The World English Bible (WEB) is an English translation of the Bible freely shared online. The translation work began in 1994

History

In 1994, Michael Paul Johnson felt commissioned by God "to create a new modern English translation of the Holy Bible that would be forever free to use, publish, and distribute."

Johnson's main goal became modernizing the language of ASV. He created custom computer programs to organize this process, resulting in the initial draft of 1997 which "was not quite modern English, in that it still lacked quotation marks and still had some word ordering that sounded more like Elizabethan English or maybe Yoda than modern English." The entire translation effort was deemed complete in 2020, Future substantial revisions will be forked to a separate World English Bible Update project. The reasons given were that they felt copyright was an ineffective way of protecting the text's integrity and the fact that the Creative Commons licenses did not exist at the time the project began.

Critical reception

The Provident Planning website uses the World English Bible because it is free of copyright restrictions and because the author considers it to be a good translation.

The Bible Megasite review of the World English Bible says it is a good revision of the American Standard Version of 1901 (ASV) into contemporary English, which also corrects some textual issues with the ASV.

The World English Bible is widely published in digital formats by a variety of publishers.

See also

  • Literal English Version – A derivative of the WEB
  • New American Standard Bible
  • Open English Bible – A primarily digitally published translation
  • Modern Literal Version – A primarily digitally published translation
  • New English Translation – A primarily digitally published translation

References

  • Official website

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