All articles 20 min read Intermediate Essay

A history of the World English Bible, the public-domain revision of the American Standard Version that this reader opens to

Four Chapters a Day

Begun in 1994 by a Colorado engineer who designed ciphers, drafted from the American Standard by a program of his own, and revised by hand from volunteers’ corrections for more than twenty years, it was given away before it was finished, and nobody owns its words.

A history in 6 parts · about 20 minutes · 1994 – today

1994 · A cipher designer, the National Security Agency, and a prayer

We Don’t Evaluate Designs

On the afternoon of 15 July 1994, Michael Paul Johnson was on the telephone with Brian Rink of the National Security Agency, trying to learn what an encryption program would have to be for the government to let it leave the country. He wanted to know the rules before he wrote the program. Another officer at the agency had told him he could submit a design for review. Rink told him the agency would look only at a finished program, ready to sell, and would answer yes or no with no reasons given. “We don’t evaluate designs.” Asked whether he would name an acceptable key length, the measure of a cipher’s strength, if forty bits was not acceptable, Rink said he probably would not. The government approved a later request, for a finished program called Quicrypt, more than a year after Johnson’s first inquiry, and only on condition that he keep its source code secret and cut its key to thirty-two bits. The only account of the call is Johnson’s, in a declaration for Daniel Bernstein’s suit against the State Department, the case that challenged the rules on publishing encryption.

Engraving of a small home study on a summer afternoon, seen from just inside its open door, whose edge and knob stand at the left of the frame. In the far corner is a plain desk with a bulky desktop computer case, a deep, boxy monitor on it whose screen shows only faint ruled lines, and a keyboard in front. To the right of the keyboard the telephone’s receiver lies on its side beside the base, its coiled cord slack on the desk, next to a notepad of close ruled lines with no readable letters. A wheeled office chair has been pushed back from the desk and turned aside, empty. Afternoon sun comes through the slatted blinds of a window in the left-hand wall and lays bars of light across the desk and the floor, and the right of the room falls into shadow, where a tall bookcase of plain unlettered spines stands. No person is present, and nothing written anywhere is readable. — 15 July 1994, in Johnson’s account of it: an afternoon on the telephone with the National Security Agency, which would look at a finished program and say yes or no, and would not say why.

The declaration says he was a registered professional engineer in Colorado and a computer security consultant, with a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a thesis on data compression and encryption. He had been through the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, and by his family’s account he served in submarines until 1984 and then spent some sixteen years writing software for defense and data-storage companies. He had designed ciphers, the Diamond and the Sapphire II among them, and wrote the FAQ that told people where to get PGP, the free encryption program. He was also president of Rainbow Missions, Inc., a small Colorado charity that he and his wife, Lori, had incorporated in 1985 to support missionaries, beginning with one family in Kenya. In the same declaration he wrote that he had signed his translation of the Gospel of John with his encryption key, so that readers could check that it was his and that nobody had changed it.

By his account the translation began with a prayer four months before the call. “One day in March 1994, I was praying,” its foreword of 1996 says, about the lack of a good modern English Bible that could be given away anywhere, in any number, with no royalties to pay, and he understood the answer to be that he should make one. The English Bibles that anyone could copy onto a computer and pass on were old ones, and the best known was the King James. It was tenth in Project Gutenberg’s catalog in 1989, and at the end of 1993 a member of Calvin College’s computing staff made it the first text of Bible Gateway because it was in the public domain. The modern translations in common use all had owners, and each printed an allowance of so many verses that anyone could quote without asking, never a whole Bible.

1994–1997 · God’s Living Word, two small programs, and a new name

The ASV of 1997

Johnson told the story of the prayer again in his history of the project, begun in 2007 and updated since, and there it has a setting. He was driving his beige Volkswagen Rabbit from Longmont to Boulder on the Diagonal Highway, and the prayer had become a conversation in which he argued and, by his account, the Lord prevailed. The foreword of 1996 has no car and no road.

