Ask an AI assistant for a Bible verse and you may get one that isn't in the Bible — assistants answer from memory, and their memory of Scripture is imperfect. concord-mcp fixes that one thing: it connects Claude to Concord, a real Bible that lives on your own computer, and hands the assistant one rule — look it up, don't recall it. Every verse comes back with a reference like John 3:16 (KJV) that you can check yourself. The README walks you through setup from zero, no technical background assumed.
Highlights
- Ten things the assistant can do once connected: find any verse by its reference; find a verse by its exact wording; search by idea ("verses about anxiety", even where the word never appears); look up what the Bible says about a subject via a century-old hand-compiled study index; show the passages generations of readers have connected to a verse; show the Greek or Hebrew behind a verse, word by word; explain what an original-language word means; tell you where a place was; walk the great journeys stop by stop with sources; hand you a verse at random.
- Two ways to run: alongside a Concord already running on your network, or fully self-contained on one machine (
make get-dbextracts the Bible database and search artifacts from Concord's published image — no container runs afterward). - The honesty passthrough: place statuses and journey source attributions come straight from the data. Ask where the land of Nod was and the answer is the honest one — location genuinely unknown, no coordinates, never an invented map pin.
- A verified eval set: ten questions in
evals/, each exercising multiple tools, every expected answer verified against the data Concord ships — runnable by a human with Claude Desktop and the documented protocol.
The guarantee covers the quotes, not the commentary: the assistant's explanations are still an AI talking. That's what the references are for.
For developers
- Quickstarts for both modes, client configs, and the Inspector harness:
docs/DEVELOPERS.md - The v1 contract and the four binding ADRs:
docs/v1/SPEC.md·docs/adr/ - The eval set and manual protocol:
evals/ - The findings ledger — what the read-the-source rule caught along the way:
CHANGELOG.md