Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Keith Williams, general editor of the Holy Bible: Mosaic. Keith has agreed to write this post for me as a stop on the Holy Bible: Mosaic Blog Tour. I have enjoyed getting to know Keith better through emails, twitter, and even meeting him for coffee as he and his wife were travelling through Louisville. Keith was willing to step up and write this post with limited time after an unfortunate timing conflict kept our original guest author from writing (a conflict beyond his control). Truly, Keith is a man dedicated to his work.

Holy Bible: Mosaiccelebrates the diversity of the church in many ways. The collection of art, writings, prayers, and quotes from around the world and throughout the centuries in the Mosaic material highlights this diversity quite noticeably. A lot has been made of the diversity of the content, and it truly is a great feature of Mosaic, but I think the unity of the church amidst this diversity is the more important point.

One of the reasons we chose the title Mosaic for this Bible was to point to this truth. All of us, those who have been incorporated into Christ Jesus, are pieces of a larger whole: the body of Christ (Gal. 3:26-29). This body, like a mosaic, is made up of individual pieces that are each distinct, yet they come together to make a whole that is far more beautiful than any single piece, or even an group of pieces, would be on its own. Some of the pieces are beautiful on their own. And some are rather unremarkable. But as a whole, every piece is elevated by pointing to the central unifying reality: Jesus Christ.

Some of the pieces that are brought together in Mosaic are quite different. I know Mark Driscoll (p. m184) is very different from Doug Pagitt (p. m22). And both of them are very different from Anna Pak Agi (p. m139) and Augustine of Hippo (throughout). Amidst all of their differences, one thing unites them all: Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who motivates these men and women from all over the globe and throughout history to write and speak and create art that proclaims his glory. What an awesome Lord we serve, that he has brought together a body made up of all these different pieces.

This emphasis on unity does not negate the fact that there are real differences between the way some of these people express their faith in Christ from others. Those differences should not simply be smoothed over and ignored; rather, they should be explored. Not everything we find will be agreeable to us, but many (I daresay most) of them will expand and enrich our faith rather than mislead us. God is far too big to be contained by any one person or group or culture of people that serve him. The most important thing we can do is to listen to one another and discover what God might be teaching us through the people he has called to himself from places and times distant from ourselves. Perhaps through them, we can get a better sense of what God is calling us to do in our culture, in our time, in our community.

Holy Bible: Mosaic only gives a glimpse into the mosaic of voices that God has provided us with through his people around the world and throughout history, but I hope that this glimpse will encourage believers to be mindful of the diversity within our unified body of Christ, and to celebrate both the differences and the oneness that we share.

As most of my readers probably already know, the website dedicated to the codex Sinaiticus was launched recently. You can go there by clicking here. The website is gorgeous. The designers did a fantastic job with the look, and it is very accessible as well. The manuscript viewer did well on Firefox 3 (though Eric at Archaic Christianity had some issues).

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the text of their “about” page:

“Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament. The hand-written text is in Greek. The New Testament appears in the original vernacular language (koine) and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. In the Codex, the text of both the Septuagint and the New Testament has been heavily annotated by a series of early correctors.

The significance of Codex Sinaiticus for the reconstruction of the Christian Bible’s original text, the history of the Bible and the history of Western book-making is immense.”

Included books at the time of this post:
1 Chronicles
2 Esdras
Esther
Tobit
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Psalms
Mark