Note: for much of this post, I am greatly summarizing the material previously published by Geoffrey Hunt (About the New English Bible) and Roger Coleman (New Light and Truth: The Making of the Revised English Bible), which I’ve had the pleasure of reading in their entirety and recommend to any with a passing interest in these specific translations and/or the history of producing a Bible translation.
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The New English Bible (NT: 1961, OT/A/NT: 1970) was one of the first modern English Bibles to be translated directly anew from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts rather than by revising existing translations. It was born by the recommendation of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1946 that “a translation of the Bible be made in the language of the present day.” [Hunt, p.1]
From the vision of that seed, the NEB and later Revised English Bible (REB) revision were born and guided. I hope to cover more of the historical developments of these translations in later posts; however, in this entry I want to look at the conditions that predicated the Church of Scotland’s radical recommendation and the initially stated goals of the translation project.
While there are undoubtedly a great many motives that might be discovered in the origins of this new Bible translation, one unifying experience seems to be the tap root of the project’s genesis: that the beautiful but ultimately foreign language of the KJV proved to be a hindrance to pastors, chaplains and teachers in conveying the gospel message during the difficult conditions of World War II. The language of the KJV was foreign to young soldiers who came from outside of Church traditions and, in the immediacy of the war front, the chaplains had no time to translate the scripture into the language of the day. Hunt describes a “veil of unreality between the scriptural writers” and an audience that desperately “needed something that would speak to them immediately.” [Hunt, p.10]
Coleman goes further in describing this wartime audience as “from industrial urban backgrounds, unchurched and the products of an increasingly secular education.” [Coleman, p.5] In addition, Coleman notes the dilemma of civilian clergy and teachers who encountered displaced persons for whom English was a foreign language, as well as children whose religious education had been interrupted by the various pressures of wartime life. In short, the church was encountering a generation bubble of school-age youth and young adults who were, to a large extent, religiously illiterate, at least compared to previous generations. This population “was unlikely to bring immediate understanding to scripture in the idiom of three centuries or more earlier, however beautiful, solemn, or literary it might be.” [Coleman, p.5]
Another major factor in the drive behind the NEB was the Education Act in 1944, which fundamentally changed the education system for secondary schools in England and Wales. Among its various reforms was the introduction of compulsory prayer into all state-funded schools on a daily basis. In response, the affected churches were bonded by a spirit of ecumenical cooperation to provide religious education; the unity achieved across denominations and doctrinal differences in creating the NEB was an end-result of this spirit as well as of the overall social need for reconnection and rebuilding following the wartime stresses.
With these recent experiences in mind, and also being sensitive that the KJV was still firmly established within Church tradition, C.H. Dodd, later the General Director of the Project, issued a memorandum entitled “Purpose and Intention of the Project”, in which he outlines three key audiences of the new translation:
1. The large section of the population which has no effective contact with the Church in any of its communions, [who are sufficiently educated, but to whom] the language of the current versions is in part actually unintelligible or misleading, and where it is not actually unintelligible has an air of unreality.
2. The young people now growing up … for whom the Bible, if it is to make any impact, must be ‘contemporary’.
3. A considerable number of intelligent people who do attend church, and for whom the traditional language is so familiar that its phrases slide over their minds almost without stirring a ripple… [Hunt, p.22]
The NEB was thus aimed at an educated audience (or one being educated), both inside and outside the Church; however, the new translation was not intended for “those for whom the language of the [Authorized Version] and the Book of Common Prayer is the familiar and natural language of devotion.” [Hunt, p.22]
That is, the NEB was not conceived to replace the traditional use of the KJV in the Church, but to supplement and explain it for those who needed explanation, and to cause the message of the scripture to be heard new on deafened and dulled ears. How true does that intent still ring today?!
