Most modern Bibles are under copyright, and using them at length means asking permission and sometimes paying (see Why Bible translations are copyrighted). Alongside them, a smaller family of translations can be copied, printed, recorded, put in apps and adapted without asking anyone. Some are free because they are old. Others were made free on purpose.

This article describes the main ones, explains the different kinds of “free,” and asks why the question has become so important for translation into the world’s other languages.

Kinds of free

“Free” can mean several different things, and the differences matter in practice.

  • Free to read. Many copyrighted Bibles can be read online at no cost. That is generous, but it does not give anyone the right to copy or reuse the text.
  • Public domain. A work in the public domain belongs to no one. Anyone may do anything with it, including sell it, alter it or translate it. Works enter the public domain when their copyright expires, or when the owner gives up the rights.
  • CC0. Some countries do not clearly recognise an owner’s declaration that a work is in the public domain. The Creative Commons organisation’s CC0 tool combines a dedication to the public domain with a fallback licence, so that the effect is as close to public domain as the law of each country allows.
  • Open licences. Creative Commons licences let owners keep copyright while granting broad permissions. CC BY allows any use, provided the source is credited. CC BY-SA (“share-alike”) also allows any use, but requires that adapted versions be released under the same licence.
  • Restricted licences. Licences marked NC (non-commercial) or ND (no derivatives) permit sharing but forbid selling or adapting. They are free to read and pass on, but not open in the sense that matters to a translator, who needs to adapt.

Free by age

Many older English Bibles are in the public domain because their copyright has expired, or because they were never under copyright at all:

  • The King James Version, except in the United Kingdom, where the Crown retains rights (see Who owns the King James Version?).
  • The Douay-Rheims Bible in Bishop Challoner’s eighteenth-century revision.
  • Young’s Literal Translation (1862) and Darby’s translation, two very literal Victorian versions.
  • The American Standard Version of 1901. It was copyrighted when it appeared, but that copyright has long expired, and it has become the parent of several modern open translations.
  • The Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917.

These are valuable, and this site quotes several of them, but their English is old and their textual base sometimes outdated. Readers and translators wanted something modern that was also free.

The World English Bible

The World English Bible was the first major modern English translation designed from the start to be in the public domain. It was begun in the 1990s by Michael Paul Johnson, with volunteers, and is distributed through eBible.org. Its preface explains why:

There are already many good translations of the Holy Bible into contemporary English. Unfortunately, almost all of them are restricted by copyright and copyright holder policy. This restricts publication and republication of God’s Word in many ways, such as in downloadable files on the Internet, use of extensive quotations in books, etc.

The WEB is an update of the American Standard Version. A computer program first modernised the ASV’s archaic words and forms, and volunteers then proofread the text and revised its grammar. Its New Testament follows the Majority Text, the form of the Greek found in most surviving manuscripts, rather than the critical text used by most modern translations (see How textual criticism works). Its main edition uses “Yahweh” for the divine name, while a British edition uses “LORD.”

The WEB places one condition on users, and it is a request rather than a legal restriction: that the name “World English Bible” be kept for faithful copies. Anyone who changes the text should call it something else. Articles on this site quote the WEB because it can be quoted in full without permission.

The Berean Standard Bible

The Berean Standard Bible, first published as the Berean Study Bible and associated with the Bible Hub website, took a different path. It was produced as a modern translation, with an accompanying interlinear and other tools, and was at first available under licence. On 30 April 2023 its publishers dedicated the Berean Standard Bible and the companion Majority Bible to the public domain, stating that all uses are freely permitted. Like the WEB, they ask that only verbatim copies use the Berean name.

The change made a widely used modern translation, along with its word-by-word glosses, available for any purpose, including commercial printing.

The NET Bible

The NET Bible, published by Biblical Studies Press, is often mentioned alongside open Bibles, but it is not one. Its text and its more than 60,000 translators’ notes have been free to read and download from the start, and its “ministry first” policy permits generous free use for study, teaching and non-commercial ministry. It remains under copyright, however, and commercial publishers must license it. The NET shows that a translation can be very freely available without being in the public domain.

Other English open translations

Several smaller projects have also used open licences:

  • The Open English Bible, edited by Russell Allen, is released under CC0. Its New Testament was published in 2010, and it has since added the Psalms and other Old Testament books, with work continuing. Its makers explained that they chose CC0 because some countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, do not recognise a simple declaration of public domain.
  • The Free Bible Version, translated by Jonathan Gallagher and published by Free Bible Ministry, began under a no-derivatives licence and later moved to CC BY-SA, which allows adaptation. A Spanish counterpart, the Versión Biblia Libre, uses the same licence.

