1.6 Is the Bible "Inspired"?

Welcome to the last episode in this opening series of Bible basics. As I mentioned at the very outset of this podcast, I hope to publish this podcast with a certain rhythm to it—an arc of about six related episodes followed by a Q and A episode that is a little bit different. So, with that Q and A episode coming up, I invite you listeners to ask questions that have come to mind as you’ve listened during the last several weeks to the discussions about how various numbers of books ended up in Christian Bibles, the languages in which the Bible was written, the introduction of chapters and verses, and how the Bible is more an anthology than a book. If you have a question you’d like to ask, please email it to the podcast. We will review questions and try to address a few of them in next week’s episode.

For today, we will address another Bible basic related to a term that you may often hear applied to the Bible—inspired.

You may have heard the claim that the Bible is the “inspired” word of God, and we are going to explore how that word was used by the early church. Before we dive in, though, I want to remind listeners that this podcast is intended to present scholarship, not to defend or to refute faith-based claims. So, when we discuss inspiration, when it comes to the Bible or just in everyday usage of the word, we need to recognize that, as a verb, inspire is transitive. It requires an object. Something was inspired. And if something was inspired, it was also inspired BY something. 

When discussing the Bible, Christians will almost universally assume that the one doing the inspiring is God, as in “God inspired the Bible”. But, the existence of a God is beyond the scope of scholarship. Of course, you can study writings about a god, practices associated with the worship of a god or gods, how cultures were shaped by their beliefs in gods, but there is no way to verify the existence or non-existence of a god by looking at texts. How can you know whether a god exists? Whether a particular god exists? Whether or not that particular god inspires books? Whether that god inspired the specific books that are in the Bible and, conversely, did not inspire the books that were left out of the Bible? Scholars cannot be expected to validate things for which there is no evidence. That just isn’t how it works to be a scholar by definition. 

So, let’s turn instead to something that can be studied, the use of the word “inspire” in the ancient church when it comes to the biblical texts. 

———

We’re going to start with the etymology. The word inspire in ancient Greek comes from “pneuma”, a word that means breath in English. We get the word “pneumatics” from this word, the branch of physics related to gases. And the word “pneumonia”, a lung disease. So, pneuma is about air or breath.  

The English word inspire comes from the Latin spiritus, which is also the word for breath. We, of course, get other English words you’ll recognize from these same ancient roots. Spiritus leads us to spirit, spiritual, spirited, inspire (our subject word), respire (again meaning to breathe). We also sometimes refer to a ghost as a spirit, a sort of ethereal element or life force that remains after death. We even refer to liquor as spirits, as they contain some intoxicating life force. 

There is a related Hebrew word, too, which is ruach. In the Old Testament, ruach shows up as the word for wind or for a spirit or life force. It goes back to the creation story in which Adam is brought to life by the breath or ruach of God. Adam or humanity is breathed by God. We might stretch the related words here and say Adam was inspired by God, borough to life through the gift of breath. 

That was an important detour because it helps us understand what meanings were attached to ruach, pneuma, and spiritus or “inspiration” in the ancient world. 

In the first few centuries AD, church leaders and thinkers would often use the word inspired when talking about books, including books that made it into the Bible as well as books that didn’t make it into the Bible. But, how did they know what was inspired and what wasn’t, and the answer is that they were simply making judgements based on contents, what they could discern of the history of a book, and whether it comported with what they believed was the message of the apostles from the 1st century.

If someone judged it to be on-message, then it was often called inspired. But, to illustrate how inspiration was in the eye of the beholder, books you may never have heard of, such as 1 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabus, The Book of Enoch, and The Shepherd of Hermas, were all thought of as inspired writings by some church leaders, even though they were left out of the semi-standardized Bible of the 4th Century. This to say, there is no objective way of knowing whether God inspired a book and there wasn’t back then, either. It is simply not correct to say that the Bible books were considered inspired and the books left out of the Bible were not inspired. The categories don’t line up that neatly.

