About this chart

What it is, what it deliberately leaves out, how it is put together, and what the version number means.

The Genealogy of the English Bible is one diagram showing where the English Bibles actually come from — which were translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, which inherited an older English text and were re-checked against the originals, and which were only edited or reworded without anybody going back to the ancient languages at all.

What it is not

It is not a chart of every English Bible ever printed. It covers the ones that come up in conversation, the ones read at Mass or in church across the English-speaking world, the ones that matter for tracing the divine name, and the ones consulted directly in building it. It stops there deliberately; the point is to be readable.

Deliberately left off: study editions rather than translations (Scofield, Thompson Chain-Reference); the Jewish English Bibles, which would change what the chart is about; and a long tail of minor or software-driven versions. Several of those sell well. None of them changes the shape of the tree.

How it is built

The chart is not a picture. It is data — every text, every relationship and what each relationship asserts — laid out once when the site is built and then drawn as real vectors, so zooming in reveals genuine detail rather than a larger blur. That is also why a box can be selected to dim everything it is not related to, and why the notes can be linked from the diagram down to the paragraph.

Nothing here is generated from a summary. Every claim traces to a source listed in Sources, and the places where the evidence runs out are written down in What is not certain rather than smoothed over.

Versioning

The version moves on three rules:

• Major — a structural rework: junctions, bands or the arrow vocabulary change.
• Minor — Bibles added to the chart or removed from it.
• Patch — a label, a date or a fact corrected; nothing structural.

This site is version 2.0.0, last changed 2026-09-06. It carries forward a chart that reached 1.0.1 as a static diagram; rebuilding it as an interactive, linkable document is the structural rework that made it 2.0.0.

Reading it

• Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, double-click to fit.
• Click a box to see what it came from, what came out of it, and by what method.
• Hover an arrow to see what that arrow asserts.
• Keys: f or 0 to fit, + and − to zoom, l for the legend, Esc to clear a selection.
• A link can point at one box: /?focus=KJV opens the chart on the King James Version.