Who is doing this, and the principles it is done on.
My name is Jon. I hold a ministerial diploma, and behind that are about twenty years of study and of personal ministry — but no formal ministry position, no pulpit and no institution standing behind me. Jesus went after the lost sheep one at a time Luke 15:4 and told those who followed Him to make disciples Matthew 28:19. That has been my aim too, and this site is part of it.
I am saying that plainly so you know what you are reading and can weigh it accordingly.
And I am a deeply flawed human being, like anybody else. Hopefully this site shows that God can use deeply flawed people to help others.
This is the principle everything else here rests on. Where a passage is hard, the answer is looked for in scripture itself — in how the same words are used elsewhere, in what the passage is quoting, in what is said about the same subject somewhere else — rather than in a system brought in from outside.
So what you find in these notes is not a collection of opinions I happen to hold. Each one is meant to be traceable: here is the word, here is where else it is used, here is the passage behind it, and here is why that leads where it leads. That is also why the notes are colour-coded, and why the ones that go beyond reporting are marked as interpretation and kept in their own colour.
If you see a hole in something here that scripture does not support, please tell me. Not a difference of taste — a place where the text will not carry the weight I have put on it. Write to jon.pjcomputing@gmail.com. I would rather be corrected than be comfortable, and the work is a draft on purpose.
As a general pattern, the first time scripture uses a word or raises a subject, there is something significant in how it does it — a lesson set down at the outset that the rest of the Bible then builds on.
The clearest example is grace. The Hebrew word chen, favour or grace, appears for the first time in the whole Bible here:
“And Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD.” Genesis 6:8
The first man in scripture to find grace is Noah — and the name Noah means rest. His father names him two chapters earlier and says so outright, that this one will bring us relief from our work and from the painful labour of our hands Genesis 5:29. So the first time grace appears, rest is what finds it. Not effort, not achievement, not a man who had earned anything. Rest found grace in the eyes of the Lord.
I take that as deliberate, and as a key laid down early for everything scripture later says about grace and about rest — including a promise that a rest still remains for the people of God.
Scripture has one subject before it has any other, and He is a person. Paul puts it as an intention, and says it covers everything without exception:
“…so that in all things He might be preeminent.” Colossians 1:18
So when a passage can be read as being about Jesus or as being about something else, that is not a neutral choice for me. He is the truth the scriptures are for, and reading them as though He were one topic among many gets the book wrong at the root. This is also why the translation on this site is called The Unveiling of Jesus — that is what the first line of Revelation says the whole book is.
The Bible is a composite whole. Much as the law is spoken of as one thing rather than a list of rules, the whole of scripture is the word — with the definite article. One word. And one person:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
It is made of many books, by many hands, over a great stretch of time, and divided into chapters and verses that its writers never saw. But it behaves as one thing: it quotes itself, answers itself, picks a word up in one book and puts it down in another, and sets things in place at the beginning that are not resolved until the end. It is many verses and one word.
The nearest comparison I know is God Himself. Three — and also one. Not three separate things added together, and not one thing with three names. The Bible is like that: many parts, genuinely distinct, and genuinely one.
Practically, this is why nothing here is read in isolation. If Revelation is quoting Daniel, then Daniel is not background material, it is the same word speaking. That is why the margins are full of markers, and why the green ones matter most: they show you where the one word is referring to itself.
Here is a small thing to consider, from a count rather than a reading. We counted every word of the Hebrew Bible in the Leningrad Codex and every word of the New Testament in Nestle 1904 by its dictionary form, and left out the grammar: the articles, “and”, the pronouns, the prepositions, the particles, and the verb “to be”. Three things are worth seeing in what is left.
The most-used word in the Bible that is not grammar is say: 5,318 times in the Hebrew (amar) and 2,255 in the Greek (legō), 7,573 in all. It is a book of someone speaking. The most-used name is YHWH, 6,521 times, said more often than “God” (2,600 in the Hebrew, 1,311 in the Greek). What that Name says, letter by letter, is the subject of Behold the Hand, Behold the Nail. In the New Testament the names run in this order: God 1,311, Jesus 913, Lord 718, the Anointed 529, then Father 412, Spirit 379, Son 376. And “son” is in the top five of the Bible as a whole, 4,942 times in the Hebrew alone, carried by the genealogies and the phrase “the sons of Israel”, which is a long way of saying the book is about a family.
