About Biblang

A regularized, word-for-word representation of the Greek Bible — built so you can be reading the real text, with the real syntax and vocabulary of the original, years before the Greek paradigms would let you in.

Why it exists

Koine Greek grammar is not conceptually hard: a handful of cases, tenses, voices, and moods, most of which English marks in some way too. What costs years is the irregularity — the many different spellings Greek uses for the same small set of facts. Three declensions with a dozen sub-patterns, contract verbs, liquid aorists, principal parts to be memorized for every irregular stem. Most people who set out to read the New Testament in Greek stop there, long before the text opens up: not because the ideas are hard, but because the forms are.

Here is one ordinary verb, “loose”, in the first person singular, across the six tenses:

Greek

λύω · ἔλυον · λύσω · ἔλυσα · λέλυκα · ἐλελύκειν

luō · eluon · lusō · elusa · leluka · elelukein

Biblang

luamō · luame · luami · luama · luamē · luamelē

Greek changes the front of the word, the middle, and the end, and each verb does it a little differently — which is what principal parts are for. Biblang changes the last vowel and nothing else: ō present, e imperfect, i future, a aorist, ē perfect, elē pluperfect, on every verb in the language.

And six ordinary nouns in the genitive singular — of a word, of love, of flesh, of spirit, of a king, of a city:

Greek

λόγου · ἀγάπης · σαρκός · πνεύματος · βασιλέως · πόλεως

logou · agapēs · sarkos · pneumatos · basileōs · poleōs

Biblang

logou · agapau · sarxau · pneumeu · basilevou · poliau

Six endings in Greek, spread across three declensions. One -u in Biblang, and the same -u on every noun, adjective, and participle there is. The middle line is the Greek spelled out in our letters, so you can see the six endings even if you do not read the alphabet yet.

Nothing has been simplified away in either case. The six tenses are still six tenses; the six nouns are still genitive, still singular. What is gone is the need to learn a separate spelling of those facts for every word in the language. The Learn page sets out the whole system, lesson by lesson — forty-seven short ones, one idea each — and the reader’s Grammar button shows the same tables while you read.

What you are reading

There is one Biblang word for every Greek word, in the Greek’s own order, each built on the stem of the word it stands for. Nothing is added, dropped, or rearranged, and nothing is turned into English:

En archa ate tos logos, kai tos logos ate pros ton theon, kai theos ate tos logos.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. — John 1:1 En archē ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos. — the Greek line above, letter for letter

The third line is the Greek spelled in our letters, and it is worth holding it against the first: archē against archa, ēn against ate, ho against tos. Same words, same order — what Biblang changes is the ending that marks the grammar. Every word on the first line stands in the place of the word below it, and carries the grammar it carried there. The sense of the sentence is still yours to work out from that grammar, which is the whole point: Biblang moves the difficulty off the forms and onto the language, and the language is the part worth having.

Why learn it

There are two honest answers, and both of them are complete.

The first is simply to read. Most people who want the Bible in its own words want exactly that, and not a second degree — and this is enough for it. You can learn Biblang, read the New Testament in it for as long as you like, and never open a Greek grammar: you will still be reading the words the authors chose, in the order they chose them, carrying the grammar they marked, rather than a rendering of all that into English. That is a destination, not a stop on the way to somewhere better.

The second is that if you do want the Greek itself, this is the shortest road to it. A century of language teaching keeps rediscovering the same result: a learner who first internalises a regular, transparent language goes on to acquire later, harder languages faster than one who starts cold. It is the documented propaedeutic effect — the reason a year of Esperanto has been shown to accelerate a student’s subsequent French, German, or Russian rather than delay it. What transfers is not vocabulary but grammatical sight: the trained reflex to see a case, a tense, a voice as a discrete, movable part.

Biblang turns that effect on Greek itself. Because every case, tense, and voice is marked one way and one way only, you build those reflexes in weeks instead of years — and then you spend them on the real thing. Nothing here is a detour that must later be unlearned: the grammatical system is Greek’s, only spelled without exceptions. You are not learning a bridge language that leads to Greek. You are learning Greek, in the order that lets it stick.

Where the text comes from

The text is not written by hand. It is rebuilt automatically, word by word, from scholarly Greek editions in which every word already carries a full grammatical description — what part of speech it is, what case or tense it stands in. That description is what each Biblang spelling is built from:

The New Testament comes from the SBL Greek New Testament with the MACULA Greek morphological analysis.
The optional English parallel is the Berean Standard Bible.

Where a human hand comes in

The endings are produced by rule and never vary. The stem is the part that sometimes takes a decision, and roughly one dictionary word in twenty has had its stem set by hand rather than by the automatic rule. There are three reasons for it, and they are worth knowing if a stem is ever not the one you expected:

Greek’s own root changes. Where Greek itself swaps roots between forms — γυνή / γυναικός (gunē / gunaikos), πᾶς / παντός (pas / pantos) — Biblang picks one root and keeps it everywhere, so gunaik- and pant- are what you learn and what you always see.
Words that came out hard to say. A stem and its endings can meet in a pile of vowels, a stutter, or a jam of consonants that nobody would want to read aloud. The fix is always to respell the stem, never to add a special rule at the join: one exception at the seam would cost the reader more than the awkward word does.
Collisions. Two different Greek words can come out as the same Biblang spelling. Where that would merge words a reader needs to keep apart, one of them is respelled; where Greek itself separates them by nothing but an accent, they are left to stand alike.