Wide engraving of a straight two-lane highway running away from the viewer across open, treeless prairie along the foot of a long wall of mountains, seen from the roadside. The mountains fill the whole horizon, and their near face tilts up in great slanted slabs of bare rock. The road is empty from the foreground to where it vanishes, with no vehicle anywhere on it. A wire fence on posts runs along the left side of the road and a line of telephone poles along the right, both shrinking toward the vanishing point. Low sun from behind the viewer lights the faces of the rock slabs, a single long shadow cast from somewhere out of frame lies across the asphalt in the foreground, and the sky above the peaks is pale. No person is visible, and there are no road signs or writing anywhere. — The road from Longmont to Boulder, where Johnson set the prayer in his later history. His foreword of 1996 says only that he was praying one day in March 1994, with no car and no road.

He began a translation of his own from the Greek, called God’s Living Word, worked on it in the gaps of a full-time job, a church and a family, and posted it in drafts to Usenet, the internet’s public discussion groups of the day, and to a mailing list. A guide he dated 22 April 1996 set out its rules: the Name as YAHWEH, capital letters on pronouns for God, and agape translated “sincere love,” so that its First John says that God is sincere love. He copyrighted it and claimed its name as a trademark, while letting anyone copy it whole and unchanged, to keep some legal hold against a cultish revision. He had finished John and the three letters of John when, as his history tells it, he worked out his rate in verses a week and saw that at that pace he would be about a hundred and fifty years old at the end.

So he turned to the American Standard Version of 1901, out of copyright since 1957. By his history’s account, he found an electronic copy, from a source none of his accounts names, and set Microsoft Word’s spell-checker on it, which crashed the program. Over about a month of spare time he wrote two programs of his own in Delphi Pascal. The first listed every word of the American Standard that does not occur in a modern English Bible, shineth and calkers among them, and guessed a modern form from the word’s ending, leaving a blank for him to fill in where it could not. The second applied the finished table to the whole text, and its last run took about fifteen minutes. His FAQ put the table at about a thousand archaic words and forms. The result had modern words in the old order and no quotation marks, since the American Standard prints none, and Johnson said later that it sounded like Elizabethan English, or like Yoda.

The Wayback Machine keeps one book nearly as the conversion left it, the World English Bible’s Judges as generated on 14 August 2000, with only traces of handwork. Of its 618 verses, 4 have quotation marks and none begins with “And,” where 410 of the American Standard’s do. The conversion had changed smote to struck, ass to donkey and Jehovah to Yahweh, and left the sentences where they stood. At Judges 1:14 Caleb asks his daughter “What wouldest thou?” in the American Standard, “What would you?” in the converted text of 2000 and “What would you like?” today. On this site 10,402 verses of the American Standard begin with the word And and 44 of the World English Bible’s do, and thee, thou, thy, thine and ye, which the American Standard uses 18,902 times, never occur in the World English Bible, even in prayer. The Name is Yahweh because, the FAQ argued, that is the likeliest way to write it in English letters. Every later edition, the British, the Messianic, the Catholic and the Update of 2024, prints LORD, and the classic text alone keeps Yahweh, 6,840 times in this site’s copy.

He called the result the ASV of 1997, probably for the year by which he hoped to finish a first pass by hand, and his history remembers the renaming as coming after that year had gone by. His own papers put it earlier. A FAQ last revised on 26 May 1997 and posted to Usenet on 3 August already introduces the World English Bible as the text formerly called the ASV of 1997. World meant that God’s Word was for the whole world, and the initials, WEB, named the World-Wide Web the text would travel by. He had registered ebible.org on 16 April. Drafts went out on the web, as files to download, to the newsgroups alt.bible and alt.christnet.bible, and to anyone who subscribed to a mailing list called bible, which promised about four chapters a day. There was no day of publication, and the drafts went on changing while people read them.

1995–2023 · Why it is in the public domain, and the free Bibles beside it

Ten Thousand Dollars and Ten a Copy

The oldest copy of the FAQ that survives on the web, the Usenet posting of August 1997, already sets out the problem in figures. There were more than forty English Bibles, it said, and every one was either archaic, like the King James and the American Standard, or restricted, like the New International Version and the New American Standard Bible. Johnson could not post the NIV whole, searchable and downloadable, without the permission of the International Bible Society, which owned it, and Zondervan, which published it, and Zondervan wanted a royalty; “they quoted me $10,000 + $10/copy distributed,” he wrote. The printed allowances of the day ran from a few hundred verses to a thousand, depending on the Bible and the printing, and never to a whole book. In Britain the Crown’s printer licenses even the King James on the same pattern.

