In March 1994, before the World-Wide Web was something most people in the United States knew existed, I was praying. I was in a beige Volkswaken Rabbit, driving from Longmont to Boulder on the Diagonal Highway and talking with the Lord. I was asking Him directly about the lack of a modern English, quality translation of the Holy Bible that could be freely distributed and copied without royalty payments or copyright violations via electronic and print media.
To be honest, the answer startled me. The Lord clearly told me to do a Bible translation. We discussed that for a while, and the Lord prevailed over my rather lame arguments. (I'm glad the Lord is patient with me.) One message from God can change things forever.
I started studying some things about Biblical Greek and Hebrew, learned to use some scholarly helps, and dug in, starting with John. The resulting translation was called "God's Living Word." I started posting drafts of the translation on appropriate groups in Usenet and on an email mailing list. Many people came along side and helped with the work by proofreading, suggesting improvements in wording, etc. Most of these people I don't even know, or know their qualifications. Some claimed to be experts, some did not, but I judged their suggestions, not the suggesters. We got through John, John's letters, and we were starting on Revelation, when I calculated my rate of progress, in verses per week, and extrapolated how long it would take to translate the whole Bible at that rate. You see, I was working full time in an engineering job, active in church, taking care of a family, and doing this translation in little snippets of time that were available after all of that. Consequently, I had to be very efficient with my time, but could not compromise on accuracy. After all, this is the Holy Word of God we were talking about. Anyway, since I wasn't happy with my projected age (about 150 years old) at the time of project completion, and I wasn't sure Jesus would wait that long to come back, I took this up with the Lord again.
Naturally, the Lord's answer surprised me. He first pointed out to me that the American Standard Version of 1901 was firmly in the Public Domain. Indeed, it was even more so than the more archaic King James Version, which is still encumbered (at least technically) by Crown Letters Patent that have legal effect in England and Wales. The ASV is also widely regarded as an accurate and reliable translation of the Holy Bible into English. It was the obvious choice for updating to modern English. Next, our Most Holy Lord suggested doing a spell-checking style update of the vocabulary.
I promptly went out and found an electronic copy of the American Standard Version of 1901. I then loaded it up into the then-current version of Microsoft Word, and attempted to spell-check and correct the whole thing. The sheer size of the text and large number of corrections quickly crashed Microsoft Word. I learned from that exercise, though, and wrote a couple of custom computer programs using my then-favorite programming language, Delphi Pascal. The first one scanned the ASV text for unique words that were not found in a modern English Bible, like "shineth" and "caulkers," and put them in a database table along with a suggested substitution. The suggested substitution was based on recognizing certain Elizabethan English suffixes and common words, and replacing them with their modern English equivalents. If the program logic didn't recognize one of those cases, it simply left the suggested substitution blank. It was then up to a real human (me) to look up the remaining words in context and find the appropriate substitution. The second custom program read the text of the ASV and made all of the substitutions listed in the table. This all took about a month of spare-time programming and about 15 minutes for the final run of the program. The end result, which I called the ASV 1997 revision (for lack of a better name) was not quite modern English, in that it still lacked quotation marks and still had some word ordering that sounded more like Elizabethan English or maybe Yoda than modern English.
In the process of doing the above transformation on the ASV, I invented a simple-to-parse format for representing Scripture text. I wanted something that would be easy to edit, easy to process, and easy to convert to other formats like HTML and formats for printing. I didn't know about SIL Standard Format, then, unfortunately, or I probably would have used that. However, that is OK, and probably even good, because I learned a lot in that exercise. After using my format for a while, I revised it, and the revision is called General Bible Format (GBF). I have since replaced it with yet another format (USFX), which is easy to convert back and forth to SIL/UBS USFM. The reason for this upgrade was to also be able to handle the wealth of Bible translations in minority languages that are in the related USFM, doing similar transformations on them for publication purposes. That strategy has borne much fruit, as you can see at eBible.org/find
The cool thing about any of these formats is that, with the proper software tools, you can have one master copy of a Bible translation and generate many formats for publication, as you can see listed on the World English Bible site, today.
I became increasingly dissatisfied with the ASV97 name for the new Bible translation, especially after 1997 had passed, so I asked the Lord in prayer what the name should be. That is when the World English Bible (WEB) got its current name. It makes sense, too, since it is targeted at English speakers all over the world, and it is distributed primarily over the World-Wide Web.
Changing vocabulary from old to new was pretty quick. Some of the remaining grammatical updates concerning word order, usage, and punctuation were not easy to automate, so those have been done (and in some books, are still being done) manually, with prayer and lots of attention to detail. Every change gets checked at least twice, normally by different people.
