- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- iOS - Android - Web
- Developer
- David Salib (AD30, Inc.)
- Launched
- 2017
- Updated
- Jul 26, 2026
The verdict
Catena is the cheapest serious way to read patristic commentary verse by verse, and for the New Testament it is genuinely dense - John 3 carries 222 separate comments across 36 verses. Buy it for the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation; do not buy it for Chronicles, the Minor Prophets or anything you need a citation for, because the app never names the edition it is quoting from.
Try Catena Bible & Commentaries ↗Opens catenabible.com
Catena is named for the medieval genre it revives. A catena, Latin for chain, is a commentary built out of other people's sentences: a verse of Scripture followed by a chain of quotations from earlier interpreters, arranged so the reader watches the tradition argue with itself. Thomas Aquinas assembled the most famous one, the Catena Aurea on the four Gospels. This app is that idea with a scroll bar.
It was founded in 2015 by Coptic Orthodox Christians in Ontario, Canada, and the about-us page lists ten named contributors spread from Cairo to Winnipeg, several with prior stints at Google, Microsoft, Yelp and PlayStation. The iOS app arrived in April 2017 under the seller name David Salib, with a copyright line reading AD30, Inc; Google Play lists the developer as AD30 Inc. The stated mission is evangelizing the timeless faith of the Early Christian Church, founded by the apostles, for the edification of all Christians around the world - a deliberately pan-Christian framing rather than a denominational one, even though the founders are Oriental Orthodox and much of the source material is Latin.
The product is free in the uncomplicated sense: no tier gate, no trial, no advertising, no paywalled books. The donate page describes Catena Bible as a non-profit focused on evangelizing the faith of the Early Christian Church, and asks for preset amounts of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 and $1,000, with an Other box for anything else. Donations, it says, support the service, grow the team, acquire and translate commentaries, and bring Catena to everybody, everywhere.
What makes it worth a review rather than a listing is that the corpus is uneven in ways the marketing does not mention, and the labelling is looser than the phrase church fathers implies. The New Testament is superbly served. The Old Testament thins out fast. And the most quoted name in a sample of verses across both testaments is not a Father of the Church at all - it is an English priest who died in 1849.
✓ The good
- Free with no tier above it - no premium unlock, no advertising and no per-translation purchase; the donation ladder is entirely optional
- New Testament density is real - the 36 verses of John 3 carry 222 commentary entries, an average of 6.2 per verse, and Titus 1 carries 97 across 16 verses with none left empty
- Breadth of voices is unusually wide - a sample of 32 verses surfaced 69 distinct commentators, from Clement of Rome (AD 99) and Ignatius of Antioch (AD 108) through to Theophylact of Ochrid (AD 1107)
- The canon is the wide one - 49 Old Testament books including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, which is where patristic exegesis lives and where most Protestant study apps stop
- Cross-references bundled in - the download page claims 30,000+ related verses, so it doubles as a chain-reference Bible
- Genuinely cross-traditional - Chrysostom, Basil and Cyril of Alexandria sit in the same scroll as Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Bede
✗ Watch out
- No source citation anywhere - a commentary page gives the author name and a death year and nothing else: no translator, no edition, no volume, no page
- Old Testament coverage collapses in the historical books and Minor Prophets - 15 of the 19 verses of Nahum 3 report that no commentaries were found, and 30 of the 55 verses of 1 Chronicles 2 do the same
- Post-patristic material sits under the same heading as the Fathers - Cornelius a Lapide (AD 1637), Richard Challoner (AD 1781), George Leo Haydock (AD 1849) and an entry labelled Aquinas Study Bible (AD 2017) appear in the same list as Polycarp and Justin Martyr
- The apps have not shipped in over three years - iOS 5.5.1 dates from 14 January 2023, the Android build from 25 March 2023, and the privacy policy from 5 January 2023
- The web reader lacks features the app has - the 5.5.1 release note promotes Catena Search, but catenabible.com/search returns a 404, and web settings expose only the default translation
- English only - the App Store lists a single language code, EN, against a stated mission to reach all Christians around the world
Best for
- Readers working through the Gospels or Epistles who want the patristic reading alongside the text
- Catechumens and inquirers in Orthodox and Catholic parishes
- Preachers looking for an ancient illustration rather than a modern one
- Anyone who wants the Ancient Christian Commentary experience without the four-figure outlay
Avoid if
- You need citable references with translator, volume and page
- Your study is in Chronicles, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah or the Minor Prophets
- You want original-language parsing, lexicons or interlinears
- You need a language other than English
What Catena Bible & Commentaries is
Catena is a Bible reader whose reason for existing is the panel underneath the verse. Open Matthew 1:1 and the app returns a stack of short excerpts attributed to named interpreters with their death dates: Ambrose of Milan (AD 397), Athanasius the Apostolic (AD 373), Augustine of Hippo (AD 430), Cyril of Alexandria (AD 444), Hilary of Poitiers (AD 368), Jerome (AD 420), John Chrysostom (AD 407), Leo of Rome (AD 461), Severus of Antioch (AD 538) and more.