He wanted one modern English Bible to be free and asked for no more, and the same FAQ credited the NIV’s royalties with paying for translation into other languages. His defense of a text that nobody owned took two forms in 1997: a public declaration that it was in the public domain, so that nobody could later claim a copyright, and Revelation 22:18–19, which promises the plagues of the book to anyone who adds to it. He had copyrighted his own John for fear of a heretical revision. For the World English Bible he took the other risk. The rest of the case came later, in layers the archived FAQ can date: a trademark on the name by 2003, a refusal by 2012 of copyleft licenses, which use a copyright to keep copies free and so need one, and in 2022 the Creative Commons public-domain dedication, CC0, in a revision that also dropped Zondervan’s name.

The notice printed with every copy today says: “The Holy Bible is God’s Word. It belongs to God. He gave it to us freely, and we who have worked on this translation freely give it to you by dedicating it to the Public Domain.” The notice makes one request, that anyone who changes the text stop calling it the World English Bible.

Others were at work on the same problem. In November 1995, at the Society of Biblical Literature’s meeting in Philadelphia, a group of scholars met a sponsor who wanted a Bible to give away on the internet. They talked first of revising an existing translation and settled on a new one, the NET Bible, which went online in 1998 under copyright, free for personal use; Johnson had gone the other way, from a new translation to an old one revised. On Christmas Day 2000 an anonymous translator finished an Updated King James Version, declared it public domain, and quoted the World English Bible’s FAQ as the reason. On 30 April 2023 the publishers of the Berean Standard Bible, all rights reserved since 2016, dedicated it to the public domain, with the same request about its name. Of the fifty-six English Bibles in eBible’s catalog, the only complete modern ones that their makers dedicated to the public domain are the World English Bible’s editions and the two Berean texts. As far as can be found, the World English Bible was the first whole Bible in modern English dedicated that way, though the Updated King James Version was finished first.

1997 · The Greek underneath, and a prayer about Mark 16

The Greek of Most Manuscripts

The FAQ named the texts. The Old Testament stayed the American Standard’s, checked against the standard printed Hebrew Bible, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. For the New Testament Johnson chose the Byzantine Majority Text as distributed with the Online Bible, a free program that Larry Pierce had begun in Ontario in 1987. It is the Greek of most surviving manuscripts, most of them late, copied in the Greek church through the Middle Ages. The revisers of 1881, whose Greek the American Standard follows, had given the most weight to a few of the oldest. No document of the time names the edition behind the choice; the likeliest is Maurice Robinson’s, released electronically in 1986 and printed with William Pierpont at Atlanta in 1991, public domain from the start. The FAQ named no editor until February 2024, when it named that edition and Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad’s of 1982 together. Two of the World English Bible’s footnotes now tell the two editions apart, and at both places its text follows Robinson and Pierpont.

Johnson gave his reasons. Scribes drop lines more often than they add them, he argued; different scribes do not make the same mistake in the same place; people copied the copies they trusted; and the Holy Spirit takes an interest in keeping the text. The last reason was prayer. Where the texts differ in ways that matter, the FAQ says, he asked God and understood the answer to favor the majority, the main passage in question being in Mark 16. His history tells it differently, with God pointing him to a reading found in the Majority Text and in neither the Received Text, the Greek the King James was translated from, nor the modern critical text, which editors rebuild chiefly from the oldest copies. The long ending of Mark cannot be that reading, since the King James prints it too. He was called a heretic, he wrote, for believing that God could still speak to him. The FAQ also said the critical text leaned on a manuscript pulled from a monastery’s trash, meaning Codex Sinaiticus. Only the manuscript’s discoverer, Constantin von Tischendorf, ever told of the basket, and the leaves he said he took from it at Sinai in 1844 were Old Testament.

