A Q&A with Keith Williams, General Editor of NLT Mosaic Bible

The NLT Mosaic Bible is the latest release in Bibles from Tyndale House.  For over a year now, the New Living Translations (NLT) has been occupying a regular spot in the top three in bestselling Bible, both in units and dollars, according to a monthly from CBA: The Association for Christian Retair Since 1950.

Today we have the pleasure of having Keith Williams, general editor of the NLT Mosaic Bible, stopping by, to answer a few questions on this new and exciting Bible:

Here we go:

1. What inspired this project?
A number of things collided to create this Bible. On my end, I was thinking about the significance of the church year in my own spiritual life and wondering if there was a way to help more evangelicals become interested in following the church year. Then Tyndale received a Bible proposal from David Sanford (the Executive Editor for Mosaic) that was targeting the emerging/missional church communities. His proposal had several of the other elements that ended up in Mosaic: geographic and historic diversity, inclusion of artwork and liturgical elements (i.e., prayers, hymns, etc.). Those two sets of ideas eventually culminated in the final product.

2. Talk about the title.
You know, “Relic” never came up as a possibility in our discussions about title. The working title for a long time was Meditations: Via Christus, and the story of how the title Holy Bible: Mosaic came to be is the subject of another guest post that I wrote here.

3. How did we choose the particular writings to include?
David Sanford and his team at Credo have a great group of contemporary authors that they were able to draw on to get the original contributions, and from there that team was involved with selecting the “outside” quotes to include with each week. The only thing we asked was that they be as broad as possible in terms of drawing from diverse traditions, cultures, and time periods as appropriate. My role was to take everything they submitted (all of which was very good) and cut out some to make it all fit well together on the page and work as an integrated whole.

In one case, we had to actively go out and find a quote to fill a “missing” century, so that we could honestly be representing every century of Christian history. Fortunately, we were able to find a great quote that fits well and served a double purpose of giving us another voice from the Middle East: Yahya ibn’Adi (p. m301).

4. What devotional am I particularly fond of?
That’s a tough question to answer, as there are really a number of very good ones. One that sticks out is the week written by Tamara Park, “Marked with Khesed,” because it is the only meditation that we allowed to spill over from one page to two. I just couldn’t bring myself to cut anything else out.

5. What hopes do I have for Mosaic?
Three things I’m hoping to see from Mosaic, apart from the obvious hope that people will be able to connect with God through the Scriptures and have a meaningful devotional experience.

(1) I hope Mosaic will help some evangelicals who don’t know much about the church calendar to take a closer look at it and consider what it could do for their spiritual lives.

(2) I hope Mosaic will help Christians get a glimpse at how wide and how broad and how diverse the entire Church is, and remind them that our unity in Christ is far more basic than our differences in culture and theological expression.

(3) I hope Mosaic will nudge a few people to give the NLT a(nother) chance, and I doubly hope that those who think the NLT isn’t very scholarly will take a close look at the Hebrew/Greek word study system in the cross reference column.

6. What feedback have we received?
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. The only negatives I’ve heard from people is that they’d like the print size to be a bit bigger in the Scripture portion and that they’d like to see the Mosaic portion printed as a separate book.

7. Has Erwin McManus seen this Bible?
I don’t know. But you can find a quote from him on p. m37 (viewable in this online sampler).

You may win a free copy of the Mosaic Bible right here, or purchase one at Amazon.com.  To learn more about the Mosaic Bible, you might want to visit its Homepage and Blog.

Thanks, Keith.