Bíblia com Apócrifos: a study Bible with the apocrypha (in Portuguese)
Available at: https://bibliacomapocrifos.com
Stack: TypeScript, Next.js 16, React, Tailwind, Cloudflare R2 + Workers, Vercel
Bíblia com Apócrifos is a Portuguese reading app for scripture and everything around it: the apocrypha, the Church Fathers, Josephus, ancient Near East epics, philosophy, even Darwin, all cross-referenced and actually pleasant to read. 📖
The purpose is honestly simple: there was no good place to read and compare these texts. Say you want to sit down and read the Book of Enoch and compare it against scripture. Or read Nietzsche and actually follow his critiques of Christianity. What did you get? A pile of ugly, messy PDFs. No cross-references, no search, no app, nothing that felt like reading. So I built the thing I wanted.
🤔 Why bother?
Because the reading experience everywhere else was miserable. I kept bouncing between a Bible app, a sketchy PDF of the apocrypha, and random sites for the Church Fathers, none of them talking to each other. I wanted one place where "see Genesis 1:1" actually shows me Genesis 1:1, where I can put two books side by side, and where the typography doesn't make my eyes bleed. So I built it.
📚 What's inside
A lot more than a Bible app. Right now:
- 11 Bible translations you can read side by side, from ACF and NVI to the original Hebrew (Stuttgartensia) and Greek (Textus Receptus)
- 42 apocryphal works: 1 Enoch, the Book of Giants, Jubilees, the Gospel of Thomas, 4 Esdras, and more
- 16 works from the Church Fathers: Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, and Augustine's Confessions and City of God
- 13 philosophy classics, including Nietzsche's The Antichrist, Dostoevsky, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and Dante
- 11 ancient Near East texts (Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, the Code of Hammurabi) with their biblical parallels mapped
- Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger for the historical record, plus Molina, Thomas à Kempis, and even Darwin's Origin of Species
That's 89 non-biblical works sitting alongside the full canon, all cross-referenced, with verse commentary, chapter subtitles, a biblical timeline, reading plans, comparison tables (Synoptic Gospels, Trinity attributes, a New World Translation critique), a Ctrl+K command palette, three reading themes, and full offline reading as a PWA.
🧐 A couple things I'm nerdily proud of
There's no database. The whole library (tens of thousands of JSON files) lives in Cloudflare R2 and is served through a tiny Cloudflare Worker I wrote, with its own app-key, rate limiting, and edge caching. It started life inside the repo, until ~144MB of JSON blew up my Vercel builds and forced the move out.
The cross-references are the fun part. Every "see Genesis 1:1" gets resolved to the actual verse text at render time, fanning out parallel reads and then caching hard so the page stays fast. It's a content-as-data app pretending to be a database, and I kind of love that.
😅 The real hard part
Not the content. It was SEO. Here's the thing about a site with tens of thousands of pages: Google has to actually index them, and lately it's been dragging its feet on new sites. The app sat in limbo for months, fully built and basically invisible.
And once Google did start crawling, it punished me for duplicates I didn't know I had. A canonical tag pointing at the apex instead of www, a missing trailing slash, and suddenly Google treats every variant as a separate page and throws half of them out. I watched my Synoptic Gospels page get dropped for exactly that.
So I got obsessive. Every URL now forces www and a trailing slash, every route is generated from a single programmatic sitemap, and I wrote a script (npm run seo:audit) that crawls the whole sitemap before each deploy and fails the build if any canonical is off. Nothing humbles you like losing a fight to Googlebot and having to automate your way out of it.
👤 Who's this for?
Portuguese-speaking readers who study scripture seriously: apologetics folks, students, and anyone who wants the historical and apocryphal sources most Bible apps leave out. English and Spanish versions are coming soon.
🌟 Try it
If you study scripture and want more than the canon, explore Bíblia com Apócrifos. It's free to read.
