World English Bible (Catholic)

History

This text is still being corrected: the project goes on receiving reports of typographical or translation errors and publishing new versions. The World English Bible is a revision of the American Standard Version of 1901, made by Michael Paul Johnson at eBible.org. The Old Testament follows the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and the New Testament follows the Greek Majority Text, rather than the critical text the American Standard Version had been based on.

The idea was that anyone could use it without asking permission. The project says so plainly — “The World English Bible is in the Public Domain. That means that it is not copyrighted” — and the only restriction is the name, which remains a registered trademark, so that nobody publishes an altered text under that title. The motive is different from that of the older editions on this site: the Douay-Rheims was born of a controversy, the Clementine Vulgate of a problem of text, and this one was born so that there would be a Bible in modern English that anyone could freely reprint.

The Catholic edition uses the same English, puts the books in the Catholic order, and replaces the “Yahweh” of the main World English Bible with “LORD” and “GOD”, in capitals, as the tradition requires. The deuterocanonical books come from another source: the project derives them from the Revised Version Apocrypha and from Brenton’s Septuagint, which is the Greek edition in this same collection.

Two books are missing from this edition, Esther and Daniel, and the problem is not in the translation. The published edition carries both, in the longer Greek form, with the passages that do not exist in the Hebrew, and identifies them by the codes used for those Greek versions. This site’s importer accepts a fixed list of book codes and discards what it does not recognise. Both books are complete in the Douay-Rheims and Clementine editions.

Curiosities

The deuterocanonical books of this edition do not sound like those of the Douay-Rheims, and the reason is that the two came in through different languages. Tobit begins like this in this edition: “The book of the words of Tobit, the son of Tobiel, the son of Ananiel, the son of Aduel, the son of Gabael, of the seed of Asiel, of the tribe of Naphtali”. The wording closely follows the Greek of the Brenton edition, including the phrase “of the seed of”, which translates ἐκ τοῦ σπέρματος. The Douay-Rheims, which renders Jerome’s Latin, opens differently: “Tobias of the tribe and city of Nephtali, (which is in the upper parts of Galilee above Naasson...)”. The version of Fr. Matos Soares, also translated from the Latin, likewise begins with the tribe and the city.

In the New Testament, the same divide appears from the other side. In Acts 8, this edition goes from the eunuch’s question — “What is keeping me from being baptized?” — straight to the chariot stopping. The confession of faith that comes between those two moments, verse 37, appears in the Textus Receptus edition, as well as in those of the Douay-Rheims and of Matos Soares, but is not in this edition.

Sources

• World English Bible — the project’s own account of the base text, the sources, the public domain terms, and what changes in the Catholic edition
• World English Bible (Catholic) at eBible.org — the digitisation this site starts from, and the note that this edition carries Esther and Daniel with the Greek portions