None of these are improvised. Every proposed stem is checked against the whole corpus before it is accepted, so a change made for one word cannot quietly break another, and it is recorded as a decision about that word rather than patched into the rules. Full source and licensing details are on the copyright page.

Questions

Is this the New Testament?

No. It is a representation of the New Testament, not the New Testament as the apostles wrote it. The letters are not theirs, the spellings are not theirs, and every form here rests on a modern editor’s analysis of what the Greek word is doing. It is made for reading and for learning, and it is honest about which of those two things it is: when a question turns on the wording itself, the authority is the Greek edition, and in the reader it is one tap away.

Is it a translation?

No. Nothing is rendered into English: there is one word here for every word of the Greek, in the Greek’s order, carrying the Greek’s grammar. The English gloss in the word panel is a study aid for the single word you tapped, not a rendering of the sentence — the sentence is still yours to read.

Can I preach from it, or settle a question of doctrine with it?

Study from it, yes. On everything it preserves it stands closer to the original than an English translation does, because it has not chosen English words for you: the words are the author’s, in the author’s order, carrying the case, tense, voice, and mood the author used. Anyone telling you to prepare from a translation instead is pointing you further from the Greek, not nearer to it.

Two cautions, which are not the same as “don’t”. The first is that this is not a pulpit text: nobody in the room reads it, so what you read aloud is still a translation, and that is fine — preaching has always been done in the hearers’ language from a text studied in another. The second is the distance between what this text shows and what it knows. Three things in it are decisions rather than data:

Resolved ambiguity. A Greek form can often be parsed more than one way, and the analysis behind this text picks one. Biblang then spells that pick as plainly as everything else, so the seam an interpreter would most want to see is the one thing made invisible. This is the real limit, and it is worth knowing where your favourite verse sits.
Hand-set stems. Roughly one word in twenty has its stem chosen rather than derived, and a few Greek dictionary entries that are really one word — μέγας and μείζων, megas and meizōn — are deliberately spelled alike.
One-word glosses. The word panel gives a single English word for a word that has a range. Building an argument on a lone gloss is the oldest mistake in the trade, and it is exactly as available here as in any interlinear.

So: read it, prepare from it, teach from it. But when the point turns on what the Greek does — this case, this tense, this word — tap through and make the claim on the Greek. That is what the interlinear is there for.

Is it a made-up language?

There are no new words, no new syntax, and no new grammatical categories. The vocabulary is Greek’s, the word order is Greek’s, and the grammar is Greek’s — what is new is the spelling of that grammar. It is much closer to a spelling reform than to an invented language.

What is lost?

Three things, and it is better to know them than to meet them later. The Greek alphabet, which you will want in the end. Accents and breathings, which Biblang does not mark, so the handful of Greek words told apart by those alone look alike here. And ambiguity: where a Greek form could be more than one thing, the source analysis commits to a reading, and Biblang spells that reading as though it were certain. The Greek interlinear exists so that none of this is hidden from you, and the last lesson of the course sets the whole of it out with examples.

Will this transfer to real Greek, or is it a detour?

It transfers, because there is very little here that is not Greek. The stems are the dictionary words you would look up; the word order is the author’s; every case, tense, voice, and mood you learn to spot is one Greek marks too. What you have to add later is the alphabet and Greek’s own spellings of endings you already understand — real work, but far less of it than the wall you walked around.

Does it replace learning Greek?

It does not replace it, and it is not a substitute for it. What it will do is sharpen how you see the Greek: the vocabulary is Greek vocabulary, the syntax is Greek syntax, and every case, tense, voice, and mood you learn to read here is one the Greek marks too.

You can also stop here, and many readers will. You do not have to go on to the Greek alphabet and Greek spellings to get real and lasting use out of this. What stopping here asks of you is that you know the limits of what you are reading. There are a limited number of places where Biblang comes out more specific than the Greek: where a form could be middle or passive, or a statement or a command, the analysis behind the text picks one. Where an ambiguity could be kept, it has been — Greek neuters use one form for the subject and the object, and Biblang gives them one shared ending too. The last lesson of the course, What this doesn’t show you, sets out the rest with examples.

How long until I can read?

The grammar is the small part — the whole system is forty-seven short lessons, and you are reading real phrases before you finish the nouns. Vocabulary is the long part, as it is in Greek, and it is the same vocabulary, so no time you spend on it has to be spent twice.

What if I want to go on to Greek?

Open a Greek New Testament at a chapter you have already read here. You will know the words, the order, and every grammatical category on the page; what you will be learning is Greek’s spelling of things you already understand. Doing that beside the reader’s interlinear is the shortest bridge there is.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome, and they are the fastest way to improve the text: open any word in the reader and use its Report an issue link. Every report is read, and fixes land in the next update of the text.