Yes, in this episode, Joe and I return – for a bit, anyway – to the Bible, this time discussing how the Bible was compiled and what is meant by inspiration.
2 Timothy 3:16 is usually translated as ‘All scripture is inspired by God’, but the Greek is para graphē theopneustos which means ‘all [the] writings are god-breathed’.
First, there’s the issue of what ‘scriptures’ Paul is talking about. The Bible as we have it didn’t exist in Paul’s day. Even the final canon of the Hebrew Scriptures – which is probably what he is talking about here – had not been decided. Indeed, a few lines earlier in the letter to Timothy, Paul refers to a story about two people called Jannes and Jambres who opposed Moses. But that story isn’t in the Bible: it comes from an apocryphal book called The Book of Jannes and Jambres. So we can’t be entirely sure how Paul defines ‘the writings’.
The same is true of inspired. Paul writes ‘God-breathed’, not ‘God-written’, or even ‘God-dictated’. The Bible is the work of many different authors writing in many different genres and at least three different languages (with some occasional Latin words thrown in). It’s not that God was not involved in the process, but I don’t think he was involved in the controlling way we think. For example, Luke is a careful historian: he collects his sources and makes an orderly account. At no point does he claim that ‘The Spirit told me what to write.’
So what does theopneustos mean?
In The Badly Behaved Bible, I argued that what is meant here is the sense of God giving life to something. He brings life to the words, in the same way that He breathed life into Adam and Eve. Or like Ezekiel sees in the valley of bones, when God says ‘I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live’ (Ezek. 37:5).
Here’s a bit from the book which sums up what I think this means:
We are not supposed to just read the Bible. We're supposed to inhale it. We're supposed to take it deep down into our lungs, breathe in the atmosphere, suck in great gulps of the life-giving breath of God. When it feels like we are drowning, the Bible fills our lungs with the saving breath of God.
When we are panicking and scared, the Bible calms us with deep breaths of the presence of God.
When all the breath has been knocked out of us by the events of our lives, when our tears and sobs mean that we cannot catch our breath, the Bible brings us the oxygen of hope and comfort.
When we are becalmed, the Bible blows wind into our sails to get us going.
When we are light-headed and dizzy, when it feels as though we are scaling new heights, the Bible resupplies us with oxygen so that we can climb even further.
We can argue all we like about the process of how books came together… We can argue about meanings and theologies and interpretations until, appropriately, we are blue in the face, but all that is missing the point of the Bible. The point is to let the Bible breathe God's life into us.
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