Further, the word inspired was hardly limited to books. The church at large was considered inspired by God, and individual early church teachers including the apostles were considered inspired by God. There are a number of notable early church theologians, such as Origen and Tertullian, who were at one point called inspired but later branded as heretics.

A person or a writing might be considered inspired one day and uninspired the next. In other words, knowing whether or not God had inspired something required judgment, and the judges often didn’t agree. Inspiration was a fickle word.

———

Now, backing out a bit, what did a person mean in the ancient world if they said a book was inspired? Did they mean God wrote it in some sense? Did they mean God simply provided some inspiration to the author in the same way we might say a beautiful spring day inspired me to write a poem? 

Let’s look at a very important passage in the Bible related to inspiration. In fact it is THE passage most often quoted by biblicists defending the God-origins of the Bible. The passage is 2nd Timothy 3:16, and it says “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Sometimes you will hear it translated All scripture is God-breathed, and the critical greek word is theopneustos—breathed or respired by God. 

But, we need to examine another word in the passage carefully and that is “scripture”. If all scripture is inspired by God, what did the author of 2 Timothy mean by scripture. As we noted already in an earlier episode, the Bible as we know it didn’t exist until the 4th century. And since 2 Timothy was written centuries before that, scripture cannot be equated with Bible. They are not the same thing in this context. Even the Old Testament hadn’t been determined in either the Christian or the Jewish community when 2 Timothy was written. 

An important aside is that 2 Timothy was purportedly written by the Apostle Paul in about the year 65 AD, give or take. But, the consensus among scholars is that the traditional attribution of this book to Paul is not correct. More on the origins of the Pauline letters in a future episode, which will be very interesting, but for now, know that most scholars would say 2 Timothy was written sometime in the 2nd Century. But, since the Bible still didn’t exist at that point, either, it would still be incorrect, anachronistic to equate scripture with Bible. If we were to accept the early dating of 65 AD, extremely little of the New Testament had even been written yet and so could hardly be referred to as scripture in this passage. Nothing of the New Testament existed, in fact, except the genuine letters of Paul. 

In the 2 Timothy passage, then, the inspired scripture in question probably just referred to the first five books of the Old Testament—Genesis to Deuteronomy—the Old Testament prophets and maybe the Psalms. Late-written Old Testament books like Daniel and Esther and maybe Chronicles probably weren’t in mind, because they hadn’t been widely recognized in the 1st and 2nd century Jewish community when 2 Timothy was written.   

And, as we discussed in the our episode on chapters and verses, context really matters in order to avoid distorting the meanings of the texts. 

2 Timothy 3:16 is in many ways the ultimate in wrongly applied prooftexting—used to demonstrate something that is believed to be true, imposed on the Bible, but that simply doesn’t hold up when the context of the verse is understood. If you read the full letter and particularly the verses that surround this “quote unquote” prooftext, you’ll find that Paul is trying to encourage young Timothy in his role as a church leader and nothing more. 

The verse says nothing like “God wrote our Bible so that it has ultimate authority". Rather, it just says Timothy should be encouraged that God had in some sense enlivened or given spirt to important Jewish literature, texts with which Timothy was familiar and which he should find useful in his ministry. To leap from that meaning all the way to the idea that God wrote the Bible is not justifiable. It doesn’t capture the meaning of inspiration.  

To sum up inspired, then, it was a word used in antiquity by church leaders to identify literature or people that, in the judgment of those leaders, were considered useful for shaping the beliefs and practices of the church because of some perceived connection with God. 

What texts were inspired, and which weren’t…well, that depended on whom you asked. What did God do, what did he inspire? What sort of evidence would you need in order to know? Ultimately, inspiration is not a particularly handy word.  

In future episodes, we will likely delve in a bit on related words that are also often used to describe the Bible, such as infallible, authoritative and inerrant. It turns out that inerrancy—which is an especially interesting claim, that the Bible has no errors in it—is quite a modern concept with a relatively short history. 

As I mentioned, in the next episode, we will take a break from these presentation-style episodes and do an interview style Q and A. So, I hope you will tune in. I also hope you will continue to subscribe and share the Bible Unthumped podcast. 

Less thumping, more understanding. Until next time.