The choice put back twelve verses the American Standard leaves empty, among them Matthew 17:21, which the World English Bible gives as “But this kind doesn’t go out except by prayer and fasting,” the angel who stirs the pool at John 5:4, and Romans 16:24. Four verses the King James prints stay out, as they do in the American Standard: Luke 17:36 and Acts 8:37, 15:34 and 24:7. The doxology at the end of Romans stands at 14:24–26, where most Greek copies have it, so that Romans 16 ends at verse 24, and the World English Bible’s Lord’s Prayer ends again, “For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.” At Revelation 21:16 the angel measures the city at “twelve thousand twelve stadia,” which neither the King James nor the American Standard prints, and a footnote converts it to 2,221 kilometers. At Acts 20:28 the World English Bible reads what neither of the other two reads.

One verse, three hands · Acts 20:28

King James 1611 Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

American Standard 1901 Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood.

World English 2020 Take heed, therefore, to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood.

Read from Biblion’s own texts, live. The King James has the church of God and the American Standard the church of the Lord. The World English Bible follows most Greek copies to the assembly of the Lord and God, which neither of the others prints.

The World English Bible departs from the Majority Text in places. Three footnotes prefer the Received Text and the critical text together over the majority, and at Revelation 5:10 it reads “we will reign,” the King James’s first person, without a note, where the American Standard and Robinson and Pierpont have “they.” The FAQ allows that some of the American revisers’ textual decisions still stand. Robinson and Pierpont count nine Greek manuscripts in ten as Byzantine, but they call the name Majority Text a misnomer and argue from how the text was copied. Daniel Wallace, whose reply is the standard one among evangelical scholars, holds that the earliest copies should outweigh the many later ones, and counts the differences at about two thousand places from the Received Text and sixty-five hundred from the critical text, most of them too small to show in translation. In the Old Testament the World English Bible stays with the American Standard’s Hebrew, taking a reading from the Dead Sea Scrolls here and there, as at Isaiah 53:11, where the servant “will see the light and be satisfied.”

1998–2026 · Seven stages, a first printing, and a text that has not stopped

Done, but Not Frozen

From 1998 the project’s index marked each book with a stage from one to seven, from the machine’s work alone to done, and by 2001 its legend added that done was not frozen. In December 1998 the New Testament stood at five and six, and the books from Numbers to Esther and the prophets from Jeremiah to Daniel at one. Volunteers read the drafts and sent corrections to Johnson as senior editor. Every account of the volunteers is his. There were hundreds, his history says, and every change was checked at least twice; the FAQ adds that they came from many churches. He publishes no list, partly because he lost early emails when a hard disk failed and partly so that nobody will judge the translation by its least reputable helper.

The New Testament, the Psalms and Proverbs were done by October 2000, and that autumn Rainbow Missions of Longmont brought out the first printed World English Bible, those three in one paperback. It cost $21.95 in stores, $14.95 from the website or $263.76 for a case of twenty-four, and part of the money went to finish the Old Testament. By early 2004 Genesis and Exodus, Job, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and the twelve minor prophets were done as well. From the end of 2005 the index stood nearly still for six years, and Numbers sat at stage two from at least 2001 to 2011.

Engraving of an opened corrugated shipping carton standing on a bare wooden floor beside a doorway, seen from slightly above. Its flaps are folded back, and inside it one continuous row of identical paperback books stands on edge with their spines upward, packed tight from one side of the carton to the other, the spines plain and without any lettering. Near the middle of the row a single book is missing, and the dark slot it has left, no wider than one book, runs down to the bottom of the carton. A roll of packing tape lies on the floor beside the carton. Late sun from a window out of frame on the right lays the shadows of its glazing bars across the open flaps, the books and the floorboards, and the far side of the room is dim. No person is present, and nothing printed anywhere is readable. — Longmont, autumn 2000: the first printed World English Bible, a New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, sold by the copy or by the case of twenty-four.

