How a 25-year volunteer translation found a new home on Books4Free, why we kept the name Yahweh, and where this road eventually leads.

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A few weeks ago I was looking at the reading stats for our King James Bible — the most-read book on Books4Free, and one of the first we ever made fully free with AI study tools. And I kept thinking about the reader who opens Genesis 1, hits the thees and thous and “waters which were under the firmament,” and quietly closes the tab.

The King James is a monument. It shaped the English language itself. But it is also four hundred years old, and for a lot of people it stands between them and the text, not in front of it.

So I went looking for a modern-English Bible we could offer the same way we offer everything on Books4Free: completely free, no paywall, no permission slips. And that’s when I learned something that genuinely surprised me.

Almost every modern Bible is locked

The NIV, the ESV, the NASB, the NLT — nearly every Bible translated into contemporary English is under active copyright. Owned by publishers. Licensed for quotation. Priced for purchase. If you want to freely copy, print, share, or build tools around the Bible in the English you actually speak, the door has been closed for most of a century.

The exceptions were the King James (1611) and the American Standard Version (1901) — both public domain, both written in English nobody has spoken for generations.

One man decided that was wrong, and spent twenty-five years doing something about it.

Michael Johnson’s twenty-five-year gift

In 1994, a Christian engineer named Michael Paul Johnson started the project no publisher would touch. Working under Rainbow Missions in Colorado, he took the American Standard Version of 1901 — widely regarded as the most rigorously literal English translation of its era — and began updating its language into natural modern English.

There was no committee of royal appointees, the way the King James had. There was the early internet. Draft books were posted openly, and volunteer proofreaders around the world compared the wording against the Hebrew and Greek and sent corrections. Book by book, through multiple editing passes, for a quarter of a century, until the text was declared stable in 2020.

It’s called the World English Bible. And then Johnson’s team did the thing that separates it from every modern alternative: they dedicated the entire work to the public domain. Not a license. Not free-with-conditions. Given away outright, in their own words:

“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.”

When I read that dedication, the decision was already made. This translation belonged on Books4Free.

The name of God, and a promise we made

Building the World English Bible into our reader, I hit a choice point that taught me something about what it means to host someone else’s life’s work.

The WEB has one famous distinctive. Where nearly every English Bible masks God’s proper name — the Hebrew YHWH, which appears nearly seven thousand times in the Old Testament — behind “the LORD” in small capitals, the World English Bible prints it: Yahweh. “Yahweh is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing.”

That choice wasn’t Johnson’s invention. It was the boldest decision of his 1901 source text, which printed the name as “Jehovah” — and Johnson carried the conviction forward, corrected by a century of scholarship on how the name was actually pronounced.

There are newer editions of the WEB that walk this back to the familiar “LORD.” We chose the classic edition, Yahweh intact. Not because of any theological position of mine — but because when a man spends twenty-five years on a translation and gives it away free, you honor his translation. You don’t edit a gift. The same principle that means we’d never touch a word of Melville means we ship the World English Bible exactly as its maker dedicated it.

What we built around it

Over one long stretch of days, the World English Bible went from an idea to a complete experience on Books4Free:

• Every chapter free to read — all 1,189 of them, no paywall, formatted verse by verse.
• Switch translations mid-verse — reading Psalm 23 in the King James and want it in modern English? One tap moves you to the same psalm in the WEB, and back. Classic 1611 English and Modern English, side by side in spirit.
• An AI study assistant that knows the whole book — ask what the Bible says about forgiveness, hope, money, or grief, and get answers grounded in the actual text, with clickable verse references.
• Nearly a hundred topic pages in each translation — what the Bible says about love, faith, marriage, work, doubt — every page linked to its twin in the other English.
• Free audio — hear the opening chapter narrated free, and the rest of the audiobook doesn’t sit pre-recorded in a warehouse: chapters are generated on demand, summoned into existence by the people listening.

All of it built by one person working with AI, on a server that costs less per month than a family pizza night — which feels appropriate for a book that was given away free.

You can start reading right now: The World English Bible — free on Books4Free · the King James Bible · the full story of the WEB

And if you want the translation’s source, visit the project that made it possible: eBible.org, where Michael Johnson and the volunteers still maintain it. We built the house; they gave the world the book.

Where this goes: every language

Here’s the part I haven’t said out loud before.

The World English Bible was never just an English project. Johnson’s eBible.org hosts openly-licensed scripture in hundreds of languages — a quiet, decades-deep library of translations that, like the WEB, exist to be given away. Spanish. Portuguese. French. Chinese. Swahili. Tagalog. Languages with millions of speakers and no free, modern, well-built digital Bible experience.

The pipeline we built for the World English Bible — the ingestion, the verse formatting, the chapter structure, the reader, the study tools — doesn’t care what language flows through it. Our intent is to extend this, translation by translation, language by language, as far as the openly-given texts reach: the same free reader, the same study tools, the same promise. No paywall in any tongue.

That’s a long road. But so was Johnson’s — he just kept walking it for twenty-five years, and then handed everyone the result for nothing.

The least we can do is build it a home worthy of the gift. That’s what Books4Free is for.

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