Matthew
The Gospel written for people who already knew the Scriptures, and who needed to be shown that they had been reading about Him all along.
You do not have to leave the site to look something up. Every chapter is here, every verse has its own link, and when the calendar says the reading for the day is John 12:19–36, that reference opens the passage.
27books
260chapters
Majority textthe Byzantine tradition
Public domainquote it, copy it, print it
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The Gospels
Mark
The shortest Gospel, and the fastest. Read it in one sitting and you will understand why the Church has never been able to slow it down.
Luke
Volume one of two, written by a careful man who went and asked people what they remembered.
John
The fourth Gospel does not begin at Bethlehem. It begins before the world did.
The Acts of the Apostles
The Letters of Paul
Romans
The longest and most carefully argued thing Paul wrote, sent ahead of him to a church he had never visited.
1 Corinthians
A letter to a church that was doing almost everything wrong, from a man who loved it anyway.
2 Corinthians
The most personal, most wounded thing Paul wrote.
Galatians
Paul angry. There is no other word for it.
Ephesians
Less a letter than a long look upward.
Philippians
Written from prison, and the most cheerful thing in the New Testament.
Colossians
Christ is not one power among others. That is the whole letter.
1 Thessalonians
Probably the oldest book in the New Testament.
2 Thessalonians
Somebody had told them the Day of the Lord had already come.
1 Timothy
How to keep a church in one piece when the apostle has gone.
2 Timothy
A last letter, from a man who knew it was the last.
Titus
Organise Crete. Good luck.
Philemon
The shortest letter Paul wrote, and the one that asks the most.
Hebrews
Anonymous, magnificent, and nobody has ever known who wrote it.
The Catholic Epistles
James
Faith that does not do anything is dead. Four chapters, no throat-clearing.
1 Peter
Written to people who were being frozen out, not yet arrested.
2 Peter
The most disputed book in the New Testament — and the Church’s own historians said so first.
1 John
No greeting, no address, no name. It just starts.
2 John
Thirteen verses, and one hard instruction.
3 John
The most ordinary document in the New Testament, which is why it is worth reading.
Jude
Twenty-five verses, written in a hurry, and quoting a book that is not in anyone’s Bible.
The Revelation
Revelation
Canonical Scripture, and never read aloud in an Orthodox church.
About this text
This is the World English Bible. It was chosen for two reasons, and the second one is the one that matters.
The first is legal: it is in the public domain, so it can be quoted at length, copied and printed without asking anyone. Almost every modern English Bible is restricted, which is why most sites can only show you a verse or two.
The second is textual. There is more than one Greek New Testament. Most modern English Bibles follow a reconstruction built largely on a small number of early Egyptian manuscripts. The Orthodox Church reads the Byzantine text — the text carried by the great majority of surviving Greek manuscripts and used continuously in the Greek-speaking Church. The World English Bible's own preface says its New Testament "was updated to conform to the Majority Text reconstruction of the original Greek manuscripts." That is the same family of text read in an Orthodox parish, which is why it is the one here.
It is not a translation made by or for Orthodox Christians, and this site does not pretend otherwise. Where a passage matters and the wording is contested, say so to your priest rather than settling it from a web page.
What is not here yet
The Old Testament. That is deliberate rather than unfinished. The Orthodox Old Testament is the Septuagint — the Greek translation the apostles themselves quoted — and it differs from the Hebrew text behind most English Bibles in its wording, in its numbering of the Psalms, and in which books it contains at all. The World English Bible's Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew. Linking an Orthodox lectionary reading to it would be quietly wrong, so the Old Testament readings on the calendar pages are shown but not yet linked. A public-domain Septuagint is the next piece of this.