Which Bible translations are in the public domain?

Why a free offline app carries the King James Version and the Chinese Union Version and not the NIV — and how the free translations actually differ from each other and from the modern ones.

If you have ever wondered why one Bible app works offline and asks nothing of you, while another needs an account before it will show you a chapter, the answer is usually not about the app. It is about who owns the words.

A translation is a creative work with an author, and it is protected by copyright like any other book. The underlying Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek are ancient and free to anyone, but the English or Chinese sentences a translation committee produced in 1978 or 2001 belong to the publisher who commissioned them. Which translations have fallen out of copyright, and which have not, quietly decides a great deal about how you are allowed to read.

The main public-domain translations

The King James Version (1611)

The one everybody knows. Produced under James I by six committees working from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Textus Receptus, published in 1611, and standardised into the spelling most modern printings use by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford in 1769. It is old enough that copyright is not a live question in most of the world, and it is by a wide margin the most reprinted, most quoted and most freely available English Bible in existence.

There is one genuine curiosity worth knowing. In the United Kingdom the King James Version is not simply public domain: printing it there is governed by letters patent held by the Crown, exercised through the Queen’s or King’s Printer and the university presses at Oxford and Cambridge. Outside the United Kingdom that restriction has no force, and the text is free. This is an unusual arrangement and it surprises people who assume a four-hundred-year-old book must be unencumbered everywhere.

The American Standard Version (1901)

A revision in the same lineage, produced by the American committee that had worked on the English Revised Version. It is markedly more literal than the KJV and rather stiffer to read, and it matters mostly because of what came out of it: the Revised Standard Version and the New American Standard Bible are both its descendants. It is in the public domain in the United States.

The World English Bible

The interesting modern case. It is a revision of the American Standard Version into contemporary English, and it was deliberately placed in the public domain by its editors rather than falling into it by age. It exists precisely because there was no modern-language English Bible anyone could freely reproduce, and someone decided to make one.

The Chinese Union Version (和合本, 1919)

The one that matters most for Chinese readers, and the closest Chinese equivalent to the KJV in cultural weight. It was the product of a long inter-mission committee project that ran from the 1890s to 1919, and it was published in a plain vernacular rather than in literary Chinese — a decision that put it alongside the vernacular literary movement of the same years and gave it an influence on written Chinese well beyond the church. It is in the public domain and remains the standard text in most Chinese-speaking congregations more than a century later.

One point causes constant confusion: simplified and traditional editions of the Union Version are not two translations. They are one translation in two writing systems, character for character the same text. A reader switching between them is changing script, not version.

Others you will meet

• Young’s Literal Translation (1862) — extremely literal, useful for seeing the Hebrew and Greek grammar through the English, awkward as continuous reading.
• The Douay–Rheims Bible, in the Challoner revision — the traditional English Catholic Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate rather than from Hebrew and Greek.
• The Darby Bible (1890) — literal, with the translator’s own distinct vocabulary.
• The Latin Vulgate, and the Greek and Hebrew texts themselves, which are free by age everywhere.

Why the NIV, the ESV and the NASB are not on that list

All three are modern works under active copyright, owned by publishers who paid committees to produce them. Biblica holds the NIV, Crossway the ESV, the Lockman Foundation the NASB. That is not a criticism — translation is expensive, scholarly, decade-long work, and copyright is how it gets funded.

The practical consequence is that an app cannot simply include them. It needs a licence, licences cost money and carry conditions, and one condition that recurs is that the text be delivered from the publisher’s or the app’s servers rather than handed over as a file the user keeps. Publishers also set quotation limits for everyone else — a fixed number of verses you may reproduce without asking, beyond which you write for permission.

Follow that chain through and a good deal of Bible-app behaviour stops looking arbitrary. If the text has to be served, the app needs a connection. If it needs to know which texts you are entitled to, it needs an identity for you. An account then arrives carrying sync, analytics and a subscription prompt, none of which was the original reason for it. A free app built on public-domain texts has no licence to enforce, so none of that machinery is needed and none of it appears.

How the free translations actually differ

They translate from different source texts

This is the difference readers notice first, usually as an alarming discovery that a verse is "missing". The KJV rests on the Textus Receptus, a printed Greek text assembled in the sixteenth century from the late manuscripts then available. Translations from the nineteenth century onwards use a critical text reconstructed from much older manuscripts found since, including fourth-century codices that nobody in 1611 had seen.

Where the older manuscripts lack a passage the later ones contain, modern editions drop it to a footnote. Acts 8:37 and the trinitarian wording in 1 John 5:7 are the standard examples. Nothing is being suppressed — the disagreement is public, footnoted, and centuries old. Read a KJV alongside a modern translation and you are seeing two defensible answers to a manuscript question rather than a conspiracy.

They sit at different points between literal and readable

Every translation trades word-for-word fidelity against natural sentences, and none escapes the trade. Young’s Literal sits at one extreme, so faithful to Hebrew tense and word order that the English creaks. The ASV is close behind. The KJV is more literal than most modern versions but was made by people with an ear for how a sentence sounds read aloud, which is why it survives as literature. The Union Version made a deliberate move toward plainness that was controversial at the time and is the reason it is still readable now.

Their English is four hundred years apart

KJV English is genuinely old, and some of it is not merely archaic but actively misleading: "let" once meant hinder, "prevent" meant go before, "conversation" meant conduct. Against that, one archaism is a real gain. Thou, thee and thy are singular; ye, you and your are plural. Modern English lost that distinction, so a modern translation cannot show you whether a promise is addressed to one person or to a whole community without adding a footnote. The KJV shows it in the pronoun.

How to choose between them

1. For reading a book straight through, take the one whose sentences you do not have to fight. Comprehension beats theoretical accuracy every time, and a version you abandon has an accuracy of zero.
2. For studying a specific passage closely, put a literal version beside a readable one. Where they diverge is exactly where the underlying text is doing something difficult, and that is worth noticing.
3. For memorising or reading aloud, the KJV’s rhythm is not sentiment. It was made to be read out in a building, and it still is.
4. For Chinese, the Union Version is the default for good reason — it is the shared text, so quoting it means being understood.
5. If offline access without an account matters to you, the question answers itself: check which texts an app carries before you install it.

What this app carries, and why

Verses ships the King James Version and the Chinese Union Version in both simplified and traditional characters, compiled into a read-only database inside the download. That list is short for exactly the reason this page has been describing: those are texts that can be handed to everyone who installs the app, with no licence to police, no server to check entitlements against, and therefore no account to make you create.

Switching between them is a single setting applied everywhere, and it does not lose your place, because internally each verse is one record holding all three texts side by side — changing scripture language reads a different column of the same row. What the app does not have is a copyrighted modern translation, and it will not have one, because carrying one would mean rebuilding it into an app that needs the network and knows who you are.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Who added the chapter and verse numbers
• Reading the Bible offline, without an account

All guides