Speaking with my philology and history hates on, not my faith hat, I can see the value of an *actual* inclusive Bible, not the point-scoring on display in that idea.

This lower-case bible would have everything seriously argued to be canonical by any early-ish group of people who called themselves Christian, picking up Revelation, the Pastoral Epistles, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic gospels. It is useful to see things in their context and to understand that the canon was decided on, and not necessarily obvious. It is useful to see bible and non-bible the way their first readers saw then, without all the typographic cues indicating which is in and which out.

At the same time, one shouldn't put everything on the same plane. Sorting them by consensus date of composition would go a long way there, particularly as so much play is given to texts that are just plain late. I can't see any extra-canonical religious texts (ie., leaving Josephus out for now) useful for the reconstruction of the historical Jesus, except maybe the Gospel of Thomas and even there in a minor way. But that's not the only question at stake. A deluxe set of stuff that people have argued to be canonical would be a fun book to own and valuable in its own way.

I think Ed Veith misspoke a bit, which becomes apparent if you check the continuity of his remarks. Rowan Williams did not endorse 'The Inclusive Bible' (at least not to my knowledge or internet searching ability); however, he did endorse the even more radical 'Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures', which aligns with Veith's description. Williams wrote the forward for it…

http://www.bible-researcher.com/gan.html

Foreword

What would Christianity look like, what would Christian language sound like, if we really tried to screen out the stale, the technical, the unconsciously exclusive words and policies and to hear as if for the first time what the Christian scriptures were saying? John Henson has devoted much of his life to wrestling with this challenge, and has for many people made those scriptures speak as never before - indeed, as for the first time. Patiently and boldly, he has teased out implications, gone back to roots, linguistic and theological, and re-imagined the process in which a genuinely new language was brought to birth by those who had listened to Jesus because they knew they were in a genuinely new world.

"Some of John's versions will startle; but only because we have forgotten what the impact might have been in the ancient world of a small library of books written in the dialect of the streets and shops, with many of the leading characters identified by slightly outlandish nicknames. And also, because we have not much living language left for authority figures, we fail to sense the impact of the images of royalty and so on in the pages of scripture; we need other terms to make them come alive.

"John's presentation of the Christian gospel is of extraordinary power simply because it is so close to the prose and poetry of ordinary life. Instead of being taken into a specialized religious frame of reference - as happens even with the most conscientious of formal modern translations - and being given a gospel addressed to specialized concerns - as happens with even the most careful of modern "devotional" books - we have here a vehicle for thinking and worshiping that is fully earthed, recognizably about our humanity. Here are sensitive meditations, blunt and beautiful prayers, familiar hymns made fresh (polished and re-set as John likes to say). The Gospels tell us that Jesus' unprofessional and unreligious audiences heard him gladly; if they are to hear him gladly today, they will need something like John's renderings for this to be plausible. His work is for a large part of the "religious" reading public a well-kept secret; I hope that this book will help the secret to be shared, and to spread in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike."

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.