Glimpse: The Great News NIV New Testament
A lot of thrift store bookshelves are downright depressing: rows of cracked spines and garish mass-market paperbacks from yesteryear. But I came across this little volume in one, and my spirits were buoyed. It's the NIV New Testament in a format obviously designed for outreach (you can tell because of all the clip-art people, who send the subliminal message that "this book is for everyone").
Yesterday's attempts at relevance often fail to stand the test of time, but when I opened this paperback, a wave of nostalgia overwhelmed me. It's a single column setting, as you can see:
What's more, it's illustrated:
Now why do you suppose the text in this edition is made to look like the inside of any other book? That's easy. The designers wanted it to look accessible ... readable. Who wouldn't want that, right? And yet, most editions of the Bible get this wrong. They aren't designed for reading; they're designed for looking up verses. In the church, we're so accustomed to this arrangement -- it's been like this for five hundred years or so, after all -- that it seems natural to us. But if they put out a new edition of The Shack with super-small, double-column type, dividing the text up into numbered phrases and starting a new paragraph for each one, that quick read might not be so quick anymore. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
J. Mark Bertrand is a novelist and pastor whose writing on Bible design has helped spark a publishing revolution. Mark is the author of Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World (Crossway, 2007), as well as the novels Back on Murder, Pattern of Wounds, and Nothing to Hide—described as a “series worth getting attached to” (Christianity Today) by “a major crime fiction talent” (Weekly Standard) in the vein of Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and Henning Mankell.
Mark has a BA in English Literature from Union University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and an M.Div. from Heidelberg Theological Seminary. Through his influential Bible Design Blog, Mark has championed a new generation of readable Bibles. He is a founding member of the steering committee of the Society of Bible Craftsmanship, and chairs the Society’s Award Committee. His work was featured in the November 2021 issue of FaithLife’s Bible Study Magazine.
Mark also serves on the board of Worldview Academy, where he has been a member of the faculty of theology since 2003. Since 2017, he has been an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He and his wife Laurie life in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.