About Christograph
What is Christograph?
Christograph is an interactive tool for comparing the beliefs of 75 Christian denominations across 39 doctrinal topics, with an integrated Bible reader supporting 50 translations in English and French.
How does the belief comparison work?
Each denomination's position on each topic is categorized and displayed in an interactive map. You can explore individual beliefs, compare denominations side by side, and discover where traditions agree or diverge.
What does the “shared vocabulary” score actually measure?
It does not measure a translation's accuracy or its theological soundness. It measures how much of a translation's vocabulary is also used by most other translations in its own language corpus: we strip common words (the, and, of…), find the words used by more than half of the translation families in that language, and calculate the overlap. Families cast the votes, not files. The 26-translation English corpus holds seven editions of one text — the King James Version, the King James Version with Apocrypha, the American King James Version, the Updated King James Version, the Restored Name King James Version, Webster's Bible, and the Revised Literal Translation, which shares 97% of its words with the King James — and each of them used to cast a full vote, so the King James helped define the majority it was then scored against. That is why the King James Version, the American King James Version and the Updated King James Version all scored identically at 7.7/10. Counting the seven as one voice drops the King James to 7.3/10 and puts the American Standard Version (7.5/10) above it. The three still land within a thousandth of each other (0.733, 0.732, 0.732) and still round to the same 7.3/10, because they genuinely are almost the same text — what changed is that they no longer set the standard they are measured against. This does not make the English scores neutral. The English public domain is overwhelmingly Tyndale and King James descended, because that is what is out of copyright, so a high English score still leans toward that vocabulary. The lowest scores belong to the oldest texts — Wycliffe (1382) at 0.5/10 and Tyndale (1525) at 1.6/10 — whose spelling predates modern English, rather than whose meaning is unusual. The 24-translation French corpus is scored the same way against itself, with the two Martin, the two Ostervald, the two Fillion-derived and the two Septuagint texts each counting once. French and English scores are measured against different corpora and are not comparable to each other.
Why doesn't the translation map have axes any more?
Because the axes it used to have were not real. The map was presented as a Tradition × Literality grid, but the vertical position of a translation was only a layout slot: the 50 translations were packed into 10 columns of 5, and the row index does not track translation philosophy at all — the row labelled “Free” held six translations our own registry records as literal, and the row labelled “Ultra-literal” held two it records as formal-equivalent. The columns were not much better: the one labelled “Orthodox” contained no Orthodox translation. Rather than invent a taxonomy to justify the picture, we removed the labels. Each square is one translation, its position carries no ranking, and only the colour — the shared-vocabulary score — means anything.
Which translations are included?
Christograph includes 26 English translations and 24 French translations, sourced from public domain and open-license texts. The collection spans from historical translations like the King James Version (1769) to modern ones.
Which denominations are covered?
75 denominations across all major Christian traditions: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal, Restorationist, and others.
How is the data sourced?
Denomination beliefs are researched from official church documents, catechisms, and confessional statements. All data is stored as static JSON and can be reviewed in the project's open-source repository.
Can I suggest corrections?
Absolutely. Christograph aims for accuracy and welcomes feedback. Please open an issue on our GitHub repository with the correction and a source reference.