“All” or “every” Scripture?
January 5th, 2008 | 4 Comments
This is the first of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
In determining the value and purpose of the Bible, we have to begin by looking at its origin. While a description of the process that put the words of the Bible on the page in mechanical terms is interesting, the theological and philosophical answer to the question of origin is foundational. This we refer to as the issue of inspiration.
The passage in Scripture usually cited as the primary source of the doctrine of inspiration is 2 Tim 3:16-17. This begins, “Every Scripture is inspired by God…” The syntax of the phrase is the most problematic aspect, because in the Greek the word “is” (the copula) does not occur, a situation common in Greek that does not always carry any detectable significance. The ambiguity of where we should understand the copula is significant in this case when you factor in the word kai, which could be translated either “and” or “even” based upon where you insert the understood “is”: in other words, should we render this verse as “Every Scripture [is] inspired by God and [is] useful…” or “Every God-inspired Scripture [is] also useful…”? In the first, the point of the statement is that God inspired Scripture and hence it is useful for doctrine, etc. In the second version, inspiration seems to be the qualifier, and that seems to suggest that there are Scriptures that are not inspired and that those are not necessarily useful.
But would it really mean that? Keep in mind that the word graphe meant simply “a writing” when the word was used outside the New Testament, but within the New Testament it is always understood to mean “sacred writing” or “Scripture”. My understanding is that theopneustos, commonly translated “God-breathed”, was probably intended not to strengthen the already specialized “Scripture” sense of the word but rather to act as a specializing qualifier for the more general meaning “writing”, thereby forming a phrase meaning literally “God-inspired Writing” and hence “Scripture”. Besides this, the usage data gathered by Robinson and begrudgingly confirmed by House seems fairly conclusive about the use of that particular syntactic construction throughout both the NT and the Septuagint: in almost every instance the adjective is attributive (i.e. it modifies graphe to mean “every God-inspired Writing”).[1]
If this interpretation is taken, we translate kai as “also”. So what is the significance of the phrase “also useful”? What was it useful for in the first place? Here, the context strengthens the case. If we look at the previous verse, we see that the start of this inspiration passage is not verse 16, but verse 15:
