Scripture must be free
And Moses commanded them, saying: ‘At the end of every seven years… thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn…’
…Write down the vision and make it plain on tablets, so that a herald may run with it.
…freely ye have received, freely give.
Every text in the corpus, every font, every line of source code, and every gem we depend on must meet the FSF’s definition of free software: the four freedoms to run and view, study, modify, and redistribute, with or without changes.
Public-domain texts are welcome. Permissive licenses (CC BY, MIT, Apache, BSD) are welcome. Copyleft licenses (CC BY-SA, GPL, AGPL, the SIL Open Font License) are equally welcome; share-alike is just one of several ways to be free, and we have no preference between permissive and copyleft. What we do not accept: non-commercial clauses, no-derivatives clauses, custom “used by permission” EULAs, and any open-core dependency whose useful features sit behind a proprietary tier. If a source can’t be redistributed by anyone who downloads it from us, it doesn’t belong here.
This is the reason a project this scope can exist at all: every contributor and every reader stands on the same legal footing as the maintainers. The corpus you read is the corpus you can fork.
The Bible is one of the most enduring gifts one person can give another. How much greater would that gift be if the Bible you received could be read, annotated, studied, and given again—by anyone, to anyone, without limit? That ideal drives everything we build here. A text that is truly free can be passed from hand to hand across generations, each reader adding to the margin what the last one discovered, and the gift is never diminished by the giving.
They that receive of Christ, Receive freely, and they are to Give freely, Pray freely, and Preach freely; and the Ministry is the Gift of God, and is to be Ministred freely.
This principle has a history written in seized type and hidden presses. In Restoration England, the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 made it illegal to print religious texts without the approval of the Stationers’ Company. The Quaker printer Andrew Sowle defied the monopoly from a hidden press in Shoreditch, reached only through trapdoors. His printing materials were seized and broken to pieces on multiple occasions. A thousand reams of printed books were confiscated in a single raid. He was brought before a magistrate who threatened to send him “after his brother Twyn” — John Twyn, executed in 1664 for the crime of unlicensed printing.
Sowle kept printing. His daughter Tace took over the press and ran it for fifty-eight years. The texts survived because someone decided that the work of making scripture available was worth more than the license required to do it legally. Andrew Sowle’s press is a primary inspiration for this project.
We are not going as far as Sowle. We are not breaking the law, and thanks to the public domain and the modern work of others who share his conviction, we do not have to. The Berean Standard Bible, the Westminster Leningrad Codex, Nestle 1904, the Robinson–Pierpont Byzantine Textform, TVTMS, the Center for New Testament Restoration: enough freely-licensed scholarship now exists to build a serious reading library without asking anyone’s permission.
But the best critical editions of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament are still locked behind licensing restrictions that prevent scholars, students, and laypeople from freely using, studying, and sharing them. The licensing regime is different now — copyright rather than crown prerogative — but the principle is the same. Open Scriptorium exists because we believe, with Fox and Sowle, and scores more, that the ministry of the text is the gift of God, and is to be ministered freely.
Academic consensus over dogmatic bias
The project is built for serious study. That means defaulting to mainstream critical scholarship and presenting the textual evidence honestly, not the tradition of any single church, school, or confession.
We hold that devotional and academic reading are not opposed but deeply complementary. The scholar who traces a variant through the manuscript tradition and the believer who sits with a psalm in the early morning are engaged in the same act of attention. Good tools serve both. The apparatus that lets a textual critic weigh witnesses is the same apparatus that lets a pastor understand why two translations of the same verse say different things. This project refuses to choose between rigour and reverence.
Where translations and editions disagree, we show the disagreement rather than picking a side. Where critical editions reconstruct or bracket a verse, we follow the editor’s notation rather than smoothing it into the body text. Where scholarship is divided, the reader sees the apparatus, not a verdict. The presentation is designed for the kind of reader who wants to see for themselves — whether they are a graduate student, a parish priest, a Talmud student, a textual critic, or someone reading the Bible for the first time and curious about the seams.
