Every text on this site, with its translator, its date, its licence, and a link to the original you can download and check against what we serve. Nothing here is paraphrased, re-edited, or silently corrected.
We use public domain texts on purpose. A translation you must pay a licence fee to quote is a translation you cannot freely give away, and Scripture that cannot be freely given away is not doing its job.
Now Readable, Still Unfinished: the 1560 Geneva Apocrypha
We are transcribing the Apocrypha of the 1560 Geneva Bible directly from public domain page scans. It is now readable on this site, and it is not finished. We would rather publish it with its gaps named than either hide it or let it look complete.
Where it stands today
- 5,715 verses transcribed, covering all thirteen books and every chapter, with no gaps left inside any chapter.
- One verse number, Tobit 4:5, is absent because this edition does not print it. The page runs 3, 4, 6, and we have left it that way rather than borrowing the verse from another translation to make the numbering look tidy.
- Italics are marked on part of the text only.The books transcribed most recently carry them; the earlier ones do not yet. Where they are absent, the words are right but the translators’ own marking of their additions is not yet recorded.
- Spacing and punctuation have been normalised per our published rule on the newer material; the earlier material still awaits that pass.
None of that is a reason to distrust a verse you read. It is a reason not to assume the chapter you are reading is whole.
Check our work
Every verse here was read from one identified copy, photographed and hosted free by the Internet Archive. It is the same copy, page for page, that our transcribers worked from. If a reading looks wrong to you, go and look at the page.
The 1560 Geneva Bible, page scans at the Internet Archive →We record the leaf each verse came from, so a passage can be traced back to the exact page it was read off.
A measured error rate is work in progress. We would rather publish the source and say the measurement is not done than quote a figure we have not earned. When it exists, it will appear here with the method that produced it.
It exists because no usable free copy does. The 1560 Geneva is public domain everywhere, yet every complete digital “Geneva” in circulation carries Laurence Tomson’s 1576 New Testament rather than the 1560 text, and the widely reprinted modern 1599 Geneva Bible is a copyrighted edition with modernised spelling. The only genuine 1560 witnesses are photographs of the printed page. So we are reading those pages and typing what they say.
Why this matters: the 1560 Geneva was a pre-King-James Reformation English Bible that still carried the deuterocanonical books. That combination survives in no free digital edition we could find.
Why its verse numbers do not always match our other translations
The 1560 divides and numbers several books differently from the King James and the Septuagint editions alongside it. These are genuine features of the edition, not errors, and we have preserved them rather than renumbering to match:
The Prayer of Azariah
Numbered continuously with Daniel chapter 3, so it runs from verse 24 to verse 90 rather than starting at verse 1. Measured against an edition that starts at 1, a complete text looks two thirds finished.
The Epistle of Jeremiah
Printed as chapter 6 of Baruch, not as a separate book. Looked for on its own, it appears missing; it is simply filed where the 1560 puts it.
Susanna
Runs to verse 65 in this edition, where several later editions end at 64.
The Prayer of Manasseh
Does not appear in this copy at all. Bel and the Dragon is followed immediately by 1 Maccabees.
What the italics mean
Where you see italic words in this text, they are not emphasis. They mark words the translators added — words that are not in the Hebrew or Greek, but that English needs in order to make sense of the sentence.
The Geneva was the first English Bible to do this, and the King James Version later took the practice from it. It is a small act of honesty by the translators: rather than blending their own additions invisibly into the text, they showed you exactly which words were theirs. We preserve the italics for that reason. Reading them as emphasis would reverse their meaning.
How it is being made
Transcribed by reading the page images themselves. Automated text recognition of 16th-century printing is unreliable here — the two-column layout with marginal notes defeats it — so it is not used as a source of words.
Original spelling is preserved in full, including vnto, heauen and Iesus. Only typographic forms are normalised — the long s, ligatures, contractions marked with a bar — and each such change is logged so the printed page can be reconstructed. Every verse records which scan and which page it came from. Chapter summaries printed by the 1560 editors are kept separate from the scripture text.
Each page is transcribed once and then independently checked against the same image by a second reader, and cross-checked for content against the public domain translations listed above. No copyrighted edition is consulted at any stage. This is a faithful transcription of one identified copy, not a scholarly critical edition: there is no collation of variant printings and no textual apparatus. A measured error rate does not exist yet, and we do not claim one; the scans linked above are how you can check any reading for yourself in the meantime.