Blame my mother-in-law.

In 1999, I was dating the woman who would become my wife when her mother, Raquel Chagas, saw the computer I had at home. Personal computers were still new to a lot of people, and she was a woman of faith who looked at that machine with far less enthusiasm than I did.

“Does that thing have a Bible? If it doesn't, I don't want it.”

It did. But her question led me to another: what could a computer do with the Bible that a book couldn't?

I didn't just want to put Scripture on a screen. I wanted to find a passage even when I couldn't remember the exact words. That's not how most of us remember the Bible. We remember stories, people, events. We remember the feeding of the multitude — but the word “feeding” doesn't have to be in the biblical text for the story to be there.

For a computer in that era, that was nearly an unsolvable problem. It knew how to search for words. It didn't know what a story was.

So I asked my father, Josias Terenzi Pinto, for help.

My father was a pastor and had read the Bible dozens of times over his life. What I needed was, in a sense, already in his head: where the stories and passages that make up Scripture began and ended.

He picked up a Bible and a notebook and began turning that knowledge into something I could take to the computer. He wrote down the pericopes — the meaningful units of the biblical text — along with their boundaries and titles.

2,970 pericopes, written by hand, one by one.

While he did that, I had another small problem: my digital Bible was a TXT file. Plain text.

To turn it into something a program could understand, I had to structure more than 31,000 verses, separating books, chapters, verses, and the Scripture text itself. Then I typed into the computer the thousands of notes my father had written in his notebook.

Something was still missing. I didn't want the computer to only know where a story was. I wanted it to know when that story continued — or appeared again — somewhere else in the Bible.

So I began another manual task. Using a form that allowed up to four references per passage, I connected one pericope to others related to it.

1,064 references entered manually, one by one.

Slowly, that TXT file stopped being merely a digital Bible. Behind the text, a structure began to emerge: verses belonged to passages, passages had meaning, and passages could lead to other passages.

The idea outlasted the technologies I tried to build it with. There was Ruby on Rails, then Python, databases, new versions, and fresh starts. And through it all, there was life happening along the way.

My father died in 2013. He never got to see the work finished.

In 2026, nearly three decades after Raquel's question, I returned to the project once more. This time, though, the technology finally seemed able to catch up with the idea.

And that foundation built from my father's notebook finally had a name: JOTEPPI — Josias Terenzi Pinto Pericope Index.

Today JOTEPPI is part of something larger. After years of consolidation, comparison, and review against other sources, SABER's Canon brings together 3,358 pericopes. But the original structure is still there, at the root of the system.

That's why SABER doesn't have to treat a result as an isolated verse. It can find the passage that verse belongs to and show the context around it.

And it's why that old idea about the feeding of the multitude finally works. You can search for something you remember even when the word in your memory doesn't literally appear in the text. Once the story is found, SABER can follow its related passages in sequence. And if you want to go further, you can put another Bible version or language beside it and compare the texts without losing the thread of your reading.

We're still building. New versions and languages are being prepared, the relationships between passages keep being expanded and reviewed, and contextual search keeps evolving. SABER is completely free — and always will be.

But the idea itself has changed very little.

It all began with Raquel asking whether that computer had a Bible, with me wondering if a machine could find stories instead of just words, and with my father turning decades of knowledge of Scripture into 2,970 handwritten notes in a notebook.

My father never got to see SABER finished. But SABER keeps my father's work alive.

Paulo TerenziSABER.Bible