Open texts for translators

The strongest push for open Bibles has come from translation into other languages. Translators into a minority language usually work from a Bible in a “gateway” language they know well, such as English, French, Hindi or Swahili, along with notes and helps. If those resources are copyrighted, adapting them requires permission (see Translating for every language).

unfoldingWord, launched in 2013 as a collaborative translation project, set out to provide a complete set of openly licensed resources in gateway languages. Its main texts are:

  • The unfoldingWord Literal Text (ULT), a form-centric English translation based on the public-domain American Standard Version, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • The unfoldingWord Simplified Text (UST), a meaning-centric translation adapted from Ellis W. Deibler Jr.’s A Translation for Translators, also CC BY-SA 4.0. It avoids figures of speech and idioms that are hard to carry into other languages.

These come with translation notes, word studies and other helps under the same licence, designed to be translated into gateway languages and used by local church translators. Wycliffe Associates worked with unfoldingWord on the Unlocked Literal Bible, also under CC BY-SA. unfoldingWord’s staff have argued that only CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA, or something very close to them, give translators the legal freedom they need; licences that forbid adaptation or commercial use do not.

Larger agencies have moved too. Biblica, which keeps the NIV under copyright, has released a number of its translations in other major languages, such as the Open Kiswahili Contemporary Bible and Bibles in Arabic, Yoruba, Lingala and Portuguese, under a CC BY-SA licence as part of an “Open Bible” initiative. Many minority-language translations are also now distributed freely on eBible.org and similar sites, some under open licences and some under more restrictive ones.

The original-language texts matter as well. The SBL Greek New Testament (2010) is licensed CC BY 4.0, and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a digital edition of the Hebrew Bible’s oldest complete manuscript, is in the public domain (see The Aleppo and Leningrad codices). Open linguistic datasets built on them, such as the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible and the MACULA datasets, are licensed CC BY.

The trade-offs

Open licensing is not without difficulties. Share-alike licences keep adaptations open, but they can complicate combining texts under different terms, and attribution requirements can become long chains of credits in software. Public domain texts can be altered and republished by anyone, so projects rely on trademarks and requests, not law, to protect their names. And without licence income, open projects depend on volunteers, donors and institutions, which can make revision slow.

Supporters reply that these costs are small beside the benefits: a church in any country can print, record or translate the text without waiting for permission, and every improvement can be shared.

Open Word Bible’s choice

Open Word Bible chose the most open option available. Its translation, its reasoning records and its data are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 (see Why another Bible translation?). The reasons follow from the history above:

  • No permissions, no conditions. Anyone may quote, print, sell, record, adapt or translate it, with no credit line and no licence to track.
  • Works everywhere. CC0 is designed to have the same effect in countries that do not recognise a simple public-domain declaration.
  • Built for translators. Each sentence comes at three levels, Literal, Balanced and Readable, sharing one set of meaning decisions, with the reasoning for each choice. Translators into other languages can use the decisions as well as the English (see Three levels, one meaning).
  • Free sources. It translates from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, and uses other Bibles, copyrighted or not, only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

The project is young, and its drafts are AI-assisted. None is marked reviewed until named human reviewers who read Hebrew or Greek have approved it (see AI-assisted translation and human review). Being free to use does not make a translation good. That has to be earned by review and criticism, and an open text makes both easier.

Sources

  • World English Bible. Preface and copyright statement. eBible.org.
  • Berean Bible. “Terms and Conditions” and “Free Licensing.” berean.bible.
  • Biblical Studies Press. “NET Bible Copyright.” netbible.com.
  • Open English Bible. Front matter and CC0 licence statement. openenglishbible.org.
  • unfoldingWord. unfoldingWord Literal Text and unfoldingWord Simplified Text, front matter and licence. git.door43.org.
  • Griffin, Jesse A., and Todd L. Price. “Unrestricted Original Language Resources.” HIPHIL Novum 5, no. 2 (2019): 86–96.
  • “Releasing God’s Word: Do Copyrights Help or Hurt Bible Translation?” Christianity Today, July/August 2016.
  • Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. 2010. Licence statement. sblgnt.com.
  • Creative Commons. “CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.” creativecommons.org.
  • Quotations are from the World English Bible’s preface (public domain).