The Invention of the Inspired Text

Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture

John C. Poirier

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567696762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

John C. Poirier examines the "theopneustic" nature of the Scripture, as a response to the view that "inspiration" lies at the heart of most contemporary Christian theology. In contrast to the traditional rendering of the Greek word theopneustos as "God-inspired" in 2 Tim 3: 16, Poirier argues that a close look at first- and second-century uses of theopneustos reveals that the traditional inspirationist understanding of the term did not arise until the time of Origen in the early third century CE, and that in every pre-Origen use of theopneustos the word instead means "life-giving." Poirier thus conducts a detailed investigation of theopneustos as it appears in the fifth Sibylline Oracle, the Testament of Abraham, Vettius Valens, Pseudo-Plutarch ( Placita Philosophorum ), and Pseudo-Phocylides, all of whom understand the word to mean "life-giving." He also studies the use of the cognate term theopnous in Numenius, the Corpus Hermeticum, on an inscription at the Great Sphinx of Giza, and on an inscription at a nymphaeum at Laodicea on the Lycus. Poirier argues that a rendering of "life-giving" also fits better within the context of 2 Tim 3: 16, and that this meaning survived late enough to figure in a fifth-century work by Nonnus of Panopolis. He further traces the pre-Origen use of theopneustos among the Church Fathers. Poirier concludes by addressing the implication of rethinking the traditional understanding of Scripture, stressing that the lack of "God-inspired" scripture ultimately does not affect the truth status of the gospel as preached by the apostles.

1

Is “All Scripture … Inspired”? Toward a New Look
at Θεόπνευστος in 2 Tim. 3:16

No passage has been more central to the church’s understanding of Scripture than 2 Tim. 3:16. Christians routinely point to that verse as making the clearest and strongest claim for the Bible’s inspiration. It comprises a “crucial piece of biblical self-testimony,” as Mark Thompson (2012: 95) would have it. And yet, perhaps no words in the entire Bible have had more false implications read into them than the opening phrase of 2 Tim. 3:16. As nearly all those implications are based on a rendering of these words in a modern language, let us take the usual English rendering as representative of how this verse typically is read: “All scripture is inspired by God.” From a strictly exegetical perspective, the corollaries hanging on these six English words are fewer and less far-reaching than the usual expansionist interpretation would have us believe. For many, there is more here than strict exegesis admits, and 2 Tim. 3:16 has served as the church’s main proof text, not only for the idea of Scripture’s inspiration but also for the (rather different) idea of its infallibility or inerrancy. Those who read infallibilist/inerrantist claims into these words do so on the basis of a preconceived system—a system that they consider (philosophically) basic to the theology of the New Testament.¹

I use “expansionist” advisedly, as it is only in connection with the Bible that the word “inspired” tends to be connected so directly with the notions of infallibility and inerrancy.² The tendency to do so, of course, is more pronounced among Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. We read in Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible, for example, that “inspiration involved infallibility from start to finish”³—the former somehow is held to imply the latter.⁴ Yet, as the word “inspired” is used in everyday speech—applied to an assortment of things besides Scripture—the thought of a resulting inerrancy or infallibility scarcely enters the picture. (We are still discussing the English word “inspired”—we will get to the Greek term behind it soon enough.)⁵ When the author of a story or poem speaks of being “inspired” to write, no one thinks to test the author’s claim to inspiration by fact-checking the story’s or poem’s claims (see Barr 1973: 16–17). And that is not only because we normally allow the word “inspired” to refer to a momentary fit of genius. There have been many, in fact, specifically claiming (with all earnestness) to be “inspired” by God to write,⁶ but in their case the fact-checking that might win or lose the reader’s approval seldom goes beyond testing the author’s central point.

The question therefore arises: if we routinely allow claims of divine inspiration in non-scriptural writings to stand (at least as tenable) in the face of a fallible literary canvas, why do the rules of engaging the notion of inspiration change so dramatically when it comes to Scripture? The answer, of course, is found in what I said above: the word “inspired” in English translations of 2 Tim. 3:16 is seldom allowed to function innocently. Instead it has served as the means for smuggling a whole system of ideas into the Bible. On the one hand, if I say I’m inspired, no one thinks I’m claiming to be inerrant. On the other hand, if Scripture claims to be inspired, then the claim to inerrancy is (supposedly) loud and clear. The rules are clearly flexible,⁷ and that flexibility creates a blind spot for those holding to inerrancy, regarding the logical fit of inerrancy within their doctrine of Scripture.

The name of Benjamin Warfield is always among the first mentioned in any discussion of the inspiration of Scripture, especially as that doctrine is made to undergird the notion of inerrancy. William Abraham (1998: 313–14) notes, however, that Warfield was quite willing to admit that inspiration played no necessary role within the theology of the New Testament. Thus Warfield (1893: 208–9) could write in a way unimaginable for most inerrantists today:

Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us in the generally trustworthy reports of the teaching of our Lord and of His authoritative agents in founding the Church, preserved in the writings of the apostles and their first followers, and in the historical witness of the living Church. (See Barr 1977: 265)⁸

To my mind, these words express almost perfectly the inessentiality of the Evangelical doctrine of biblical inspiration. But was this really Warfield, the celebrated watchdog of Princeton Orthodoxy, saying these things? It was indeed Warfield, but only, it seems, as he was caught in a lapse of his real intellectual and religious commitments. As Abraham (1998: 314) notes, Warfield immediately (within the same essay) “proceeded to turn this [disclaimer] on its head by insisting that giving up inspiration would entail giving up the evidence on which our trust in Scripture rests.” In Warfield’s (1893: 210) words, the inspiration of Scripture is “an element of the Christian faith … which cannot be rejected without logically undermining our trust in all other elements of distinctive Christianity by undermining the evidence on which this trust rests.”⁹ Warfield’s response to his own streak of methodological honesty was to totalize the mischief in doubting the New Testament’s word in any one instance. If we should mistrust the doctrine of inspiration as laid out for us in the New Testament, he argues, we cannot trust what Scripture tells us of any doctrine of the faith: “The human mind is very subtle, but with all its subtlety it will hardly be able to find a way to refuse to follow Scripture in one of the doctrines it teaches without undermining its authority as a teacher of doctrine” (Warfield 1893: 207). David Kelsey (1975: 22) summarizes Warfield’s move at this point by characterizing inspiration as “logically dispensable” but “methodologically basic.”

Today this “slippery slope” argument is more likely to elicit a smile than a gasp of horror,¹⁰ but it is worth noting that the terms it lays down are entirely agreeable to the present book’s argument. The pages that follow do not attempt to dismiss the doctrine of inspiration in spite of Scripture’s supposed claim, but rather to show that Scripture really makes no such claim in the first place. Warfield (1893: 185) writes that the doctrine of inspiration “is based wholly upon an exegetical fact.” I aim to show that the facts (both exegetical and historical) are quite otherwise. To his credit, Warfield (1893: 181) appears explicitly to accept these terms of engagement: “If a fair criticism evinces that this is not the doctrine of the Biblical writers, then of course it has ‘destroyed’ the doctrine which is confessedly based on that supposition.”¹¹

Returning to the slippery slope, one wonders why the witness of the apostles and their first followers so quickly lost its sparkle for Warfield. Why does Scripture need to be inspired in order to be trustworthy in its central commitments?¹² Is the truth true only when it’s inspired?¹³ As early as the seventeenth century, Jean Le Clerc (1690: 29–31) registered the same complaint about the slovenliness of certain habits of thought surr...