After the work of delegation was finished, a general conference was held in October 1946 where it was determined that a completely fresh translation should be undertaken rather than a revision as originally suggested by the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge.

The work of translating was typically undertaken in this fashion: A member, or members, of one of the committees would produce a draft of a book, or books, of the Bible (typically from the section in which they were assigned) and submit the draft to the section committee.

For the Old Testament the translators primarily made use of the Masoretic Text as presented by Rudolf Kittel in his 3rd Edition of the Biblia Hebraica (1937).

In addition to the Masoretic Text, the translators also made use of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Targums, and the Syriac Peshitta.

For the Apocrypha the translators made the decision to follow The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint, edited by Henry Barclay Swete.

Also, the translators made use of the Codex Sinaiticus (for the Book of Tobit), Theodotion's translation of the Apocrypha (for The Song of the Three, Daniel and Susanna, and Daniel, Bel and the Snake (sometimes referred to as the Dragon)), Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 (for Sirach), Codex 248 (also for Sirach), and Robert Lubbock Bensly's Latin text The Fourth Book of Ezra for 2 Esdras.

C. H. Dodd, Vice-chairman and Director of the Joint Committee, commented that the translators "...conceived our task to be that of understanding the original as precisely as we could... and then saying again in our own native idiom what we believed the author to be saying in his."

They have given us a version which is contemporary in idiom, up-to-date in scholarship, attractive, and at times exciting in content".

[2][page needed] T. S. Eliot, however, commented that the New English Bible "astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic".

[4] The British publisher and author Adam Nicolson, in his 2003 book on the King James Bible, criticized the newer translation for its 'anxiety not to bore or intimidate'.

[7] W. D. McHardy, B. J. Roberts, A. R. Johnson, John Adney Emerton, C. A. Simpson, Sir Godfrey Driver (convener), L. H. Brockington, N. H. Snaith, N. W. Porteous, H. H. Rowley, C. H. Dodd (ex officio), P. P. Allen (secretary).

Prof Sir Roger Mynors, Prof Basil Willey, Sir Arthur Norrington, Anne Ridler, Canon Adam Fox, Dr John Carey, and the Conveners of the Translation Panels.