We will sometimes have to make judgment calls about which witnesses to surface by default. Current scholarly consensus favours editions like NA28 / ECM for the Greek New Testament and BHS for the Hebrew Bible, but these are not available under free licenses. Where that is the case, we host the freest faithful witness we can — and say so. For the Greek NT, that is the Nestle 1904; for the Hebrew Bible, the Westminster Leningrad Codex; for the Septuagint, the Rahlfs 1935.
Big tent — with a light hand
The corpus is meant to be inclusive. Anything an academic might reasonably want to read in connection with the biblical literature belongs here: not just the protestant 66, but the deuterocanonical and apocryphal books, the pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, the Apostolic Fathers, the Gnostic gospels, the rabbinic literature, and the historical commentary that has surrounded all of it for two millennia. Texts whose canonicity is contested in any tradition can still teach us about the texts that are not contested.
Moderation exists, but with a light hand and a clear principle: we curate for academic relevance, not for theological agreement. The Gospel of Thomas belongs here. So do Philo, Josephus, Origen, Maimonides, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. Some works may be included but not shown by default — the filters let readers opt in to material outside their tradition or area of study. Texts that have no historical or scholarly relationship to the biblical literature do not belong.
Customizable, with sensible defaults
Different readers want different things. A scholar comparing the Masoretic Text to the Septuagint wants both side by side with the apparatus visible. A parish priest reading the lectionary wants a clean modern translation with footnotes only when textual decisions affect meaning. A student of patristics wants Greek and Latin sources together with their English translations.
The reader will let you choose, per account, which texts and commentaries appear by default in your parallel view, in your cross-reference panel, and in your search results — a kind of personal corpus inside the larger one. The defaults are chosen to be useful to a curious newcomer with no prior preference. Everything that can be customized will be.
A note on harmful content
The corpus contains scripture, and scripture — read honestly — contains passages that have been used to justify enormous harm: slavery, the subjugation of women, the persecution of Jews, the conquest of indigenous peoples, the killing of heretics. We do not redact these passages, footnote them away, or pretend they aren’t there. A project built for serious study has to let the text speak, including where the text is hard. Readers are trusted to bring their own judgment, and the scholarly apparatus is there precisely so they can see how that judgment has been formed and contested over two millennia.
Commentary and secondary literature are held to a different standard. Inclusion in the corpus is editorial; it is not neutral, and it is not required by the principle of academic relevance. A work can be historically important and unfit to host. Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies is the clearest example: it is undeniably part of the historical record, it is studied seriously by scholars of Reformation antisemitism, and it does not belong in a reading library that aims to serve Jewish readers, Christian readers, and everyone else on equal footing. The same goes for early modern tracts whose primary content is dehumanization rather than argument.
The line we try to hold is this: we host commentary that engages the biblical literature, even where it disagrees sharply with traditions we respect. We do not host commentary whose central project is the degradation of a people. Where a corpus author has written some work that crosses that line and other work that doesn’t, we host the rest.
If you think we’ve drawn this line wrong — in either direction — please open an issue.
Accessibility
Open Scriptorium is built to be usable by everyone who reads scripture, including people who use screen readers, braille displays, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology.
The project targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance.
Known limitations: the parallel reader’s multi-column layout is difficult to navigate linearly with a screen reader when more than two columns are active. The Vilna Talmud layout uses overlapping absolutely-positioned text layers whose DOM order does not match the visual reading order; screen reader users should use the simple layout toggle, which presents each text stream as sequential, semantic HTML. The reading theme slider produces intermediate color states whose contrast ratios have not been exhaustively verified at every position; the highest contrast is available at either end of the slider (light and dark themes).
If you encounter an accessibility barrier on this site, please open an issue on the issue tracker. We treat accessibility bugs with the same seriousness as data bugs.
The project’s accessibility standards are developed in consultation with Liam Gilchrist-Blackwood, Accessibility Consultant.
These principles are operating commitments, not platitudes. If you catch the project violating one of them — bundling a non-free dependency, hiding an inconvenient textual variant, refusing a text on doctrinal rather than scholarly grounds — please open an issue on the source repository.
For scholars, editors, and lexicographers: please also read our appeal asking you to release your editorial work under a license that respects the four freedoms.