About Royal Archives
A linked library of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers.
Mission
Royal Archives is a free digital library dedicated to preserving and sharing Christian texts across languages and traditions. Scripture, patristic works, and reference encyclopedias are cross-referenced into a single reading experience, so a verse and the writings that cite or expound it sit one click apart. It is free to use and offline-capable.
Sources & provenance
Texts are drawn from public-domain editions and digitized scholarship: the Ante-Nicene and Nicene/Post-Nicene Fathers series, nineteenth-century reference works, and original-language scans. Every work carries provenance badges naming its edition, and texts derived from optical character recognition are corrected over time.
- Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene/Post-Nicene Fathers series.
- Nineteenth-century reference works, via Wikisource, CCEL, and the Internet Archive.
- Migne Patrologia Graeca scans for Greek sources.
Where the English is a Royal Archives translation, it is made from the original-language edition named in the work's source citation, and that original text and any parallel editions are published alongside it so every reading can be checked.
Understanding our editions
A work may be presented in more than one edition. The badge on each work names which kind you are reading:
- Modern translation
- Royal Archives' own English translation, made from the original-language source and published beside it.
- Modernized
- A light readability update of a classic public-domain translation (thou → you, speaketh → speaks) — the translation itself is unchanged.
- Classic
- A scholarly public-domain translation (the Ante- and Post-Nicene Fathers and the like), presented as printed — often in archaic English.
- Original language
- The original-language source text (Greek, Latin, Russian, Hebrew), as printed in its cited edition.
- Orthodox Catholic Bible (OCB)
- Our Orthodox recension of the World English Bible — adjusted toward Orthodox usage, with the wider canon.
Licensing
The historical texts and translations taken from public-domain editions remain in the public domain.
Royal Archives’ own contributions — original translations, the Orthodox Catholic Bible (OCB) recension, and editorial apparatus — are © Royal Archives, all rights reserved.
Downloads produced by the site (the PDF and EPUB exports) are typeset, branded Royal Archives editions, free for personal use — read them, keep them, print them — but not for redistribution or republication. Texts within them taken from public-domain editions remain in the public domain; Royal Archives’ own translations and editorial content remain © Royal Archives.
Beta
The site is in beta: addresses and content may change, and errors in scan-derived texts are corrected continually.