As a young man raised in a Christian home, I became enamoured of The Jerusalem Bible, a translation based on La Bible de Jérusalem, published in France in 1956. I had tried such paraphrases as J. B. Phillips' New Testament in Modern English and Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible. In fact, I had received a copy of the latter at Christmas 1970 and read it from cover to cover over the next six months or so. I was so put off by its obvious anachronisms and excessive literary breeziness that I quickly abandoned it for something better. The Jerusalem Bible (JB), published in 1966, seemed an obvious alternative. It reads very well and has a certain literary quality that appealed to me. I found it intriguing as well because it included those extra books in the Old Testament that Protestants group together as part of the Apocrypha.
