read how a Catholic scholar handles the books we share.

Why does the same verse sound so different in different Bibles?

Because translating means choosing. Some teams stay close to the original words and structure. Others aim for the idea behind them in natural English.

Rather than argue for one, we show you several, plus the original Greek or Hebrew the verse came from, plus what the commentaries make of the wording. Then you can see exactly where the translations part ways and why.

What happens when I open a verse?

You get the verse, then a set of cards you can scroll through and open: the background and setting, the original words, what it connects to elsewhere, what scholars have written, and how people from different backgrounds read it.

Open the ones you want and go deeper in any of them. The fastest way to understand it is to look at one: Psalm 23:1 is open in full to everyone.

What is a study card?

A study card is one panel of study material about the verse you are reading. Context, word study, commentary, cross references and perspectives are each a card.

A free account opens every card on every verse. A membership lets you go deeper inside each card.

Which verses can I see in full without paying?

Nine verses are open completely, at full membership depth, for everyone. They are there so you can see what you would be getting before you decide anything.

• Deuteronomy 6:4
• Deuteronomy 6:5
• Psalm 23:1
• Proverbs 3:5
• Micah 6:8
• John 3:16
• Romans 8:28
• Romans 8:38
• Romans 8:39

What is a cross reference?

A cross reference is another passage connected to the one you are reading, because it is quoted there, uses the same image, or deals with the same theme.

Following them is how the Bible starts to look like one connected book instead of many separate pieces.

How is this different from Googling a verse or asking a chatbot?

A search gives you whoever ranked highest today. A general chatbot writes you a confident answer and can invent the parts it does not know, with nothing you can check.

Here, everything traces back to a named source you can open and read. When scholars disagree, you see them disagree instead of one blended answer that hides it.

Does it work offline?

Mostly, on the iPhone and Android apps, once you have downloaded what you want to read. A few things need a connection, such as creating passage highlights and generating new days of a reading plan.

The web version needs a connection.

Is there an app?

Yes. iPhone and Android, plus the web version.

Your notes, highlights and reading position follow your account across all of them.

Is my reading private?

Your notes and highlights are yours. They are not shown to other users, they are never given to a third party to train their models, and they are not used for advertising.

We do look at what people search for and struggle with, anonymously and in aggregate, because it tells us what to build next. That is about the product, never about a person.

Which commentaries do you carry?

Seventeen, in full:

• John Calvin (1554)
• Matthew Poole (1685)
• Matthew Henry (1708 to 1714)
• John Gill (1746)
• Wesley's Notes on the New Testament (1755)
• Wesley's Notes on the Old Testament (1765)
• Adam Clarke (1810)
• Barnes' Notes (1832)
• Haydock's Catholic Commentary (1859)
• Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, unabridged (1864) and standard (1871)
• Keil and Delitzsch, Old Testament (1866)
• Spurgeon's Treasury of David (1869)
• The Pulpit Commentary (1880)
• Vincent's Word Studies (1887)
• Ellicott (1897)
• Robertson's Word Pictures (1930)

All are public domain, which is why we can give you the whole text instead of extracts rather than a licensed snippet. Modern scholarship has to be licensed, and adding it is the next thing we want to do.

Does Focus Bible push one denomination?

No. We aim to be non-denominational, and we chose commentaries from traditions that argue with each other.

These are different Christian traditions, and they disagree with each other on real questions. Reformed: Calvin, Poole, Gill. Methodist: Wesley and Clarke, who argued against Calvin's position directly. Catholic: Haydock. Baptist: Spurgeon. Lutheran: Keil and Delitzsch. Anglican: Ellicott and Fausset. Presbyterian: Jamieson, Brown and Barnes.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown wrote their commentary together across that divide, two Scottish Presbyterians and an Irish Anglican.

You see them disagree. That is why we carry all of them instead of picking one.

Where does Focus Bible stand?

We follow the evidence, and we weigh it by how close it sits to the source. The earliest manuscripts, the original languages, the archaeology, and what the text itself says. The further a claim sits from that, and the later it first appears, the more carefully we want to see it argued.

That is a position about method rather than a denomination. It is also why the library spans traditions that disagree. We would rather show you the argument than settle it for you.

Am I reading the actual commentary, or an AI summary?

With a membership you read the commentator's own words, the full text, served from the source. It is not paraphrased and not rewritten.

On a free account you get a summary of the note plus the real quotations pulled from it, so you still see the scholar's actual words. A membership opens the whole thing.

Anywhere something is a summary, it is labeled as one.

Can I quote this from the pulpit?

Yes. Every quotation carries the person or work it came from, and you can open the surrounding text to check the context before you use it.

