Bible texts on this site
The two English texts you can read here, and what each one is
King James Version
The text that shaped English, published 1611.
- Year
- 1611
- Source text
- Textus Receptus (NT), Masoretic Text (OT)
- Licence
- Public domain
The King James Version has shaped the English language for four centuries. Commissioned by James I in 1604 and published in 1611, it is the most quoted and most memorised Bible in the language, and the text this site reads from in English.
How it was made
James I convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, and the translation was one of its few lasting outcomes. Forty-seven scholars worked in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, each taking a portion of Scripture and reviewing the work of the others. They were instructed to revise the Bishops' Bible rather than start fresh, and they kept a great deal of what earlier English translators had already settled, above all William Tyndale, whose phrasing survives throughout.
The text behind it
The New Testament rests on the Textus Receptus, the printed Greek text assembled by Erasmus and refined by Stephanus and Beza. The Old Testament follows the Masoretic Hebrew. Greek manuscripts discovered since 1611, among them Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, underlie most modern translations, and that difference in source is where the King James Version and a modern Bible most often part company, rather than any disagreement about meaning.
Reading it today
The English is early modern: "thou" for the singular you, verbs ending in -eth, and words that have since drifted. "Conversation" means conduct, "prevent" means to go before, "suffer" means to allow. None of this is a mistranslation. It is a language four hundred years old. Where a verse is hard going, the chapter summaries and the passage explanations on this site are there to help.
Questions about this translation
5 Minutes Bible Simple English
The King James text rewritten in plain English.
- Year
- 2026
- Source text
- The King James Version
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
This is the King James Version rewritten in the plainest English the sense allows, for readers who find the 1611 wording hard going: people reading English as a second language, readers with limited literacy, and children. It is not a new translation. The Greek and the Hebrew were never consulted; only the English was changed.
Free to copy, print and adapt, for any purpose including commercial, on one condition: name where it came from.
Credit it like this5 Minutes Bible Simple English, 5minutesbible.com (CC BY 4.0)
The books published so far.
What was changed, and what was not
Archaic English goes: thou and ye become you, verbs lose their -eth endings, and words that have since drifted are replaced, so conversation becomes conduct and suffer becomes allow. Long sentences are broken where the sense allows. What does not change is the content. No explanation is added, no application, no theology that was not already there. Where the King James is obscure because the text behind it is obscure, this stays obscure: resolving an ambiguity that Scripture leaves open would be the worst error possible here, worse than clumsy wording.
How it was made
Each chapter was rewritten with the help of a language model, working from the King James text alone, under a fixed set of rules and a glossary that keeps recurring terms identical across the whole Bible. Every chapter then passes automatic checks before it is kept: the verse numbers must match the source exactly, no verse may be merged, split or dropped, every number and proper noun must survive, and no archaic form may remain. A chapter that fails is set aside rather than published.
Where it stands
All sixty-six books are written: 1,189 chapters and 31,102 verses, each one through the checks described above. The King James text it comes from is always one click away on any chapter, so you can compare any verse against its source - and where the two differ, the King James is the one to trust.