Thai KJV

The Thai KJV (พระคัมภีร์ภาษาไทยฉบับ KJV) is the work of Philip Pope, a BIMI Baptist missionary in Thailand since 1978. He began the translation in 1983 and finished it in 2001; the text carries a 2003 copyright. The name states the idea plainly: to put the King James Version itself in the hands of Thai readers.

That is the key to reading it well. Pope did not translate from Hebrew and Greek but from the English King James into Thai. Its loyalty is to the KJV: it follows the Textus Receptus behind the KJV New Testament and inherits the choices made by the 1611 translators.

It serves Thai churches that hold the KJV as their standard, and anyone who wants to read Thai and English side by side, verse by verse. The honest limit is the one every translation of a translation has: each passage has passed through two languages before reaching Thai, and where the KJV has a debatable reading, the Thai KJV carries it along. For careful study, check it against a Thai translation made from the original languages.

The rights holder released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. It allows anyone to read and share it for free, as long as the text stays unaltered and is not used commercially. That is why the Thai KJV is here in full to read for free on Midvash, but is left out of the public API, audio and AI features, which would go beyond what the license allows.