This repository hosts the World English Bible, Catholic edition (73-book canon) as published by eBible.org, plus notes added in this project. The translation text itself is unchanged.
Text version: eBible.org
eng-web-c, digitally signed upstream 2026-07-24, pulled 2026-07-26, integrity verified against eBible.org's GPG-signed manifest. The text is frozen at this version — our notes refer to it specifically. Full details and re-verification steps:source/VERSION.md.
Start reading: books/README.md — one Markdown file per book, rendered directly by GitHub.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
source/VERSION.md | Which upstream version the text is frozen at, and how it was verified |
source/usfm/ | The canonical USFM sources from eBible.org, hosted verbatim — never edited here |
source/metadata/ | Translation metadata and book names from eBible.org |
books/ | Generated reading view (Markdown) — regenerate with ./render.sh, never hand-edit |
notes/ | This project's fold-in layer (e.g. corrections), applied at render time |
tools/ | The rendering code |
Two roles, two layers:
source/usfm/is lossless. USFM is eBible.org's master format; every other format they publish is generated from it. It carries editorial data invisible in any rendering: Strong's concordance numbers on nearly every word (~1.26 million\wmarkers), 3,300+ translator footnotes (some with embedded Hebrew), cross-references, words-of-Jesus markup, poetry indentation, psalm descriptors, speaker labels, and more. Hosting it verbatim means this repository never loses information relative to the upstream editorial work. The accompanyingsignature.txt.asc/keys.ascare eBible.org's GPG signature of the sources.books/is a readable view. Generated Markdown, one file per book, with chapter headings, verse numbers, footnotes, cross-references, and poetry layout. It deliberately omits machine-oriented markup (e.g. Strong's numbers) for readability — the source layer keeps it.
Editorial fold-ins are applied to the reading view at render time and come in
classes, each with its own visual treatment and label: typo corrections
render as strikethrough plus a highlighted replacement ("The Second Book of
MosisMoses"), nova-vulgata alternate readings use an
underlined replacement plus a superscript NV badge (readings the
Nova Vulgata omits are struck with the badge alone), and editor notes leave
the text untouched and live only in the notes. The original wording always remains visible, and the
source/ tree is never touched. Project notes keep their own class-prefixed
markers (c1…, e1…) in a "Notes (this project)" section on each book page — a
separate cadence from the translation's own numbered footnotes. Entries are
indexed by book and location in
notes/corrections.json (format, classes, and
rendered examples in notes/README.md); rendering fails if
an entry no longer matches its target exactly.
All project code runs inside a project-specific Docker image, not host tools:
./build.sh # build the webc-tools image
./render.sh # regenerate books/ from source/usfm/ (runs in the container)
./run_bash.sh # interactive shell in the container, repo mounted at /workThe World English Bible is in the public domain. It is brought to you courtesy
of eBible.org. "World English Bible" is a trademark that may
only be used to refer to faithful copies of the text as distributed from eBible.org;
this project does not change the text. See
source/usfm/copr.htm for the full statement.
Notes added by this project are kept distinct from the translation's own footnotes,
so nothing here should be read as originating from eBible.org except the contents
of source/ and the text rendered from it.