The notes

Everything the diagram cannot say in a box. Fourteen sections, in reading order — or jump straight to whichever one a chart node sent you to.

1. How to read the diagram

   Time runs left to right, and the arrow is the whole story. Two Bibles can sit one below the other and mean completely different things depending on which arrow joins them.

2. The ancient sources

   The dark boxes down the left edge. No original manuscript of any Bible book survives, so everything on the chart descends from copies — and which copies mattered changed decisively in the nineteenth century.

3. The Tyndale–King James line

   The spine of the chart. One man's English in 1526, still standing word for word in Bibles published four centuries later — and the moment in 1881 when the Greek underneath it was swapped out.

4. Out of the American Standard Version

   One 1901 revision, and eight Bibles out of it going in every possible direction at once — literal, plain, amplified, paraphrased, public-domain and Catholic.

5. The Catholic line

   From the Vulgate, by way of exiles in Flanders, to a Bible due in 2027 — including the least advertised fact on the whole chart.

6. What is actually read at Mass

   The Bible a Catholic hears on a Sunday is not always the Bible they read at home, and it is not the same from one country to the next. Four translations, four jurisdictions, and two of them mid-change.

7. The divine name across the chart

   The Hebrew writes God's name nearly 7,000 times. What each translation does with it is the sharpest line that can be drawn across this whole family tree — and three Bibles dropped it in twelve years.

8. One-man translations

   Eight Bibles made from the original languages by a single translator working alone. Almost no circulation between them, and they turn up in reference work out of all proportion to their size.

9. The British line

   Two Bibles that the chart used to leave out entirely, and that were the Bible for a whole generation of British churchgoers.

10. The modern American translations

    Between them these account for most English Bibles sold anywhere today — including one whose famous name no longer means the edition most people are quoting.

11. The New World Translation

    Four boxes at the bottom of the chart, one of which is not really a Bible at all but an apparatus — and is the reason much of the rest of this chart can be checked.

12. Bibles that document their own sources

    Only two boxes on the chart carry the 🔍 mark, and they are twenty-one years and a whole tradition apart. Everything else does a thinner version of the same job.

13. What is not certain

    The parts of the chart that are a drawing decision rather than a claim, the figures that were withdrawn, and the questions the sources used do not settle.

14. Sources

    Where each part of this came from. The scholarship is the credibility, so it is all listed.