Which translation this site quotes, and why

Why the default is a public-domain text

Every verse this site cites appears in full on a public page, and several appear inside downloadable data. That is only possible with a text that can be freely republished, which is why the World English Bible is the default rather than a more familiar modern translation.

The alternatives are offered because readers have preferences and because comparison is genuinely useful. The picker records which translation produced the text on screen, so a passage is never labelled as one edition while showing another.

Generated, not typed

The public-domain texts are extracted from pinned source files by a build step, and the generated files record the source, the retrieval date, and a content hash. They are never hand-edited. If a citation is added, the build regenerates the text and fails if the committed result does not match.

This exists because the alternative failed. Hand-maintained Scripture drifts: a word gets normalised, a punctuation mark modernised, a verse quietly conformed to what the writer remembered. Each change is small and none is visible in review, and after enough of them the text on the page is nobody’s edition.

The copyrighted texts, and their limits

The picker also labels what it actually rendered. If a translation has no text for a cited verse, the reader sees the public-domain fallback with the fallback named, rather than a passage mislabelled as an edition it did not come from. A wrong translation label is a small but real misattribution, and it is exactly the kind that goes unnoticed. The New International, English Standard, Common English Bible, and NRSVue readings are used under the publishers’ terms and remain their property. Their inclusion transfers nothing and grants no right to redistribute them. Because those permissions cap how much may be shown, repeated rendered passages and speech excerpts are counted conservatively and checked automatically against the licence limits, so growing content cannot quietly breach them.

Spoken lines get an additional check. When a character in the story says something drawn from Scripture, that line has to be a strict verbatim slice of the cited verse — the same words, the same punctuation — rather than a paraphrase presented in quotation marks. A speech bubble asserts that someone said this, and a loose rendering inside one is a small fabrication.

The attribution is checked as well as the wording. A verbatim quotation can still be put in the wrong mouth, and a verse spoken jointly, or reported rather than quoted, stays on a verse card instead of becoming dialogue. Narration that summarises what Acts reports is written as narration, not dressed up as speech.

The King James text is public domain in most of the world, but in the United Kingdom rights in the Authorized Version are vested in the Crown and administered by its patentees. This site is readable worldwide and does not geoblock, so that limitation is recorded rather than ignored.