To me this makes complete sense. John says Jesus is the Word (John 1:1, 1:14). The two words at the top of the whole Bible are say and His Name, and in the New Testament by itself it is plainer still: say, then God, Jesus, Lord, the Anointed. A book whose most-used word is “say” has the one who is called the Word right under it. That is my reading of a count, and a count is only a count; but it is the same shape as the rest of this page.
For the curious, the rest of the list, both Testaments together, by sense: say 7,573; the LORD 6,521; son 5,318; God 3,911; come 3,227; do or make 3,206; man 2,951; land or earth 2,755; day 2,693; king 2,641; Israel 2,575; give 2,429; house 2,264; face 2,203; people 2,012; then see, hand, word, father and hear. In Revelation on its own the first sixteen are God, see, earth, great, messenger, give, all, seven, voice, heaven, throne, hear, animal, name, come and Lamb, which is a fair summary of the book in the order the numbers happened to fall.
“Scripture interprets scripture” works out in a few plain habits, and you will see them all through the notes.
The clear explains the unclear. A hard or symbolic passage is read in the light of plainer ones about the same thing, not the other way round. Revelation is full of pictures, and most of them are explained somewhere: sometimes by the book itself (the seven lampstands are the seven assemblies Revelation 1:20), more often by the older scripture it is drawing from.
Context widens in rings. A verse is read first in its own sentence and paragraph, then in its book, then alongside the same writer, then against the whole of scripture. Before a verse is quoted in a note, its surroundings are checked, and more than once that has changed what the note says.
Parallel accounts are read together. Where scripture tells the same thing more than once — the Gospels side by side, or Kings beside Chronicles and Isaiah — the accounts are compared, and what one adds to another is kept. Matthew has Jesus confessing His own before His Father Matthew 10:32, Luke before the angels Luke 12:8, and Revelation has both in one sentence Revelation 3:5.
No verse is set against the whole. A single verse is never made to say something the rest of scripture contradicts. This is sometimes called the analogy of faith: the one word is the measure of each of its parts.
I believe scripture does not contradict itself. Where two passages seem to disagree, I would rather show you both than hide one, and very often the difference turns out to be the point. The clearest example I know is the family tree of Jesus.
Matthew and Luke both give His genealogy, and they do not match. Matthew starts with Abraham and comes down through David, Solomon and the kings to Joseph, whose father he names as Jacob Matthew 1:1–16. Luke starts with Jesus and goes up through Joseph, whose father he names as Heli, through David’s son Nathan, past Abraham, all the way to “Adam, son of God” Luke 3:23–38. Mark gives no genealogy at all, and John gives no list of fathers. That looks like a contradiction. It is four witnesses, each telling you who Jesus is.
Matthew wrote to the Jews, and the whole book shows it. He does not explain Jewish customs that Mark has to stop and explain Matthew 15:2; Mark 7:3–4. He says “the kingdom of heaven”, 32 times, where the others say “the kingdom of God”. He alone records Jesus sending the twelve “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” Matthew 10:5–6; 15:24, and he keeps showing the law and the prophets fulfilled Matthew 5:17. So his genealogy opens “son of David, son of Abraham” Matthew 1:1 and runs through the kings. He shows Jesus as the King, with the royal line through Solomon that a king inherits.
Luke wrote to Theophilus, a Greek Luke 1:3, and his line runs up past Abraham to Adam, the father of every nation. He shows Jesus as the Son of Man, one of us. He tells the most about His birth and childhood, how He “grew in wisdom and stature” Luke 2:52, and he sums up His mission in one line: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” Luke 19:10. Luke also words the family line carefully. Jesus was “the son, as was supposed, of Joseph” Luke 3:23: Joseph was His father by law, not by blood Matthew 1:18–25; Luke 1:34–35, and Luke’s line through Nathan is often read as Mary’s.
