A Cartha Project
The Cartha Open Bible
This is the people’s Bible — the most accurate, publicly revisable Hebrew and Greek to English translation we can present. Our data, methods, and code are public and free; every verse carries a unique hash so anyone can inspect the reasoning, the alternatives, and the full history.
What makes this different
Three things, in short
- Translated from the originals. Source texts are SBLGNT (Greek NT) and the Westminster Leningrad Codex / Unfolding Word Hebrew Bible — the openly-licensed scholarly critical editions closest to what the authors actually wrote. Not a re-rendering of another English translation.
- Every translation decision is publicly documented. Every verse is a file in the repository with the source text, the English rendering, every lexical decision (source word, chosen gloss, alternatives considered, lexicon entry, rationale), and the contested theological readings with alternatives preserved. Every change is a signed git commit. Every disagreement has a permanent URL.
- Every verse is reproducible. Given the source text, the prompt hash, and the model identifier, any third party can re-run the pipeline and verify our documented draft. No other English Bible in history has offered this.
Why we built this
The gap we ran into, and decided to fill
It started with a simple need: a Bible we could ship in our own apps without licensing friction. Most modern English Bibles ship under commercial trademarks — readable, but not quotable at length, forkable, or shippable in a product. The openly-licensed alternatives are mostly older translations that don’t reflect modern scholarship.
Building one surfaced two more gaps worth addressing at once:
- Modern reasoning we could put to work. Frontier AI models can now work carefully through the Greek and Hebrew — surfacing hard choices at a scale no single committee could.
- Transparent reasoning. Most translations happen behind closed doors — a reader who disagrees has no way to see why. We wanted every decision visible: source word, alternatives, rationale, drafter, reviewer.
So we translate directly from the original Greek and Hebrew, reason across multiple frontier models, and document every decision publicly. Released under CC-BY 4.0 — free to read, quote, fork, adapt, or ship in a commercial product, with no trademark and no royalty. For the Deuterocanonical books, where no modern openly-licensed corpus existed, we transcribed directly from manuscript photographs.