These are public domain works, so there is no permissions problem with quoting them.

Who decides which commentary appears on a verse?

Whichever of the seventeen actually wrote about it. Coverage varies. Some works are Old Testament only, some New Testament only, and some treat certain books far more closely than others.

Where a commentary has nothing on a verse, we show you nothing rather than padding it.

Are these scholars still relevant?

Yes. They wrote before the Dead Sea Scrolls and before most of the last century's archaeology and manuscript work, so on those points newer work goes further.

But look at what they were doing carefully: reading the text closely, weighing what a Greek or Hebrew word carries, and following the shape of an argument. Modern commentaries are built on top of them and still cite them. They are in print centuries later for a reason.

How do you handle Hebrew and English verse numbering?

The Hebrew Bible and English Bibles number verses differently in about three hundred places, mostly in the Psalms and a few prophets. Joel has four chapters in Hebrew and three in English.

We keep both systems and link them, so a note written against the Hebrew numbering still lands on the right verse instead of quietly disappearing.

I am a scholar or pastor. Can I contribute?

Yes, and we would like to hear from you. There is a way for theologians, scholars and pastors to contribute to Focus Bible today, and we have partnerships to announce in the next few months.

Tell us what you work on and we will take it from there. Contributors get Focus Bible free.

Do you use AI?

Yes, and it can only work from sources we have gathered and checked: the biblical text, the original languages, and the seventeen commentaries. It cannot reach past them or pull from the open internet.

We use it to organize that material, find the parts that matter for your verse, summarize long notes, build reading plans, and gather how different backgrounds read a passage. We do not use it to decide what a passage means.

Why should I trust AI with Scripture?

On its own, you should not, and that is why Focus Bible exists.

People are taking their questions about the Bible to general AI. It answers confidently, it makes things up, and it is getting better at sounding right while being wrong. On Scripture that matters.

The answer is not to avoid the technology. It is to lock it to sources you can check, and to show you the source every time.

Will AI tell me what a verse means for my life?

No. That is not a step we would want to automate, and the Holy Spirit is not something software replaces.

We put the passage, the scholarship and the original words in front of you. What it means for you is between you and God.

How do I know the AI has not invented something?

Because you can go and look. Anything drawn from a commentary is attached to the commentary it came from, and you can open the original text beside it.

That check is the whole safeguard. A claim you cannot trace is a claim you should not accept, from us or from anyone.

What if you get something wrong?

Tell us. You can send us a message from any page, and it comes straight to the team.

When the problem is in the source data we fix it at the source rather than patching over it.

Are my notes used to train AI?

No. Your notes are never given to a third party to train their models, and they are not used for advertising.

Do I need to know Greek or Hebrew?

No. Every original word is shown with how it is pronounced, what it means, and where else it appears.

If you do read Greek or Hebrew, the actual text is there rather than a simplified version.

What can I see about the original words?

For any verse: the Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek behind each English word, what that word carries, and everywhere else it is used. Aramaic is a related language to Hebrew, used in parts of Daniel and Ezra and spoken in Jesus' day.

That last part is usually the interesting one. How a word is used across the whole Bible tells you more than any single definition. You can see it on John 3:16.

What are the word studies based on?

Strong's numbering runs through everything, so every original word is keyed to a standard reference you can look up anywhere.

A lexicon is a dictionary for an ancient language. The Hebrew text is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, the standard scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible. The Greek and the extended lexical data come from STEPBible, the open scholarly dataset published by Tyndale House in Cambridge, using their amalgamated tagged Greek New Testament. Most words also carry grammatical detail.

Where they exist we carry Brown-Driver-Briggs numbers for Hebrew and Thayer's for Greek. Both are old. Thayer's dates from 1886 and later scholarship has corrected it in places, so treat it as a starting point rather than the last word.

We do not carry the modern standard lexicons, BDAG for Greek and HALOT for Hebrew. Those are licensed works, and licensing them is one of the things memberships are meant to fund. If you are doing academic work, that gap is worth knowing before you lean on a definition here.

Can I cite Focus Bible in a paper?

Cite the underlying work, not us. Every quotation names the scholar and the commentary it came from, which is what belongs in a footnote.

We do not yet give you edition and page level references, and several of these works exist in more than one edition. For formal academic work you will still want to locate the print or scanned edition to complete the citation. Making that easier is on the list.

Does it show where the manuscripts disagree?

Through the commentaries, yes. Where a passage has a real manuscript question behind it, the scholars who argue it are here and they argue it directly. Several of the seventeen work closely with manuscript evidence.

