THE BATTLE FOR THE COMMON TONGUENow Side-by-Side with the 1611 Authorised Version
Four centuries ago, William Tyndale died to give the Gospels to the plowboy. In 1923, University of Chicago scholar Edgar J. Goodspeed picked up that exact torch. He shattered the illusion that the apostles wrote in the stained-glass English of kings. They wrote in Koine—the gritty street language of fishermen, tax collectors, and tentmakers.
When The New Testament: An American Translation appeared, critics branded it the “Slang Bible.” Readers who wanted Paul and Peter in living American English made it a sensation.
Goodspeed was not a paraphraser and not a committee. He was the first American scholar to collect, decipher, and publish first-century Greek papyri—wills, receipts, private letters—from the sands of Egypt. That work taught him that New Testament Greek was marketplace Greek.
He therefore refused British “corn” where the text means wheat, refused court cadence where the apostles spoke straight, and put the letters back into the common tongue.
The last mass-market King James / Goodspeed parallel was printed by the University of Chicago Press in 1958. For 68 years a new copy has been impossible to find. This edition brings that comparison back—and adds the historical frame the old printing never carried.
The two columns
Left: the King James Version, 1769 Oxford Edition, the English millions already know by heart.
Right: Goodspeed’s 1923 An American Translation, rendered from the Koine. A translation. Not a paraphrase.
Every verse locks on the same baseline. Where Goodspeed’s Greek omitted a later reading, the right-hand slot is left blank on purpose. You see the difference without a footnote and without anyone explaining it away.
Inside this edition
• Interweave Parallel Format: KJV left, Goodspeed right, verse-locked, line-locked
• The 1611 translators’ own preface—the confession modern KJV publishers usually cut. They called their work a revision, blessed later workers, and asked why the kingdom of God should be bound to syllables
• “The Battle for the Common Tongue”: the 1923 newspaper firestorm, the Chicago papyri, and the fight to put the apostles back in ordinary speech
• A plain field guide to the so-called missing verses: Mark 16:9–20 labeled as an ancient appendix; blank right-hand slots at John 7:53–8:11, Matthew 17:21, Acts 8:37, 1 John 5:7, the Lord’s Prayer doxology, and the rest
• How to read blended verses, skipped numbers, and intentional blanks so the layout is never mistaken for a typesetting error
• Goodspeed’s essay “The English Bible: From Tyndale to King James”
• A working bibliography of Goodspeed’s books and monographs
Serious students of the King James Bible always ask the same question: does a modern rendering actually bring me closer to the original Greek? You no longer have to take a committee’s word for the answer. The evidence sits on the page. The left column keeps the familiar wording. The right column gives the New Testament in the language the apostles actually used.
This book is for the reader who loves the Authorized Version enough to test it, and for the reader who wants Goodspeed without giving up King James. Open it to Matthew, to John, to Romans. Read both columns aloud. The argument is not in the introduction. The argument is the two columns.
Trim 8 × 10 in.
824 pages
12-point Clarity type.
Wide inner margins so the gutter of a thick parallel Bible does not swallow the verse.
The King James Version (1769 Oxford) and Goodspeed 1923 texts are in the public domain in the United States. Original editorial frame, parallel architecture, historical notes, and typographic design © 2026 Truth Unredacted Publishing.
