Paul and The ​‘Inspi­ra­tion’ of Scripture

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi

In II Tim­o­thy 3:16, we read the claim of Paul :

“All Scrip­ture is God-breathed and is use­ful for teach­ing, rebuk­ing, cor­rect­ing and train­ing in right­eous­ness.” (2 Tim­o­thy 3:16)

In the above verse, we clear­ly see that the entire Bible is sup­posed to be inspired from God Almighty.

First of all, let us just say that we com­plete­ly agree that ​“all scrip­ture is by inspi­ra­tion of God”. How­ev­er, this is basi­cal­ly a val­ue­less state­ment because what does the word ​“scrip­ture” mean ? It means Divine­ly revealed (or ​“inspired”) books that speak the will of God. Thus to say that ​“all scrip­ture is by inspi­ra­tion of God” is the same as say­ing ​“all books that were inspired by God were inspired by God”. This is point­less dou­ble-speak that not only proves noth­ing, but also fails to address the real issue. This issue is whether or not some­thing that peo­ple claim to be scrip­ture real­ly is a scrip­ture — in whole or in part.

This is not to men­tion the fact that when this state­ment was orig­i­nal­ly made by Paul, he was refer­ring not to the New Tes­ta­ment, but only to the Jew­ish writ­ings that he (right­ly or wrong­ly) con­sid­ered to be scrip­ture. As most Protes­tant Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists usu­al­ly do, they fail to men­tion the verse just before the pas­sage men­tioned above. In II Tim­o­thy 3:15, we read : ” … and from child­hood you have known the Holy Scrip­tures …” Obvi­ous­ly, since none of the so-called ​“gospels”, nor the Epis­tles of Paul, could have exist­ed in this per­son­’s ​“child­hood”, the entire New Tes­ta­ment is exclud­ed from this pas­sage. If lat­er Chris­tians came to believe that every­thing that they claimed was ​“inspired by God” was real­ly ​“inspired by God”, then that is their mis­take. So suf­fice it to say that we sub­mit to and fol­low the authen­tic Word of God, but just because some­one claims that they have been ​“inspired” does­n’t mean that we believe them.

Paul who wrote II Tim­o­thy 3:16 had ridicu­lous­ly con­tra­dict­ed him­self because he had admit­ted that he was­n’t always inspired by God Almighty (1 Corinthi­ans 7:25 – 30). Vers­es 1 Corinthi­ans 7:25 – 30 are today per­ma­nent­ly pre­served in the ​“Bible”. If God Almighty indeed spoke II Tim­o­thy 3:16 through Paul, then He would­n’t have con­tra­dict­ed Him­self in the verse about the entire Bible being His Word, while per­ma­nent­ly pre­serv­ing Paul’s per­son­al words and sug­ges­tions in the ​“Bible”. This should be a par­tial evi­dence that Paul was not truthful.

The word ​“Bible” is a mod­ern term, and comes from the word Bib­lia which means ​“books”. Fur­ther­more, until today we see var­i­ous Church­es have a dif­fer­ent num­ber of col­lec­tion of books in their ​“Bible”. So when such claim is made, it is not right for us to use it to prove the entire ​“col­lec­tion” was inspired from God Almighty. Since all of the books of the New Tes­ta­ment were deemed ​“Divine­ly inspired” by a Church that already had a cer­tain the­o­log­i­cal point of view, it comes as no sur­prise that some parts of the books that they select­ed (at the expense of oth­ers) con­firm their beliefs. Suf­fice it to say that even if Chris­tians are able to pro­duce an (alleged) state­ment of Jesus, peace be upon him, in the New Tes­ta­ment in which he explic­it­ly says ​“I am God, wor­ship me!”, this would only prove that the Church had made a mis­take in its selec­tion of gospels.