One of the troubling issues of Bible translation is which original-language text should be regarded as most authoritative. Scholarly opinion is divided between the Nestle-Aland/UBS text (NU) that is weighted heavily based on ages of manuscripts, the text underlying the KJV translation (Textus Receptus or TR), and the Byzantine Majority Text (MT). These differences are, to my way of thinking, the equivalent of no more than a theological ant hill, because the differences between texts, though numerous, are small, and often make no difference in meaning at all. None of them affect any essential doctrine that cannot be supported with other Scripture passages where there is no dispute over the wording. To resolve this issue, I did a radical thing. I asked the Author for guidance. After all, it is His Book, and I wanted to give Him the respect that He deserves. He answered clearly, not by directly picking one of the three options I asked about, but by pointing out the correct rendering of a passage as it was in the MT, but not in the TR or NU. Many people have chipped in comments, some praising this decision, and some deriding it. I was even called a heretic for believing that God could actually communicate with me, today. No matter. He did, and I fear Him and respect His opinion over everyone else's. Therefore, a couple of us working on the project took on the challenge of conforming the WEB New Testament to the Greek Majority Text New Testament, as the Lord directed. That is why, even though the WEB is derived from the ASV, it is based on the MT instead of the Greek text used by the ASV translators (which was close to the NU text).
At one point in time, I joined forces with Wayne Mitchell to create a Hebrew Names Version, also called the World English Bible: Messianic Edition or World Messianic Bible (WMB). This is the same as the World English Bible, except for three main things. It substitutes English spellings for some Hebrew names for people, places, and festivals in place of equivalent Greek/English names. It goes back to the tradition of substituting "LORD" or "GOD" for God's proper Name in the Old Testament, instead of using the transliterated "Yahweh" that the WEB uses. It also boldly renders "baptism" as "immersion." The target audience for the WMB is genuine Messianic Jews who speak English as a first language. The WMB was generated automatically from the WEB using a phrase substitution list and a custom program to make the changes on that list. In the history of that project, there was much debate on just how far to go with the name substitution (more or fewer), exactly how to handle God's Proper Name in the Old Testament, and about the baptism/immersion translation decision. The current mix seems to be a good balance. Some people are really taken aback that the Names of God are not treated the same way as other names. So far, without exception, the people making those comments have not been Messianic Jews.
The text of the World Messianic Bible is now frozen and unlinked from the text of the World English Bible. We don't plan to make any further changes in the text unless obvious problems or typos are discovered.
The World English Bible is published electronically on the World-Wide Web at several different web addresses, including WorldEnglish.Bible, and eBible.org/eng-web/. Many different formats are available for browsing online or downloading. Because it is in the Public Domain, the World English Bible has found its way to many other web sites, Bible study programs, etc. I lost count long ago.
Printed editions of the World English Bible are available at eBible.org/buy.php.
Without taking a doctrinal position on these books, the concensus view among WEB volunteer leadership was that the books found in "Catholic" Bibles that were missing in most "Protestant" Bibles were worth preserving and including in this work. Since the ASV didn't have an Apocrypha, the WEB Apocrypha is based on the KJV Apocrypha and the Brenton English translation of the Greek Septuagint.
There are several audio recordings of the WEB that I'm aware of, including:
In most cases, the edits made are small but very numerous, such as adding quotation marks, swapping word order to something more natural for modern English speakers, etc. Rather than log each of these individually, we rely on automated version comparison programs to keep track of what changed, when. Readers can do the same thing by keeping older versions for reference (or searching the Wayback Machine). To see changes from the beginning of the project, compare it with the American Standard Version. There are various free and commercial software sources for text comparison. One is built in to the Browser Bible, and it works if you can figure out the user interface.
The World English Bible is an open text project with drafts posted on the Internet and with readings emailed out daily for for anyone to see who wants to and who has Internet access. Anyone can email typo reports, translation suggestions, etc., and many people do. We don't require a set of credentials from all contributors, but every suggestion is double-checked and evaluated before being accepted or rejected. Some people have done excellent scholarly work. Some have just noticed a typo or punctuation problem and reported it. It all adds up to some very good quality control. Sometimes people point out an alternate reading that is more clear and still accurate. Sometimes people suggest things that don't preserve the meaning of the text, or try to push some strange theological agenda, and those suggestions are summarily dismissed. Those suggestions that improve the readability and/or accuracy with no compromise in the meaning get accepted. We don't have a complete list of all contributors, but there have been hundreds. (Some early contributors' emails were lost in a hard disk crash, so we couldn't make one if we wanted to.) We don't publish a list of contributors lest people judge the Bible translation by the character or theology of the most disreputable of the contributors (whose suggestions would probably have been rejected, anyway). We do, however, acknowledge that this is far from being a one-man work, and many have helped in the process. The glory all goes to God, though, because it is His Word and He enables us all to do this work and guides us in the process.
The most frequently asked question is when the whole World English Bible will be done, stable, and put into print in various formats. Yes, it is finally done. At least we think it is. We have stopped doing any language updates. We will still correct obvious typos or serious problems, but other than that, the text is frozen for stability. There is still some publishing work to do. Although the electronic distribution is looking very good, right now, the print distribution has room to grow. Go to WorldEnglish.Bible for digital downloads, or install any of the Crosswire Sword project apps and download it from the eBible.org repository. You can buy a printed copy now, although better quality print copies are coming soon.