The New English Bible (NEB) is a Bible translation jointly produced by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. The New Testament was released in 1961 and the complete Bible (with Apocrypha) appeared in 1970. The NEB was presented as a new translation from the original Greek and Hebrew texts and is written meaning-for-meaning (versus word-for-word in other translations) and favors contemporary British English idiom.

Many Churches throughout Great Britain and Ireland sponsored the NEB. They were:

• Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland
• Church of England
• Church of Scotland
• The Congregational Church in England and Wales
• Council of Churches for Wales
• Irish Council of Churches
• The London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• The
  
  of Great Britain">Methodist Church
  
  
  
  of Great Britain
• The Presbyterian Church of England
• British and Foreign Bible Society
• The National Bible Society of Scotland

The resultant translation is clearer than the King James Version (KJV) to the modern ear but also wordier, as can be seen in the following excerpts.

From Psalm 23:1-3a -

From Ecclesiastes 1:2 -

One of the NEB's more controversial renderings is of Psalm 22:16 a verse traditionally viewed by many as anticipating the crucifixion.

Aside from the fact that this translation is clearly aimed primarily at a British and British-educated audience (e.g. using Whitsuntide instead of Pentecost in 1 Corinthians 16: 8), which is only a shortcoming from primarily an American viewpoint, this version has been accused, with some justification, of sexism. Even as the world was changing with regard to the roles of sexes, the translators insisted on using "man" and "men" for the generic human being of either sex upon the premise of grammatical exactitude, even when the context of the original languages was gender-neutral. (This is quite a different criticism from stating that many Biblical doctrines are sexist, which by modern standards is certainly the case, but can hardly be considered a fault of translators.) One of the many changes to the NEB made in the Revised English Bible was an attempt to correct this; however critics of the REB tend to feel that the effort resulted in overcompensation, and that the REB often renders words that were clearly masculine in their original context in a gender-neutral fashion. Some accuse the REB translators of bowing to political correctness in this regard.

In their own introduction, the NEB translators state their goals. They in large measure wanted to make a clean break with past translation traditions and approach the text with much of the same approach that would have been taken had important ancient Hebrew and Greek texts been recently discovered. While at times this approach seems to have resulted in phrasing that was constructed in a way so as to appear completely as an attempt not to sound "Biblical", for the most part the translators seem to have succeeded in the eyes of many.

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