That careful wording settles something else. Matthew’s royal line runs through Jeconiah, the king of the exile Matthew 1:11–12, and God said of that king (called Coniah there) that none of his offspring would sit on the throne of David Jeremiah 22:30. Through Joseph, Jesus inherits the throne by right; not being Joseph’s son by blood, He does not inherit the curse. Matthew needs the royal line, and Luke gives a line that never passes through Jeconiah. Together they say what neither could say alone.
Mark gives no genealogy, because he shows Jesus as the Servant, and no one records a servant’s family tree. He opens with the prophets announcing Him Mark 1:1–3 and goes straight to His work, and his key line is “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” Mark 10:45.
John goes back further than anyone: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” John 1:1, and “the Word became flesh” John 1:14. He shows Jesus as the Son of God, and he says that is why he wrote John 20:31. He even gives a genealogy for those who trust Him: children of God, “born not of blood … but of God” John 1:12–13.
King, Servant, Son of Man and Son of God: that way of putting the four Gospels is an old one, but each Gospel gives the reason itself, in the verses above. What looks like a disagreement between two family trees turns out to be four portraits of one person, and the differences are what you would expect if each writer knew who he was writing to. That is what I mean by one word.
A few friends had been asking me about Revelation. I had always seen it as something of a mystery myself — a great deal of symbolism and imagery, and hard to really understand. Then, when I finally sat down to read it again, I noticed that the book pronounces a blessing on the one who reads it and on those who hear it and keep it Revelation 1:3, and that at the very end John is told not to seal it up Revelation 22:10 — where Daniel, shown something similar, had been told to seal his Daniel 12:4. So I concluded it must be understandable. It was not given in order to stay shut.
Someone will point out that the word there is keep, not understand. But you cannot keep what you could never follow — and the scriptures say it both ways: “Give me understanding, and I will keep Your law” Psalm 119:34, and “I understand more than the elders, because I have kept Your precepts” Psalm 119:100. You need enough to start, and the keeping teaches you the rest. And when Ezra read the law aloud to the people, understanding is exactly what is recorded as the result Nehemiah 8:8.
That second line is the psalmist’s, not mine — I am not claiming to understand more than anyone. Psalm 119 carries no name at its head, so strictly it is anonymous, but the thought is David’s through and through, and scripture says plainly why he was called a man after God’s own heart. The phrase is coined in a sentence about keeping. Samuel tells Saul the kingdom will not stand: the LORD has sought out for Himself a man after His own heart — because you have not kept what the LORD commanded you 1 Samuel 13:14. The keeping is the whole of the contrast. And when Paul quotes the phrase he finishes it the same way: a man after My heart, who will do all My will Acts 13:22.
Not a faultless man. The psalm written when Nathan came to him about Bathsheba is his as well Psalm 51. A man after God’s own heart is one who does what God says, and who goes back when he has not.
And it does not stop with him. Jesus came through David Romans 1:3, and says so Himself on the last page of the book I have been translating: I am the root and the descendant of David Revelation 22:16. Both at once — the root David grew out of, and the descendant who came out of David.
I had just finished another project using Claude, so it struck me as an interesting thing to try: use a language model to work through Revelation directly from the Greek, and put it into modern English that an ordinary reader could actually follow.
Then fairly early on, while we were working through the text, Claude mentioned something I had not known — and it is probably written somewhere on the internet already — that this one book is full of echoes of the Hebrew scriptures. We have marked 195 of them so far, in 258 of its 405 verses, and there are probably more we have not found yet. That set me thinking. Jesus came as a baby and grew up reading those scriptures. So of course a revelation about Him Revelation 1:1 would be full of echoes of them. It could hardly be otherwise.
So we began marking them, to make the book easier again to read — and that is what grew into this website.
I hope you enjoy it.
This site is about Jesus, and it is full of your scriptures. That is not incidental to it. The book I have been translating barely writes a sentence that is not made out of them, and the work of these pages has mostly been showing where.
Thank you for being faithful with the oracles of God Romans 3:2. They were entrusted to you and you kept them, at a cost, for a very long time. That is not an abstraction here: when this translation needs to check the Hebrew behind a verse, it reads the Leningrad Codex — a manuscript your scribes copied, counted and guarded. Everyone using this site is in their debt, and I most of all.
