Four languages, four Bibles: every page now quotes its reader’s own edition
English pages read the King James Version, Spanish the Reina Valera 1909, Portuguese the Bíblia Portuguesa Mundial and Filipino Ang Dating Biblia 1905, each laid out on the same 66 books, 1,189 chapters and 31,102 verses.
Published · Prepared by the Cinematic Bible Songs editorial team · 2 min read
News about this site, from its own records.
Which Bible, on which page
A reference on this site now opens in the reader’s own language. English pages quote the King James Version. Spanish pages quote the Santa Biblia Reina Valera 1909. Portuguese pages quote the Bíblia Portuguesa Mundial, added on 20 September. Filipino pages quote Ang Dating Biblia 1905, the Philippine Bible Society’s Tagalog translation, added on 22 September. Until then a Filipino reader was shown the King James Version in English, labelled as such.1234
At Pentecost, the Book of Acts says, the crowd was confounded,
because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
Acts 2:6
Why these four
Each one can be published whole. Three are in the public domain outright, and the King James Version is public domain everywhere except the United Kingdom, where its printing is still governed by letters patent.123 That matters to a site like this. It is the difference between showing a reader a verse and showing them the chapter around it.
For Portuguese the choice was narrow. The Bíblia Portuguesa Mundial was the one redistributable Portuguese edition we could find, and its own publisher describes it as a draft still under revision.3 Ang Dating Biblia is public domain by age; our copy comes from the scrollmapper bible_databases project, which publishes it as machine readable data under the MIT licence.4
Checked, not just counted
All four editions follow King James verse numbering, so a reference means the same verse in every language. That was proved rather than assumed. Each edition’s verses were fitted against the King James chapter by chapter, and any chapter where the fit was off was flagged and repaired. Counting alone was never enough: the Spanish once had seventeen verses packed onto the end of the verse before them while every total still matched.
Four verses are empty in Portuguese on purpose: Luke 17:36, Acts 8:37, Acts 15:34 and Acts 24:7, which that edition does not carry. A visible gap can be filled from another copy. A plausible sentence slipped into the gap could never be found again.
Where the wording is ours
In a handful of Portuguese chapters the published edition turned out to be a machine translation of the World English Bible: 1 Samuel 26 to 31, Micah 7, Zephaniah 1 to 3, and Haggai 1 and 2. On this site those chapters are rewritten in the edition’s own register, with SENHOR for the divine name as everywhere else in it. They are the one place where the Portuguese text is our wording rather than the publisher’s, and we say so here so that nobody has to discover it.
Every study page names its source edition at the foot, with the date our copy was taken where we recorded one, so the text never pretends to be newer than it is.