Biblical inspiration

Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology that the human writers and canonizers of the Bible were led by God with the result that their writings may be designated in some sense the word of God. This belief is traditionally associated with concepts of the biblical infallibility and the internal consistency of the Bible.

At 2 Tim 3:16 (NRSV), it is written: "All scripture is inspired by God [theopneustos] and is useful for teaching".

When Jerome translated the Greek text of the Bible into the language of the Vulgate, he translated the Greek theopneustos (θεόπνευστος) of 2 Timothy 3:16 as divinitus inspirata ("divinely breathed into").

Some modern English translations opt for "God-breathed" (NIV) or "breathed out by God" (ESV). The -tos ending in the Greek theopneustos also designates a passive construct whereby the subject God is breathing out the object (scripture).

Theologian C. H. Dodd suggests that it is "probably to be rendered" as: "Every inspired Scripture is also useful".

Daniel B. Wallace states that numerous scholars believe that the proper translation should be: "Every inspired scripture is also profitable". Wallace, however, criticises this translation; he proposes the translation "every scripture is inspired and profitable".

Evangelicals view the Bible as superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the writers' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style. This divine involvement, they say, allowed the biblical writers to communicate without corrupting God's own message both to the immediate recipients of the writings and to those who would come after. Some Evangelicals have labelled the conservative or traditional view as "verbal, plenary inspiration of the original manuscripts", by which they mean that each word (not just the overarching ideas or concepts) was meaningfully chosen under the superintendence of God.

Evangelicals acknowledge the existence of textual variations between biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches. They see these as complementary, not contradictory, and explain them as the differing viewpoints of different writers. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew was intended to communicate the Gospel to Jews, the Gospel of Luke to Greeks, and the Gospel of Mark to Romans. Evangelical apologists such as John W. Haley in his book Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible and Norman Geisler in When Critics Ask have proposed answers to hundreds of claimed contradictions. Some discrepancies are accounted for by changes from the master manuscripts (which are alleged to contain very nearly the original text and) that these alterations were introduced as copies were made (maybe of copies themselves), either deliberately or accidentally.