our aim is to empower the people of the World to create a modern translation of the Bible that everyone can use in their own language, free from all copyright encumbrances, and as faithful to the original languages of the text as modern scholarship can enable us
to help us in this endeavor, we are re-using existing texts in the public domain as our starting point and build upon these with modern emendation guided by state-of-the-art advancement in Bible scholarship
we also want to make inline references to Strong's concordance possible for advanced readers, which will also serve us with internal consistency and self-verifiability of the translated texts with their corresponding original languages
our efforts are inspired specifically by the hard work, scholarship and eloquence of previous translations:
- New Revised Standard Version of 1989 (especially the Common Bible edition for all Christians);
- New American Standard Bible of 1995; and
- New English Translation of 2005
our guiding original text references are:
- Westminster Codex Leningradensis
- Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, the Leon Levy online archives
- Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 28th edition
the NewOpenBible will draw upon available texts in the public domain from two independent traditions:
- the American Standard Version (ASV) released 1901, former copyright has now expired so it is in the public domain and free to be published without payment of royalty---
- a free updated revision is the World English Bible (WEB), one of the two most popular public domain, modern-English translations of the entire Bible and freely distributed to the public using electronic formats, a Hebrew Names Version is also available as the World Messianic Bible or World English Bible, Messianic Edition (WEB:ME)
- the Open English Bible (OEB) derived from the public domain Twentieth Century New Testament (TCNT) based on "The New Testament in the Original Greek" by Westcott and Hort in 1881, and public domain translations of the Hebrew Bible done by John E McFadyen and Charles F Kent based on the Westminster online digital copy of the Codex Leningradensis maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research at the Westminster Theological Seminary
we will avoid unnecessary interpretation; ambiguous cultural or technical references in the original will be preserved for the readers consideration with appropriate notes most of all, we shall not diminish the divine glory and supreme authority of God as witnessed by the original scriptures, and proclaim how God is fulfilling His promises in the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ
The Open English Bible is the anticipated end product of a project intended to create an English translation of the Bible that is:
- under a licence enabling the maximum reuse, remixing and sharing without requiring the payment of royalties or the obtaining of permission from copyright holders; and
- a translation reflecting modern English usage and Biblical scholarship.
The New Testament of the OEB is being formed by editing the public domain Twentieth Century New Testament (TCNT), which was a new translation of the New Testament published in the early twentieth century, based on the Greek text of Westcott and Hort.
The Hebrew Bible is being formed by editing a number of public domain translations done by John E McFadyen and Charles F Kent.
As such, the OEB as a translation does not stand within the Tyndale tradition but has a separate tradition in a similar manner to the NIV and New English Bible.
Its website is at http://OpenEnglishBible.org
This source tree contains:
final-usfm/ The final generated usfm. This is probably what you want if you want to use the NewOpenBible usfm files.
source/ These are the OpenEnglishBible.org source files we are working from. They are USFM files with a layer of markup to handle variations.
src-usfm/ These are the other source files we are working from (NOT from the OEB, but all in the public domain /CC0) originating from the ASV to modern emendations contributed by the WEB
scratch/ These are various support documents such as books not yet fit for the development version.
build.py The python 2.x script which creates a set of USFM files from the usfm.db files
build-standard.sh Shell script which builds the two main sets of USFM files in final-usfm/us and final-usfm/cth
all content and text source files used are in the public domain in the original or are released here under the creative commons 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License, 3.5, and 3.0 international and PH-adapted local license and all changes here are made available in the same free license (Attribution-ShareAlike License) for the sole purpose of availability and preserving freedom to use and share content, including transclusion in other relevant media under the same or any compatible license..
the Word of God spans millennia of Human History and we believe the message that frees all of us should be free from all arbitrary and artificial control in its translation and distribution as well
the GitHub repository contains backend source code (primarily Python scripts and associated documentation) used in transforming the source files to formatted content, which is copyright (c) 2010-2013 Russell Allen and available under the BSD licence, a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BSD/
changes and improvements are more than welcome! Feel free to fork and open a pull request
you can open issues for meta-changes, feedback or additional perspective regarding this project
all contribution and communication on GitHub will be released in the same creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike License stated above (4.0, 3.5, 3.0 international +PH-adapted local license) for the Bible texts, and BSD-license for the scripts and source code, unless otherwise indicated