The Organization

Formation Status

Koine Bible Society is a Colorado nonprofit corporation organized exclusively for religious, educational, and charitable purposes. This page states the organization's current legal and operational status plainly, and will be updated as each milestone is reached.

Current status

The Corporation is formed under the Colorado Revised Nonprofit Corporation Act. Its Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws are adopted, including the required 501(c)(3) purpose, private-inurement, and dissolution provisions. An application for recognition of exemption under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (Form 1023) is in preparation, claiming public charity status under Section 509(a)(2). Upon a favorable determination, recognition is expected to be retroactive to the date of incorporation.

The Society is not soliciting contributions prior to IRS determination. No donation mechanism appears on this site, deliberately. When the determination letter issues and state charitable solicitation registrations are complete, that will change, and this page will say so.

Governance

The Society is governed by a Board of Directors bearing fiduciary and strategic responsibility, with a majority of directors independent of one another. Scholarly direction of the translation is vested in a separate Translation Oversight Committee, whose composition and budget the Board determines but whose scholarly judgments the Board cannot override. This separation is codified in the Bylaws as a non-negotiable structural feature: governance on one side, textual authority on the other. It is described further under Method. The founding Board is presently being seated; a Conflict of Interest Policy, Document Retention Policy, and Whistleblower Policy accompany the Bylaws.

Program timeline

The translation project is planned across ten to twelve years in three phases. The pilot phase, in the first two years, produces annotated sample translations of Esther and Job to establish and publicly test the methodology. The main translation phase, in years three through ten, engages twenty to forty contracted scholars in book-level translation under the Oversight Committee's direction. The final phase, in years ten through twelve, carries review, revision, and publication preparation, with the Society retaining copyright in its translations and anticipating a distribution partnership with an established religious or academic publisher.

Alongside translation, the Society's programs include scholarly research and working papers documenting translation decisions, and free public education in biblical languages and textual history, beginning with the material published on this site.

Milestones

Completed: incorporation in Colorado; adoption of Articles and Bylaws; establishment of the Society's digital presence. In progress: Form 1023 preparation and filing; founding Board recruitment; pilot translations of Esther and Job. Ahead: IRS determination; state charitable solicitation registration; Translation Oversight Committee appointment; publication of the methodology paper and pilot translations.

Formal correspondence regarding the Society's formation may be directed to info@koinebiblesociety.org.