The scriptural text is secondary and the app treats it that way. The web reader ships with one version enabled by default, King James Version 2000, described in the app state as a KJV with modernized words, Thy becoming Your; the faith.tools listing adds NKJV, NIV, RSV and Douay-Rheims to the mobile builds. Alongside the commentary sit daily readings, cross-references, highlighting, favourites, collections and notes.
The only free catena with the deuterocanon in it
Two things separate Catena from every free commentary site carrying Matthew Henry and Gill. The first is the century: this is pre-modern exegesis, mostly first through eighth, where the standard free stack online is eighteenth and nineteenth. The second is the canon. The web navigation lists 49 Old Testament books, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, plus 27 in the New Testament - 76 in total, against the 73 books Google Play advertises.
That matters because the Fathers quoted Sirach and Wisdom constantly, and a reader following a patristic argument into those books on a Protestant-canon app hits a wall. Catena does not. Sirach 1:1 opens with the KJV Apocrypha wording, All wisdom comes from the Lord, and is with him for ever, and carries a commentary attached to it.
Coverage: excellent in the New Testament, patchy in the Old
The claim on the download page is 60,000+ commentaries, verse-by-verse. In the New Testament that number does real work. The 36 verses of John 3 carry 222 distinct commentary entries, an average of 6.2 per verse, with none empty. Titus 1, a short and unglamorous chapter, carries 97 across 16 verses, again with nothing missing. Matthew 5:3 carries 19, Revelation 1:1 carries 19, Romans 8:28 carries 10.
The Old Testament is a different product. Joshua 1 leaves 4 of its 18 verses without a comment, 1 Chronicles 2 leaves 30 of 55 empty, and Nahum 3 leaves 15 of 19 empty on six comments for the whole chapter. Judith 1:1, 1 Maccabees 1:1, 2 Maccabees 1:1 and Numbers 7:12 all return the same notice: no commentaries found, try exploring the next or previous verse. Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes hold up - Genesis 1:1 carries 26 - but the historical books and Minor Prophets are close to bare.
Who counts as a Father here
A sample of 32 verses across both testaments surfaced 69 distinct named commentators, and the frequency table is the most interesting artefact in the product. George Leo Haydock, an English Catholic priest who died in 1849 and whose Douay-Rheims annotations are long out of copyright, appears 34 times - more often than Augustine of Hippo (32) or John Chrysostom (32), and twice as often as Jerome (17). Basil the Great appears 15 times, Bede 13, Ambrose 10, Hippolytus of Rome 10, Athanasius 9.
Further down, the label stretches further: Thomas Aquinas (AD 1274), Nicholas of Lyra (AD 1349), Glossa Ordinaria (AD 1480), Cornelius a Lapide (AD 1637), Richard Challoner (AD 1781) and an entry called Aquinas Study Bible dated AD 2017. None of this is hidden, since every entry carries its death year in the header - but the App Store subtitle reads Bible with verse-by-verse commentary from the church fathers, and a reader taking that literally will attribute a nineteenth-century Douay footnote to the patristic age. The mix also skews Latin and Western more than the Coptic Orthodox founding suggests, because the Gospel material comes from the Catena Aurea tradition.
Reader mechanics and what the web build lacks
Navigation is verse-addressed and clean: catenabible.com/mt/1/1 is Matthew 1:1, the commentary stack sits below the verse, and each entry has a permanent page under /com/ with a reading-time estimate. Settings cover text size, font, dark mode, commentary sort order and a tag filter, and daily readings live under /daily/ by calendar date. Highlighting, favourites, collections and notes are account features, though the web reader is browsable anonymously.
