The Scriptures

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.

The New Testament

The Gospels

The Acts of the Apostles

The Letters of Paul

The Catholic Epistles

The Revelation

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The Old Testament

Orthodox Old Testament tradition rests on the Septuagint — the Greek translation the New Testament writers most often quote — rather than on the Hebrew text behind most English Bibles. This site's own calendar shows it: the readings it appoints are named the Septuagint's way, and among the books it draws on is the Wisdom of Solomon, which a Protestant Bible does not contain. Which books belong to the Old Testament is not settled identically across the Orthodox world, and the canon used here is the broad one the Greek tradition prints.

The Law

The Histories

The Books of Wisdom

The Prophets

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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.

And the Old Testament

The Old Testament here is a different translation, and the difference is worth knowing about. Orthodox Old Testament tradition rests on the Septuagint — the Greek translation the New Testament writers most often quote — which 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, so it is not used here. What is used instead is Sir Lancelot Brenton's 1851 English translation of the Septuagint, which is also in the public domain.

The two translations are a century and a half apart, and they do not sound alike: Brenton is Victorian where the World English Bible is modern. Every chapter page says which text it is showing, and Brenton's own footnotes are kept.