A 40-year-old digitizing pre-1900 Bibles, Masonic texts, and rare manuscripts · Found dead in August 2026 · The archive was days from public release
Before you read another word — check these against the public record.
Joe Alx Felz — sometimes signed Joseph, most often just Joe — was born in 1985 or 1986 and turned 40 on June 26, 2026. He was an electrician by trade, a real-estate investor by 2011 (founding Felz Investment Group), a remodeling contractor, an off-grid solar consultant, a father, a partner to a woman named Alxzondra, and, in his last years, a digital archivist.
Reducing him to "van life influencer" — the phrase most outlets used after his death — misses what he was actually building. He drove a 1999 Dodge Xplorer he called El Suave, rebuilt with maple counters, poplar doors, solar panels, and an off-grid generator. He filmed himself teaching electrical work at a whiteboard, explaining volts and amps to viewers who had been told the subject was too complicated for them. He operated at least four business entities: Felz Investment Group, FelzBooks, Felz Energy (with the FelzCalc solar-design tool), and Felz Media Group. He had begun working on renewable-energy training in Costa Rica.
He had a combined following of more than 1.4 million across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Threads. Most of that audience came for the van, the solar work, or the freedom-of-information posts. A smaller subset came for the books.
The books are why his death made news beyond the influencer beat.
FelzBooks was a scanning project. Felz would photograph pages of antique books he owned — smartphone camera, overhead lighting, standard equipment — then run multiple AI-powered OCR models against the scans to make handwriting and 200-year-old typesetting fully searchable. His stated mission, in the site's own copy: "Information should be free. Sacred texts belong to everyone, not locked in vaults or hidden behind paywalls."
His argument — made across dozens of videos — was that Bibles printed in the 1800s differ meaningfully from Bibles printed in the 1900s, and the differences are not accidental. He would open a pre-1900 edition on camera, turn to a specific passage, then open a 20th-century edition to the same passage. The wording was often not identical. Sometimes an entire book was missing. The Apocrypha — the Book of Esdras, Judith, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, the additions to Daniel and Esther — appeared in nearly every English Bible printed before roughly 1820. Then it disappeared from most Protestant editions.
That the Apocrypha was removed is documented history. The British and Foreign Bible Society formally voted against including it in 1826. The timing, the reasoning, and what it meant for the tradition are legitimate scholarly questions. Felz's contribution was making the pre-removal editions searchable — so anyone could pull up the exact wording, side-by-side, without needing access to a rare-book library.
He was not the only person doing this work. HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Google Books have digitized thousands of pre-1900 Bibles, freely available with no login. What made FelzBooks different was OCR quality on early typefaces and marginalia, single-search across his whole collection, and — critically — the specific editions he had chosen, which he argued supported his thesis about textual drift.
What follows is the public record of Joe Felz's last months, compiled from his own posts, media reporting, and interviews with his partner. Nothing here is inferred. All entries have public documentation.
The 24-day gap between the last public post and the death announcement is not, by itself, unusual. Many creators go dark for weeks. Alxzondra has asked repeatedly for space to grieve and stated that "when the time is right, the truth will come." She has not disputed the official finding. She has disputed the speculation built on top of it.
Joe Felz lived and worked out of Augusta, Georgia. Augusta sits in Richmond County. The Richmond County Coroner is Mark Bowen, listed at 912 8th Street, Augusta, GA 30901.
The coroner who confirmed his death was in Paulding County — a county on the opposite side of the state, roughly 150 miles west, on the outskirts of the Atlanta metro area. The Paulding County Coroner is Phillip Boatright.
The Codex records this as an open data point. There are many innocent explanations — a work trip, family, an appointment, a stay with friends. None have been publicly given. That is not evidence of anything. It is a gap in the public record. The gap is what we mark.
The most viral framing of the case — repeated in USA Herald, TikTok compilations, and dozens of independent posts — is that Joe Felz died "72 hours before releasing a trove of digitized rare and ancient texts online." The Codex has attempted to source this claim to a primary document. We were unable to do so.
The claim traces to social media posts made after his death, not to any dated announcement Felz made himself before his death. His last dated statement about an upcoming release is from October 2025, when he confirmed the Apocrypha PDF was complete and the rest of the 1812 Bible was in progress. He had been dropping books incrementally for nearly a year. There is no public post from Felz stating a specific date on which a major archive was scheduled to go live.
This does not mean the claim is false. He may have communicated the timeline privately. His partner and inner circle may know things the public does not. It means the claim currently rests on secondary reporting and should be marked as such until primary documentation surfaces.
The stronger version of Felz's project was never that the source texts were unavailable. Masonic Bibles, the Apocrypha, and the Book of Esdras have been freely readable on Internet Archive for years. His argument was that his particular editions supported a specific thesis about what changed between printings — and that testing that thesis required the exact scans he had made. That claim does not depend on him being alive to make it. The Codex records it as testable by anyone who obtains the same editions.
As of publication of this case file, felzbooks.com is still online. The landing page loads. The about page loads. The interface promising free browsing of the collection loads.
Registration — required to actually view or download the scanned PDFs — has been reported by multiple users as returning server errors. Reports on X, TikTok, and Threads describe attempts to create accounts that fail or hang. Whether this is deliberate suppression, a temporary technical issue, or an unmaintained site absorbing a traffic surge with no one left to operate it is not currently answerable from outside the operation.
The site's own architecture — verified registration only, government domains blocked, watermarked downloads with tracked actions — was built with a threat model already in place. Felz anticipated resistance. His response was engineering. The site does not read like a hobby archive. It reads like something built by a man who expected it to be attacked.
Whether the unreleased archive he had reportedly been preparing will ever surface is now in the hands of his partner Alxzondra and his family. She has stated the full story will come when the time is right. The Codex will update this case file if and when it does.
Separately, a community-run tribute site — The Holy Word · Joe Felz Library — has appeared, offering community upload and download of Bibles, ancient texts, and apothecary works. It has not been publicly endorsed by Joe's family or estate as of publication. The Codex records its existence and will update this line if formal endorsement or repudiation appears.
The following are matters of documentary absence. None of them prove anything. All of them are unanswered.
The Codex holds these questions open. If any of them are answered publicly, the case file will be updated with the new material. If they remain unanswered, that is itself part of the record.
Everything Joe Felz published while alive. Compiled from his own Linktree. No endorsement, no ranking, no curation. The Codex records what he made public — you make your own reading of it.
He also collaborated publicly with Dr. Parkinstine (Parker Edmondson, Tesla-coil restorer) and Julian Brown (plastic-to-fuel inventor). Both are alive and continuing their own work.
The books Joe was photographing — the Apocrypha, the Book of Enoch, the Gospel of Thomas — are the subject of the archive's own published volume.