The words were spoken once, written down in Greek, copied for centuries, and only printed in red in 1899. The red is the youngest thing about them.
Every contested point below is an open question, shown from both sides with its sources. None of it is a verdict — it is the honest texture of how the text reached us.
The red is a design decision about 125 years old. The words are ancient.
The words of Jesus were only printed in red recently. Louis Klopsch, editor of The Christian Herald, conceived the idea on 19 June 1899 — inspired by Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” — and produced the first red-letter New Testament that year, and the first full red-letter Bible in 1901. The Greek manuscripts had no quotation marks and no colour; which words are red has always been a publisher’s interpretive choice.
This site reveals what was always present in every manuscript and translation — and lets you see it even in the original Greek, where it was never red. It holds two attitudes at once: reverent stillness, and honest curiosity about how the text travelled. Texts are public domain: the World English Bible, the King James Version, and the Textus Receptus Greek.
Scripture reproduced verbatim from public-domain sources. The red-letter spans are an editorial choice and are presented as such; in John 3 the red ends at verse 15 by default, with the dispute shown in Scholar mode.