The gaps are on the web side. There is no search page - the iOS 5.5.1 release note advertises Catena Search, but /search returns a 404 and the only way in is a verse URL or the book menu. The shipped web state offers no translation picker, pinning the browser reader to King James Version 2000. There is no export, no copy-with-citation and no index of commentators, so reading everything Basil says means walking the Bible verse by verse.
Pricing
Free
Free
Everything the product does. All 76 books, the full commentary corpus, cross-references, daily readings, highlights, favourites, collections and notes, on iOS, Android and the web. No advertising, no premium tier, no per-translation purchase. Funded by donations to a self-described non-profit.
Donation
$5 to $1,000 (one-off)
Optional. catenabible.com/donate offers presets of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 and $1,000 plus a custom field, and says the money supports the service, grows the team and acquires commentaries. Donating unlocks nothing - the free tier is the whole product.
There is one price and it is zero. Free on iOS, free on Android, free on the web, no advertising, no in-app purchase tier, no per-translation charge and no cap on how much commentary a session can read.
The funding model is stated plainly. The donate page calls Catena Bible a non-profit focused on evangelizing the faith of the Early Christian Church and offers eight preset amounts from $5 to $1,000 plus a custom field, the stated uses being the service, the team, acquiring and translating commentaries, and distribution. No annual report or registration number is published, so the non-profit claim is the vendor's own.
The economics are worth naming: nearly everything in the corpus is public domain. Haydock, Challoner, the Glossa Ordinaria, Cornelius a Lapide and the nineteenth-century English translations of the Fathers are all out of copyright, which is why a small team can ship tens of thousands of excerpts for nothing while a publisher charges four figures for a curated set.
The one place money would change the product is the Old Testament, and the donate page says so - acquire and translate commentaries is the line item that would fill in Chronicles and the Minor Prophets. Three years without an app update suggests it is not moving quickly.
Where Catena Bible & Commentaries falls behind
Citations. This is the disqualifying gap for anyone writing rather than reading. A commentary page shows the author, a death year and the text, and nothing else: no translator, no edition, no volume, no homily or section number. The verse-level list occasionally shows an abbreviated reference inherited from the Catena Aurea, such as In Luc. iii or Ep. i. ad Monachos Egypti, but these are not resolvable to a modern edition without separate research. A seminary paper cannot cite this app.
Old Testament breadth. The verse-by-verse promise holds for the New Testament and fails in the historical books. Fifteen of nineteen verses empty in Nahum 3 and thirty of fifty-five in 1 Chronicles 2 is not a rounding error, and the app gives no warning before the reader arrives.
Maintenance. iOS 5.5.1 shipped on 14 January 2023 and the Android build on 25 March 2023, which is more than three years of silence as of July 2026. The iOS minimum is 11.0, the download 59.9 MB, and the App Store privacy link resolves to the homepage rather than the policy page - catenabible.com/privacy returns a 404 while catenabible.com/privacy-policy is live.
Disclosure consistency. Google Play's Data safety card states that no data is shared with third parties, and that the app collects personal info, app info and performance, and device or other IDs. The privacy policy on the same vendor's website names Google Analytics, Firebase Crashlytics and Sentry as services the product uses. Both statements are the vendor's, and are reported as published rather than reconciled.
Counting. The download landing page says 60,000+ commentaries and 30,000+ cross-references. The Google Play description says the Bible with 10,000's of commentaries. The faith.tools listing says over 70,000 commentaries from hundreds of church fathers. Google Play says 73 books; the web navigation lists 76. No figure at all is published on catenabible.com itself.
Catena vs. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture vs. StudyLight
The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, edited by Thomas C. Oden for InterVarsity Press, is the print answer to the same question and the only fair benchmark. It runs to 29 volumes covering Genesis through Revelation plus the Apocrypha, and IVP prices individual volumes at $79.99 with Revelation at $75.99 - which is exactly the set's list price, since 28 at $79.99 plus $75.99 comes to $2,315.71. Christianbook sells the set at $1,454.72, a 37 percent discount off list. So the comparison is $1,454.72 against $0, and Catena is not a cut-down substitute: it covers the same wide canon, quotes the same authors, and is addressable by verse in a way a 29-volume shelf is not.
What the $1,454.72 buys is everything Catena omits. ACCS excerpts are chosen and annotated by named patristics scholars, each carries a full citation, the series uses the Revised Standard Version as its base text, and it includes fresh English translations of material previously available only in ancient languages. It is also strict about the boundary of the patristic period in a way Catena is not - Haydock, Challoner and a 2017 study Bible would not appear. IVP calls the series a postcritical revival of the glossa ordinaria; Catena simply includes the Glossa Ordinaria itself as a source, dated AD 1480.
