We present a measurement of b jet transverse momentum ((p_T)) spectra in proton-lead (pPb) collisions using a dataset corresponding to about 35 nb(^{-1}) collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Jets from b quark fragmentation are found by exploiting the long lifetime of hadrons containing a b quark through tagging methods using distributions of the secondary vertex mass and displacement. Extracted cross sections for b jets are scaled by the effective number of nucleonânucleon collisions and are compared to a reference obtained from pythia simulations of pp collisions. The pythia-based estimate of the nuclear modification factor is found to be 1.22±0.15(stat+syst pPb)±0.27(syst pythia) averaged over all jets with (p_T) between 55 and 400 GeV/c and with |(\eta_{lab})| < 2. We also compare this result to predictions from models using perturbative calculations in quantum chromodynamics.