(Dr. Jeannie Brown) Being part of a mission that is so vital, making sure that God’s Word is communicated in language people understand, means so much to every person here. It really is the passion of the team.

(Dr. Bruce Waltke) And when you sign onto this kind of work, it’s hard work. When you sign onto it, you have to be committed.

(Dr. David Instone-Brewer) Well, sometimes we’ll spend an hour on a comma, you know. We want to get it right.

(Dr. Paul Swarup) When you come in and see how we passionately argue about every single issue, it’s clear that we are committed to God’s Word more than to anything else, and we want to make sure that we are faithful to the text.

(Dr. Mark Strauss) The goal is to translate it into English language that your everyday person in the pew or on the street can understand.

(Dr. Bruce Waltke) Simple, clear, precise.
(Dr. Douglas Moo) Looking both at the advances of scholarship on the one hand and where the English language is going on the other hand.

(Dr. Karen Jobes) And then we have people, I think, on the Committee who have a real ear for the beauty of language.

(Dr. Bill Mounce) How is this going to be read from the pulpit, and how are people going to read it in Sunday school?

(Dr. Paul Swarup) Some of these we read several times before we finally say, “You know, this sounds really good.” Beauty is definitely one of the things that we look for.

(Dr. Bill Mounce) And so that’s why I really recommend the NIV now is that I want people to understand what it says. I want the text to hit a modern audience the same way it hit the ancient audience.

(Dr. Karen Jobes) All of us would consider ourselves evangelicals. All of us would consider ourselves in unity, in what the Word of God is.

(Dr. Douglas Moo) All of us who recognize how high the stakes are. These are words that are becoming part of people’s Bibles, the Word of God to them.

(Dr. David Instone-Brewer) When we get to the end of something like this, and I’m tired out, and we have to fill up our coffee cups to keep going, I say to myself, “Well, hang on. This is Scripture. This is Bible. This is God’s Word, and we want to represent it in English as if God had been speaking English what would he have said and where would he have put that comma.” Suddenly, it’s important again.

(Dr. Karen Jobes) I was sitting in church one Sunday morning, and the preacher read a verse that I remembered how much we had hassled over it. Then he says, “This is the Word of the Lord,” and I just felt that responsibility in a completely new way that people are going to stand up and say, “This is the Word of God.”