StudyLight and the other free commentary sites are the wrong comparison. Their stacks are overwhelmingly eighteenth and nineteenth century - Matthew Henry, Gill, Barnes, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown - and their Bibles are Protestant-canon, so a reader chasing a patristic reading of Sirach or Tobit has nowhere to land. Catena fills a slot nothing else in the category fills for free: pre-modern exegesis, wide canon, verse-addressed.
The bottom line
Catena does one difficult thing extremely well and says little about the rest. For the New Testament it delivers what a $1,454.72 print set delivers, on a phone, for nothing, across a canon that includes the deuterocanonical books the Fathers actually quoted. For the historical books and Minor Prophets it is close to empty, and for written work it is unusable because no excerpt carries a citation. Treat it as a reading companion rather than a reference work, trust the death dates in the headers over the phrase church fathers, and keep the Ancient Christian Commentary in mind for anything footnoted.
Alternatives to Catena Bible & Commentaries
StudyLightA very large free commentary library, but the weight sits in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the canon is Protestant. Better for Victorian exposition than for the Fathers.
VerbumThe Catholic build of Logos, with paid patristic and medieval libraries that are citable and searchable by author. Far more capable and priced accordingly.
Bible HubFree verse-by-verse aggregation with original-language tools and parallel translations. No patristic layer, but it covers the lexical work Catena does not attempt.Precept AustinEnormous free collection of commentary and sermon material organised by passage. Dense, unpolished, and modern-evangelical rather than ancient in its sources.Frequently asked questions
Is Catena really free, and how is it funded?
Yes. Free on iOS, Android and the web, with no premium tier, no advertising and no per-translation purchase. The donate page describes Catena Bible as a non-profit focused on evangelizing the faith of the Early Christian Church and asks for one-off gifts of $5 to $1,000, or a custom amount. Donating unlocks nothing extra.
Is it Catholic, Orthodox or non-denominational?
The about-us page says it was founded in 2015 by Coptic Orthodox Christians in Ontario, Canada, and states a mission for the edification of all Christians around the world, so the framing is pan-Christian rather than confessional. In practice the canon is the wide one used by Catholic and Orthodox churches, and much of the Gospel material comes from the Latin Catena Aurea tradition alongside later Catholic annotators such as Haydock and Challoner. Eastern voices are well represented too, including Chrysostom, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria and Ephrem the Syrian.
Does every verse have a commentary?
No. The New Testament is dense: all 36 verses of John 3 and all 16 of Titus 1 carry commentary, averaging over six entries each. Large parts of the Old Testament do not. Nahum 3 leaves 15 of 19 verses empty, 1 Chronicles 2 leaves 30 of 55, and Judith 1:1, 1 Maccabees 1:1 and 2 Maccabees 1:1 report that no commentaries were found.
Which Bible translations does it include?
The web reader ships with King James Version 2000 enabled, described in the app as a KJV with modernized words such as Thy becoming Your, and it includes the Apocrypha. The faith.tools listing credits the mobile builds with NKJV, NIV, RSV and Douay-Rheims; catenabible.com publishes no translation list of its own.
Can I cite Catena in a paper or sermon manuscript?
Not safely. A commentary page gives an author name and a death year and no bibliographic detail - no translator, edition, volume or section number. Some verse-level entries carry abbreviated references inherited from older catenae, such as In Luc. iii, but those are not resolvable without separate research. Use Catena to find the passage, then cite a real edition.
How does it compare with the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture?
They answer the same question at opposite prices. ACCS is 29 volumes at $2,315.71 list, $1,454.72 discounted at Christianbook, with scholar-selected excerpts, full citations and an RSV base text. Catena is free, addressable by verse and covers the same wide canon, but carries no citations and files post-patristic writers such as Cornelius a Lapide (1637) and George Leo Haydock (1849) alongside the Fathers.
Sources & further reading
- Catena Bible - Matthew 1:1 verse page ↗
- Catena Bible - About Us ↗
- Catena Bible - Donate ↗
- Catena Bible - Privacy Policy ↗
- Catena download landing page ↗
- Catena: Bible & Commentaries on the App Store ↗
- Catena Bible and Commentaries on Google Play ↗
- Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, 29-volume set (Christianbook) ↗
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