In 1560, a small group of English exiles in Geneva finished a Bible no one had asked them to make.
They had fled England under Mary Tudor’s reign. They had settled in a city governed by John Calvin’s theology and shaped by the printing press as much as by the pulpit. They had access, for the first time, to the best manuscripts, the best Hebrew and Greek scholarship, and the best printing in Europe. And they had time.
What they produced was the first complete English Bible translated directly from the original biblical languages — not from Latin, not from secondhand translations, but from Hebrew and Greek. It was the first English Bible with numbered verses, a small typographic innovation that quietly rewired how the English-speaking world would read scripture forever. It was printed in clear, readable roman type instead of blackletter, so that ordinary people could read it easily. It was marginally annotated, generously, by Reformers who wanted the reader to understand what they were reading.
It became the Bible of Shakespeare, who quoted it in his plays. It became the Bible of the Pilgrims, who carried it across the Atlantic. It was, for over seventy years, the Bible that shaped how English-speaking Christians thought — until the King James Version, politically preferred and aesthetically stately, overtook it in the seventeenth century.
I want to tell you why we are building something on top of it four hundred and sixty-six years later.
What we have lost
The Bible is not a scarce object. There are more English translations available at more price points in more formats than at any point in history. You can read scripture on your phone in six seconds. You can listen to it read aloud by actors. You can consult commentaries on every verse, in every tradition, instantly.
And yet something has thinned out. The average English-speaking Christian in 2026 — if the surveys are to be trusted — reads less scripture, reads it more shallowly, and holds it in memory less than the average Christian of nearly any previous generation. Not because the text is inaccessible, but because it is too accessible in too flat a way. It is everywhere, and nowhere.
What the 1560 Geneva did — and what we have lost — is to treat the Bible as a made thing. A thing with a printer, a typographer, a team of translators, a set of editorial choices, a history. The marginalia in a Geneva Bible is argumentative. The introductions are opinionated. The typography is deliberate. You cannot read it without remembering that someone put it in your hands.
This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is the wrong frame entirely. The Geneva Bible was, in 1560, the most modern Bible anyone had ever seen. It was the product of the cutting-edge scholarship of its day, delivered through the newest technology of its day, in the clearest type available. It looked like the future. It was the future, for a while.
What we are building is an attempt to read the Geneva Bible the way its first readers read it: as something alive, made, specific, historically grounded, and aesthetically serious. And to let that reading spill over into how a Christian platform can be made, in our own most-modern time, with our own most-modern tools.
What Geneva1560 is
Here is what Geneva1560 is.
It is a modern home for the 1560 Geneva Bible — a web reader, eventually more. Free. Fully free. We do not believe scripture should be paywalled, and we are not asking anyone to subscribe to read it.
It is a publication — this one. The 1560. Where we write about scripture, history, and Christian life from inside the historic faith. We hold firm to the creeds. We lean orthodox Protestant by conviction. We welcome Catholic and Orthodox voices by tradition. We publish slowly, because slow writing is better writing, and because the Bible does not reward hurry.
It is a small apparel brand called G1560 Supply. Pre-order drops, printed on Next Level Apparel blanks, designed with the typography and marginalia of the 1560 Geneva Bible. The commerce layer exists for a reason: it pays for the publication to be free, for the reader to be free, for the work to continue.
And it includes a commitment we call The Tenth. Ten percent of everything we make, after the cost of producing the goods we sell, goes to the church in need. We report the number every quarter. We have it audited every year. We publish the partners. The number starts at zero; we are making something from nothing. But the commitment precedes the revenue, which is the whole point of the name.
That is the ecosystem. One Bible at the center. One publication around it. One commerce layer funding it. One giving commitment making it honest.
On disagreement
A few of the people who might read this will notice that I haven’t said much about what I believe, specifically, on questions where Christians disagree. That is on purpose.
Our editorial standard distinguishes between what we hold firm — the historic creeds, the gospel — and what we let breathe — the questions where thoughtful Christians have disagreed for centuries without ceasing to be one church. We write from within a particular tradition, with a particular accent; we do not demand that readers share every particular.
A fifteen-year-old Baptist picking up a Geneva essay should feel welcome here. So should a forty-year-old Anglican. So should a sixty-year-old Orthodox reader curious about how Reformed scholars read Chrysostom. We are not trying to referee every dispute. We are trying to do something rarer in 2026, which is to hold a Christian conversation where people still recognize each other as Christians.
Starting small
One last thing, because it matters.
Geneva1560 is being built by one person, employed full-time, with a tight budget and no team. This is honest. It is also a feature. A publication built in the margins of a working life, over time, will grow slowly — which is how all good publications have ever grown. A commerce brand that begins with three pre-order shirts is a commerce brand with no waste, no inventory risk, and no shortcuts. A platform that starts with one domain live and three more as promises is a platform whose promises can be kept.
We are starting small because starting small is how you start honest. We will grow as the work earns it, and no faster.
If you want to come along, the best way is to subscribe to The Letter. It is free. It arrives on Fridays. It contains one essay, one note from the margins, one verse typeset beautifully.
The first English Bible translated from the originals. The first with numbered verses. The Bible that shaped Shakespeare’s sentences and the Pilgrims’ pockets.
We built a modern home for it.
Welcome in.