A Modern History of Freely Giving
1986 — Byzantine Textform — Maurice Robinson & William Pierpont released their New Testament critical text into the public domain.
1994 — World English Bible — Michael Johnson began work on the first modern public domain English Bible translation, adapted from the 1901 American Standard Version.
1996 — The Bondage of the Word — Maurice Robinson wrote an essay critiquing the use of copyright to restrict the distribution of Scripture.
2013 — The Christian Commons — Tim Jore published a book encouraging Christians to use open licenses for biblical content relevant to global mission and Bible translation.
2020 — Open.Bible — Biblica started releasing dozens of non-English Bible translations they owned under open licenses.
2021 — The Dorean Principle — Conley Owens published a biblical response to the commercialization of Christianity.
2022 — Statistical Restoration Greek NT — Alan Bunning released the first openly licensed critical text based on earliest manuscripts.
2022 — Let’s copy, church — Jon Here created a website to urge the open licensing of all kinds of ministry resources.
2023 — Selling Jesus — Andrew Case launched a website to confront the commercialization of Christianity, with Conley Owens and Jon Here contributing content.
2023 — Berean Standard Bible — Bible Hub et al. relinquished copyright of the BSB, making it the first modern English translation of the original languages to be public domain.
2025 — Abolish the Jesus Trade — Case, Here, & Owens published a collection of articles produced over the previous three years to confront the commercialization of Christianity.
2025 — The Sunnyvale Statement — A statement on the stewardship of Scripture was signed at the first Doreancon conference in Sunnyvale, California.
2026 — Freely Giving — Jon Here created a website for discovering and publishing freely given resources.
Events are included if they are significant attempts to resist the commercialization of Christianity and/or pioneer the free giving of a form of Scripture.