New Test, Stud. 8, pp. 80-100. REVIEWS The New English Bible: New Testament. Library Edition, pp. xiii+ 447, 215. Popular Edition, pp. x+432, 85. 6d. Oxford University Press, London; Cambridge University Press, 1961. The 1611 version of the Bible, commonly called ‘the Authorized Version’ (though no formal authorization was ever bestowed upon it by Church or State), exercised an unchallenged sway in English usage until 1881, when the Revised Version of the New Testament appeared. Even then, its dominion was scarcely diminished. For one thing, the Revised Version was not a great success; it was often pedantic in its efforts to reproduce shades of meaning in the Greek idiom, and the translators placed an intolerable handicap upon themselves by their decision to render the same Greek word everywhere by the same English word. And the continuing hold of the Authorized Version upon the public was acknowledged from the start in the instructions to the Revisers ‘to introduce as few alterations as possible... consistently with faithfulness’, and also ‘to limit, as far as possible, the expression of such alterations to the language of the Authorized and earlier English Versions’. The effect upon the reader was often to make him feel that someone had botched and haggled the familiar words of his Bible. The English Revisers were aided in their labours by a group of American associates. The suggestions of the Americans, however, were so often rejected that they arranged to have them embodied in a separate edition of the new version, which was published in rgor as the American Standard Version. In 1928 the copyright of this Version passed into the hands of the International Council of Religious Education; in 1937 a committee of this Council was able to persuade it that a revision of their Version should be undertaken, with the provision that it ‘should embody the best results of modern scholarship as to the meaning of the Scriptures, and express this meaning in English diction which is designed for use in public and private worship and preserves those qualities which have given to the King James Version a supreme place in English literature’. In these instructions there is a distinct lessening of the degree of dominance which the Authorized Version is to retain; but the work is still planned as a revision of a revision of that Version, and changes are limited by the provision that they must secure the agreement of two-thirds of the members of the revising committee (thirty-two in all). In practice, however, the translators exercised a good deal of freedom. They were not limited, like their predecessors, to the vocabulary and style of the Elizabethan age; and they felt no obligation to reproduce Greek constructions and word order in English. Their work is fresh and vigorous, and has been widely accepted not only in North America, but wherever English is spoken. The New Testament was published in 1946, and the Old Testament in 1951, under the title of The American Revised Standard Version, usually shortened to