sermonindex/bible-parallel-english

Parallel Bible — English Translations and Ancient Versions

A verse-aligned parallel corpus of the Protestant Bible in seventeen English translations, spanning 1599 to 2022, plus the Latin Vulgate and Syriac Peshitta for the New Testament.

Looking for every language? This repository is a curated English set, chosen for spread across translation families and small enough to load whole. For the full corpus — 1,253 translations in 1,004 languages, 14.4M verses — see `sermonindex/bible`. The Vulgate and Peshitta below appear only here, not in that corpus.

Every row is keyed to the same reference, so any two translations can be aligned by joining on reference. This makes the corpus usable for translation-style modelling, diachronic study of English, retrieval, and evaluation.

Published by SermonIndex.

Contents

31,056 distinct verses are covered.

Translations

Coverage is not identical across translations — versification and the treatment of disputed verses differ, so counts range from 23,009 (ILT) to 31,056. Join on reference and expect gaps rather than assuming a dense matrix.

Schema

verse

ancient_version adds version, version_name, date, language, direction and a short note on the version's history.

Example

from datasets import load_dataset

v = load_dataset("sermonindex/bible-parallel-english", "verse", split="train")
kjv = v.filter(lambda r: r["translation"] == "KJV")

Source and licence

The English translations are mirrored from the Free Use Bible API (AO Labs), used with the permission of its maintainer. Each underlying translation carries its own terms; the older translations (Geneva, KJV, Webster, Young, Darby, RVA, Douay-Rheims, ASV) are public domain outright, and the modern ones in this set were selected by the Free Use Bible API for permissive redistribution. If you intend to redistribute a specific modern translation on its own, check that translation's own licence rather than relying on this card.

The dataset assembly, verse keying and metadata are released CC BY 4.0.

Citation

@misc{sermonindex_bible_parallel_english,
  title  = {Parallel Bible: English Translations and Ancient Versions},
  author = {SermonIndex},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/sermonindex/bible-parallel-english}
}