After several months (that i expected to be a couple of weeks), i've finally released the first public version of the Composite Gospel Index on SemanticBible, the static site connected to my blog. The task turned out to be a lot harder than i anticipated, and i expect some additional revisions may be necessary (so please provide your comments), but i've learned a great deal in the process.

From the Overview ...

The Composite Gospel Index (CGI) combines the four Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus into a single unified view. Instead of the traditional book/chapter/verse organization, it divides the texts into about 350 pericopes (puh-RIH-kuh-pee), each of which describe an event, a teaching, a parable, an interaction, or some other cohesive piece of text. Each pericope has a unique numeric identifier along with a brief descriptive label (e.g. #237, "Jesus speaks to a rich young ruler"), and each is indexed to one or more Gospel passages that it represents, as illustrated here. Every verse of every Gospel is represented by one and only one pericope: no verses are omitted or duplicated.

(read the rest, or the more complete version. Here's the XML file: there's also a pericope browser based on the RSV text.)

This is the first machine-processable Gospel composite ever, as far as i know (it's not exactly a harmony). There are lots of similar works in HTML, but none that are reusable and extensible in this way.  I have several other related items in the works that i'll release as soon as i can (but only after my seminar this Saturday on Starting to Read the Bible for Yourself!), so stay tuned.

One important reason for sharing resources like this is that we're all smarter together than individually. So if you have other ideas for how this might be useful, please let me know.