In October 2011 Johnson moved the master text into the format Bible translators use and started again after what he called a long silence, with a backlog of 816 emails by the end of November. Then the books fell one after another, Numbers and Deuteronomy that November and the histories through 2012. Over Christmas he went through 2 Chronicles chapter by chapter, then Ezra on 4 January 2013, and on 5 January he wrote that he had “called that book done,” meaning Nehemiah, which ten years before had been machine output. On 9 January 2014 he announced every book of both Testaments essentially done. That August a reader reported two words missing at Matthew 7:14 in a printed copy, which was how Johnson learned that someone else had typeset the whole Bible and put it on sale. He announced it as “whole Bible in print (I think)” and said that this was what giving up a copyright meant.

The Apocrypha, added in 2004 as a revision of the King James’s and rebuilt from 2011 on from the English revisers’ Apocrypha of 1895, took six more years. On 8 January 2020, by the date on his post, Johnson announced the language update complete and the text stable in every book. “Yes, it is finally done. At least we think it is,” his history says.

The hands kept going where the machine stopped. Nearly twenty-five hundred words that the American Standard uses appear nowhere in the World English Bible. Church is one of them, and all 111 are now assembly or assemblies, as in “on this rock I will build my assembly,” a change already made by August 2000, for which no published reason has been found. Gospel is Good News throughout, and the four Gospels are titled “The Good News According to” their writers. Jehovah of hosts is Yahweh of Armies in all 260 places. The preface calls the result informal, spoken English, “designed to sound good and be accurate when read aloud,” with contractions used freely, 3,950 of them in this site’s copy, and quotation marks in 9,314 verses. Behold stayed, 1,336 times, defended in the glossary as “Look! See! Wow! Notice this! Lo!” Some changes are new renderings of the Hebrew and Greek: “You shall not murder” for thou shalt not kill, “Every Scripture is God-breathed” for every scripture inspired of God, a ship for Noah’s ark, and “the virgin” for a virgin at Isaiah 7:14. Four words in five are still the American Standard’s, and only 988 of the 31,083 verses that both carry come through word for word.

The project has retranslated the best-known verse twice. The American Standard, like the King James, has God giving “his only begotten Son.” The World English Bible of 2000 read “his one and only Son,” and still did in May 2018; by November 2019 it read “his only born Son,” with a footnote naming both older renderings. Only born now stands at all nine places where the Greek has monogenes, three of them in Luke, where the American Standard had said only son, only daughter and only child. The John that Johnson translated himself, in the copy eBible carries, also says only born.

One verse, three hands · John 3:16

King James 1611 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

American Standard 1901 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.

World English 2020 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Read from Biblion’s own texts, live. The King James and the American Standard have only begotten. The World English Bible had one and only until at least May 2018, and only born by November 2019.

The text has gone on changing since 2020. Between July 2025 and September 2026, 171 verses changed in eBible’s files, most of them in wording. At Revelation 20:11 the earth and the heaven that flee from the great white throne became the earth and the sky on 4 October 2025, and in June 2026 “exalted in the earth” at Psalm 46:10 became “on the earth.” The FAQ says the project now corrects only real errors, and a few language updates it found compelling. For most of its life the project kept no record of its changes, and Johnson’s history sent anyone who wanted such a record to the Wayback Machine. The World English Bible on this site is eBible’s file of 29 July 2026.

2000–today · Where it went, and where it is read

Freely You Received

Anyone could copy the World English Bible, and many people did. By May 2000 David Williams was offering MP3 recordings of it at AudioTreasure.com, under a copyright notice of 1999 that the text itself did not carry. Project Gutenberg released it on 1 June 2005 as sixty-seven ebooks. In April 2006 nine LibriVox volunteers read psalms from it for a weekly poetry project and gave the recordings away; LibriVox readers had recorded the whole Bible by January 2009, and two men have since each read all of it alone. Faith Comes By Hearing made a dramatized New Testament of it with about a hundred and eighty characters, and in March 2005 Joel Peter Anderson generated a Klingon version, which describes itself as “an experimental relexification of the WEB.”

Engraving of a corner of a quiet room at night, set up for recording. A music stand holds an open book whose pages are covered in close ruled lines with no readable letters, and beside it a microphone stands on a tall stand with a round mesh screen in front of it. A plain wooden chair stands empty facing them both, a pair of headphones hung by its band over the chair’s back, and the headphones’ cable runs down and across the floorboards to a small box on a side table, where one tiny indicator light glows. A reading lamp clipped to the top of the music stand throws a pool of light over the open pages, and the rest of the room falls away into darkness. No person is present, and nothing written anywhere is readable. — April 2006: nine LibriVox volunteers read psalms from the World English Bible, two of them Psalm 23, and gave the recordings away.

