Although they were all fluent in the "koine" Greek of the New Testament, the translators were not professional scholars but a varied cross section of society—ministers, housewives, school teachers, railroad workers, and businessmen.
However they shared the desire (as the Preface to their work puts it), "to do for the English nation what has been done already for the people of almost all other countries -- to enable Englishmen to read the most important part of their Bible in that form of their own language which they themselves use.
[3] In a break with most translations, the TCNT arranges the New Testament books in the order scholars believe they were written – Mark comes before Matthew, for instance.
Because of the translators' meticulous attention to the best scholarship of their day, Bruce Metzger concluded that their version still holds up remarkably well today, despite the lapse of over 100 years.
[5] A modern revision of the TCNT called the Open English Bible was released in 2010 as a public domain (Creative Commons CC0 license) work.