I browse
The Bible Hunter every so often to see if anything new pops up. The Bible Hunter's goal is to catalog all English translations of the Bible and while most of his posts discuss mainstream translations and their updates, there are gems in there that range from
amusingly quirky to
theologically interesting to
downright weird.
Anyway, The Bible Hunter found a
free PDF of the
1599 Geneva Bible, Patriot's Edition. I'm going to put this one in both the interesting and quirky categories.
It's interesting because it updates the Geneva Bible with modernized spelling (like nearly all printings of the KJV since 1769) and includes the footnotes of later editions (the 1560 edition has different New Testament footnotes than the 1599 editions). The Geneva Bible and its footnotes are very Calvinist (think "Puritan") and as such were disliked by the Anglican establishment. Replacing the Geneva Bible is one of the main reasons that King James commisioned the Authorized Version of 1611.
It's quirky because it seems to be part of the recent movement to recast US history in terms of evangelical Christianity. In addition to the Bible text, this PDF includes the text of the US Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Magna Carta and a prayer attributed to George Washington.
This particular link to the free PDF appears to be legitimate (mostly because Kirk Cameron doesn't seem the type to be bootlegging digital Bibles), but it's perhaps left over from an earlier promotion. The only other free link that Google found seemed dodgy and the publisher is
selling it for $9.95. It looks the same as
this hardcover version (the publisher data and page count are the same). If you decide that you want to pay for it, I'd recommend skipping the "Patriot" edition and getting
the one with the Apocrypha.
Edit: The publisher has a
whole website just for this family of Bibles.