What you will not find here is a modern critical apparatus, meaning the scholarly footnotes that list every manuscript reading for a verse. These writers knew the evidence of their own day, not the twentieth century finds or the current critical editions. For most readers the commentaries are more than enough. If you need the apparatus itself, you need a tool that licenses it, and that is on our list.

Can I use this for inductive Bible study, or a structured method?

Yes. Observation, interpretation and application line up with how a verse page is built: what the text says, what it meant, then what interpreters have made of it.

Working one verse or one passage at a time is designed to slow down the observation stage, which is the one most people rush.

Can I take notes and keep them?

Yes, on any verse, and they stay yours whether or not you keep a membership.

Exporting them from inside the app is a membership feature. On a free account you can still send us a message and ask for one.

What are passage highlights?

A passage highlight is study material you generate for a passage you choose, rather than a single verse. It pulls the relevant material together across the whole passage.

Free accounts can create 2 a month. Memberships get 40, which covers a weekly session for a year with room to spare.

Do you have reading plans?

Yes. Two year-long plans through the whole Bible, one in canonical order and one in chronological order, are free. Topical plans and personalized plans come with a membership.

They are built to go somewhere rather than just cover ground. The aim is to change how you live and follow Christ, not to reach the end.

Does it keep track of what I have studied?

Yes. Verses you have read, verses you have studied, words you have studied, and the people and places you have looked into.

The point is not a score. It is being able to see where you have spent time and where you have not, so you can go back and fill the gaps.

What is the encyclopedia?

A reference of the people, places, things and events in the Bible, over 12,000 of them, connected to the verses they appear in.

A free account gets a short summary of each. A membership opens the full detail.

Can my small group use this together?

Yes, and the free account matters here. Everyone in your group can open every study card on every verse without paying, so nobody is shut out of the passage you are studying.

A membership goes deeper inside each card, so a leader who wants the full commentary text can have it while the group follows the same passage.

If some of us pay and some do not, can we still do the same study?

Yes. The difference is depth, not access. Nobody hits a wall on a verse.

The one place it differs is reading plans. The two year-long plans are free. Topical and personalized plans need a membership.

How does this help a group from mixed church backgrounds?

This is close to the reason it is built the way it is. The commentaries span Reformed, Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican and Presbyterian writers who disagree with each other.

On a verse where traditions divide, you can put the disagreement itself in front of the group instead of having to pick a side and present it as settled.

Is there group or church pricing?

No. There is one price for everyone.

For most groups you do not need more than that. One membership for whoever prepares is usually enough, because every member can already open every study card on every verse for free.

If your church wants to contribute scholarship to Focus Bible, contributors get it free. Get in touch and we will talk it through.

How does a leader actually prepare a study?

Open the passage you are teaching and work down the cards. Setting first, then the original words, then what the scholars say and where they part company. That is roughly observation, interpretation, then application, which is how most people are taught to study a passage anyway.

A membership adds material built for leading rather than just reading: discussion questions, notes on where a passage tends to land hard for someone, illustrations, and a main idea to teach from.

Take your own notes as you go. Those export, so what you prepared leaves the app with you.

Can I prepare a study and share it?

You can take notes on any verse and export them, then send them on however you like.

Sharing a whole prepared study with a group as one package is not built yet. It is on the list.

Can I print anything for members who do not use phones?

Not directly yet. There is no print layout in the app.

What works today is exporting your notes and printing those. A proper printable study sheet is something we want to build, so send us a message if it matters to your group.

Is this a study tool or a devotional one?

Study, in the service of devotion. Understanding what a passage says is usually what makes praying it possible.

There is no streak to protect and nothing that rewards volume. One verse is a complete session. So is one passage, or one day of a reading plan. However you come at it, it counts.

Will this make me read faster and understand less?

It is built to do the opposite. You work on one verse, or one passage, and everything is arranged to keep you there instead of moving you along.

If you want to spend a week on one verse, nothing here will hurry you.

How do I read slowly, not just quickly?

The oldest reading practice is simple. Read slowly until something stops you, then stay there. Read the verse again. Let one phrase come to the surface, carry it through the day, and come back to it.

Some people call this lectio divina. Whatever you call it, it is reading that expects the text to do something to you rather than the other way around.

Nothing here will hurry you past it. The cards stay closed until you open them, and one verse is a complete session.

What if I just want the text, without commentary?

Read it. Nothing opens unless you open it. The cards sit below the verse and stay shut until you want them.

There is also a reading mode, which drops the study layer entirely and gives you the text chapter by chapter, the way you would read a book.

What about seasons when reading feels dry?

We would be suspicious of any app claiming to fix that.

What we can do is help you find where to look. Search what you are actually carrying, in your own words, and you will get passages that speak to it.