Johnson went into full-time mission work in 2000, and the site he registered in 1997 now publishes 1,542 translations in 1,242 languages. By the site’s own count from its server logs, which include machines reading the web to train artificial intelligence, the classic World English Bible was the text it delivered most in the twelve months through August 2026, some 3.4 million times. Since 2022 the site has published draft public-domain Bibles in French, Spanish and Portuguese, and in 2026 Chinese, translated from the World English Bible, footnotes and all. Researchers use it as the English half of the parallel Bibles they train machine translation on, and one copy, frozen into a test that researchers score their programs against, still has the earth and the heaven fleeing at Revelation 20:11, a year after the readers’ text changed.

Its reception has been quiet. No review in a scholarly journal has turned up, and nobody has found a church that adopted it for the pulpit. In October 1998 Gary Zeolla, a lay translator, judged the unfinished draft about as accurate and readable as the New King James. GotQuestions, the evangelical question-and-answer site, gives the verdict most often met now, that it is accurate and free and not always natural English, and Bible Gateway, which carries it, still described it in September 2026 as “in draft form,” six years after its editor declared it complete.

On this site it is the Bible you open to unless you choose the King James, the American Standard, the Geneva or Tyndale. The commentary quotes it whichever translation you have chosen, and where another text lacks a verse, the World English Bible stands in, labeled as itself.

Its dedication echoes the charge Jesus gives the twelve at Matthew 10:8, which it translates “Freely you received, so freely give.” The verse is shorter there than in the King James and the American Standard. Both have the twelve raise the dead as well as heal the sick, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons, and the World English Bible, following most of the Greek copies, leaves out “raise the dead” and notes that the Received Text adds it.

1985 – today

The whole thing, in order

1985Michael and Lori Johnson incorporate Rainbow Missions in Colorado, 26 November.
1994A prayer in March; an afternoon on the telephone with the National Security Agency, 15 July.
1996Johnson copyrights and signs his own John, God’s Living Word; its guide is dated 22 April.
1997Johnson registers ebible.org, 16 April; the ASV of 1997 becomes the World English Bible by May; its FAQ reaches Usenet, 3 August, with the Majority Text and Zondervan’s price.
1998The index marks every book with a stage from one to seven by December.
2000The New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs are done, and Rainbow Missions publishes them in Longmont.
2004A first Apocrypha appears, revised from the King James’s.
2005Project Gutenberg releases it as sixty-seven ebooks, 1 June.
2014Johnson declares every book of both Testaments essentially done, 9 January; someone else’s printing of the whole Bible turns up in August.
2019John 3:16 reads only born by November.
2020Johnson declares the language update complete, 8 January.
2022The FAQ names CC0, 14 September; drafts of French, Spanish and Portuguese Bibles made from it appear.
2025At Revelation 20:11 the heaven becomes the sky, 4 October.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history, assembled from the documents named below, and where they disagree the disagreement has been left in the prose.

Almost everything known about the founding of the World English Bible and the people who revised it comes from Michael Paul Johnson himself: his foreword of 1996, the project’s FAQ in the versions the Wayback Machine has kept since 1997, its mailing list and changelog, and his history, begun in 2007. His accounts differ from one another in places, and the page says where. The telephone call of July 1994 rests on his declaration in the Bernstein case. The dating of the revision book by book rests on archived copies of the project’s own index pages up to 2011, and on its mailing list and changelog after.

The counts of words and verses were made on the electronic texts this site carries, the World English Bible file of 29 July 2026 and the American Standard as repaired in September 2026, and the count of changed verses on eBible’s own files of July 2025 to September 2026; they describe those files, not a printed book. The delivery figures are eBible’s own estimates from its server logs, and the verdicts quoted near the end are opinions, named as such.

Now read it

The World English Bible is the text this reader opens to, beside the American Standard it was made from and the King James behind them both.