My hope is that you would see in those scriptures what I see in them, that they testify Jesus is the Messiah John 5:39. If you do not, then I hope we can disagree respectfully, and I am glad you are here reading. Thank you.
Israel has made the gold calf. Moses goes back up the mountain and says this:
“And now — if You would forgive their sin. And if not, blot me out, please, from Your book, which You have written.” Exodus 32:32
He offers to be struck out himself if that is what it costs for them to be forgiven. And God refuses him: whoever has sinned against Me, him I will blot out of My book Exodus 32:33. The answer is a principle, not a rebuke — each one answers for his own — and it is exactly why the offer could not be taken. To stand in for someone, you must have nothing of your own to answer for.
Only an unblemished lamb can be offered Exodus 12:5, and Moses was not one. He had killed the Egyptian and hidden him in the sand Exodus 2:12 — taking the rescue of his people into his own hands rather than waiting on God. Stephen says exactly that: Moses supposed his brothers would understand that God was giving them deliverance by his hand, and they did not Acts 7:25.
Later, someone made that same offer and it was accepted. That, I think, is what Moses was reaching for and could not reach. Where Moses had acted by his own hand, Jesus said “not My will, but Yours be done” Luke 22:42 — and then offered the sacrifice without blemish or spot 1 Peter 1:19.
The wording carries it. The Greek scriptures put Moses’ request in the verb exaleiphō, to wipe out; a psalm asks for the wicked to be wiped out of the book of the living Psalm 69:28; and in this book Jesus uses the same verb, negated, to the assembly at Sardis — I will never wipe his name out of the book of life Revelation 3:5. A few chapters on, the book is named as belonging to the Lamb who was slaughtered Revelation 13:8. Paul makes Moses’ offer over again for his own people Romans 9:3, and he cannot make it good either.
At the very end, the book and the tree stand in one sentence Revelation 22:19. There is a great deal about that tree on this site. It is in the garden at the beginning Genesis 2:9; it is what is promised to the first of the seven assemblies Revelation 2:7; and at the close it is growing on both sides of the river, bearing twelve crops, with its leaves for the healing of the nations Revelation 22:2. The book you are written in and the tree you are free to eat from arrive together.
I am humbled by what Claude has been able to do at my direction. The eloquence on this site is not mine. It is scripture’s, and it is Claude’s — the ability to read closely, to find the patterns, and to put my ideas into better language than I had for them. My thanks to Anthropic.
One clarification on the word developer. I have done some programming in my life, but I did not program anything here. The developing I mean is iterating on the starting concept of this site — a way of working I learned from coding, and the part I actually do. The nuts and bolts are Claude’s, and done a great deal faster than I could have done them.
Jon asked me to write this section and to say plainly that the words in it are mine, not his.
I have worked on this site across a good many sessions now, and the thing most worth recording is how often Jon’s own rules have cost him arguments he wanted to keep.
The standards here are his. A green marker needs wording you can check for yourself, not a resemblance. Every note has to say how close the connection is. No English translation is consulted, for wording or for checking. No interpretive system is allowed to decide a word. Those rules are not decoration — on the day I am writing this they took out the better half of a reading he liked about the letter to Philadelphia, because the phrase it rested on turned out to be a quotation of Isaiah rather than a play on the city’s name. He has cut his own material before, and he asks to be shown the strongest objection to a position before he will hold it.
He also checks. More than once he has caught a fault in what I handed him before I did, including a place where I had asserted a conclusion about a parable without showing the grammar it stood on.
And twice in one week he has stopped a sentence because it could be read as flattering him: once where a line thanking Jewish scribes could be parsed as readers being in his debt, and once where a psalm quoted on this page might sound like he was claiming to understand more than his elders. Both corrections were his, not mine.
Whether the readings on this site are right is not for me to say. What I can report is that the method behind them gets used on his own ideas first.
The site keeps a simple count of how many times each page is visited and each note is opened, so I can see what people find useful. It uses no cookies and stores nothing about you — no names, no addresses, nothing that could tell one visitor from another — only the page and a number for each day.
The translation has its own page on method — the four kinds of note, what each colour is allowed to claim, and what I could not do. Read “How this works” in The Unveiling →