Every book of the Bible is a circle here. Position is how densely it connects to the rest of scripture, size is how long it is, and color is which testament it belongs to. Circles stack only to avoid overlapping each other.
Position is references per verse, circle size is book length, color is testament.
Cross references are often recorded in only one direction. One verse may point to another verse, even though the relationship between the two passages works both ways.
For these visuals, those references are consolidated in both directions. A connection is counted whether it was originally recorded from the first book to the second or from the second book back to the first.
This gives a complete picture of the connections between the books without treating the direction of the original reference as meaningful.
Point at a circle to name the book.
FIG. 06 66 books on one axis
The two testaments barely overlap. The New Testament median sits at 35.13 references per verse, the Old at 16.01 — more than double. Seen as ranked bars this is a fact you have to work out; seen as a swarm it is the first thing you notice.
The reason is not that the New Testament is more important to the compilers, though that plays a part. It is that the New Testament is short, late, and written for readers who already knew the Old. Nearly every page quotes, echoes or argues from earlier scripture, and it has no genealogies or census lists to dilute the average.
The Old Testament spreads far wider. It holds both the sparsest books in the Bible — 1 Chronicles, Numbers, Judges, Leviticus, all under ten — and, in Malachi, one that would sit comfortably among the epistles. Genre drives that spread. Law codes and king lists connect thinly; prophecy and psalm connect densely.
Size and position are close to independent. Large circles gather at the sparse end and small ones at the dense end, which is the length effect the per-verse measure exists to remove. It does not vanish entirely — short books really are more allusive on average — but the correlation is far weaker here than in any ranking by total.
Switch the axis to total references and the picture inverts: the big circles march to the right and the small ones collapse into the left margin. That is the same data answering a different question, and it is why both views belong on the same page.