Sometimes understanding the setting and the language of a passage you have read many times shows you something you had not seen. That is not the same as making it feel alive, but it is honest work and it is here.

Can this help me pray?

Indirectly, and honestly that is the better order. Understanding a passage is usually what gives you something to pray about, and the Psalms in particular are prayers already written down that you can borrow when you have no words of your own.

There is no prayer feature here. We are not going to write your prayers for you.

Does it track me or push me to come back?

No streaks, no pressure, no guilt.

It does remember where you left off, and it keeps a record of what you have read and studied. That is there so you can see where you have not spent time yet, which is genuinely useful if you are preaching or leading.

Who makes Focus Bible?

Three of us, plus volunteers who have found it useful and want to see biblical scholarship reach more people.

It started with Mitch Lusas. He had spent his career building apps, games and platforms, working with messy piles of data and turning them into something people can actually use. For as long as he can remember he has followed Christ, and he has started and led a number of ministries over the past 25 years.

The catalyst came when one of his mentors died in 2025 and he felt God calling him to study to show himself approved, in a similar way to what Paul wrote to a young church leader named Timothy (2 Timothy 2:15).

While studying how the Bible was compiled and how it spread, from the Council of Nicaea to the creation of chapter and verse numbers to how copies were made and distributed, he recognized kindred spirits. Those people loved organizing data. They brought structure to chaos so that ordinary people could reach Scripture for themselves.

Every generation has done that with the tools it had. Monks copying by hand, scholars numbering the verses, the printing press. The question was what that looks like now. Focus Bible is the answer to it: take the same gifts, and build something that makes Scripture as reachable today as those people made it in their own time.

What is your theological training?

A few seminary courses in hermeneutics, biblical interpretation and preaching, plus a lot of personal study. No degree.

Focus Bible does not rest on our authority, and it is not built to. We do not write the scholarship. We gather it from named scholars, keep their words intact, show you where they disagree, and put the original languages beside them. Every claim points at a source you can open and check yourself.

The expertise we want is from people who have it. Scholars, theologians and pastors can contribute to Focus Bible, and we would like more of them to.

What is the Beit Midrash?

A ministry we started in 2025. The name is Hebrew for house of study.

It uses chavruta, the Jewish tradition of learning in pairs. People pick topics they are interested in, then get assigned a position, often not the one they hold. The work is to understand that position well enough to argue it, gently. When a question comes up mid-debate, the pair stops and studies the passage together, then brings back what they found.

Different pairs work different topics on the same night, so everyone leaves with more than they came with.

Are you connected to a church or denomination?

No. Focus Bible is not owned by, or run on behalf of, any church, denomination or institution.

It is a project of Hidden Planet Productions, a small company in California.

How can I help?

More ways than you would think, and all of them matter.

If you are a scholar, theologian or pastor, you can contribute scholarship. That is the one that changes the product most.

If you like breaking things and saying what went wrong, there is room for that. Several people already do it and the app is better for it.

If you want other people to find this, telling them is real help. So is a membership, or gifting one to someone else. Both keep the work going.

send us a message and say which one sounds like you.

Is Focus Bible free?

Yes. All of it, always, in every translation we carry. You never need an account or a payment to read Scripture in Focus Bible.

A free account also opens every study card on every verse. A Study membership goes deeper: the full commentary text instead of a summary, every cross reference instead of the main ones, the complete word study, full detail on people and places, personalized reading plans, and 40 saved passage highlights a month instead of 2.

Why isn't all of it free?

It costs real money to run, and more to keep building. Servers and storage, and the work of connecting seventeen commentaries and the original languages to every verse in the Bible.

The scholarship we want next has to be licensed, which is a genuine cost. Memberships are what make that possible.

What does it cost?

$7.99/mo, or $79.99/yr. We do not run sales, and we do not inflate a price so we can discount it later.

Where does the money go?

Back into building this. Focus Bible is a project of Hidden Planet Productions, a small company in California. There are three of us, plus volunteers.

Our goal is to fund biblical scholarship, discipleship, and ministries like the Beit Midrash we support today.

Discipleship means learning to follow Christ and helping others do the same.

There is no merchandise store in this app and there will not be one. Our focus is the scholarship.

What if I want this but cannot afford it?

Ask us. Send us a note and we will see what we can do. We keep a small number of sponsored memberships, and each one is paid for by someone else.

You can also sponsor one, or give one to someone you know.

What happens to my notes if I stop paying?

They stay yours. Your account keeps working, your notes and highlights remain, and you keep full access to Scripture and every study card.

You lose the added depth, not your work. You can cancel any time, and there is a 14 day money back guarantee if it is not for you.