Biblical inspiration

The -tos ending in the Greek theopneustos also designates a passive construct whereby the subject God is breathing out the object (scripture).

[6] Daniel B. Wallace states that numerous scholars believe that the proper translation should be: "Every inspired scripture is also profitable".

[7] Evangelicals view the Bible as superintended by the Holy Spirit, preserving the writers' works from error without eliminating their specific concerns, situation, or style.

[8] 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.

[9] Evangelicals acknowledge the existence of textual variations between biblical accounts of apparently identical events and speeches.

Evangelical apologists such as John W. Haley in his book Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible[10] and Norman Geisler in When Critics Ask[11] have proposed answers to hundreds of claimed contradictions.

B. Warfield and Charles Hodge, however, moved away from a circular argument and "committed themselves to the legitimacy of external verification" to inductively prove the doctrine, though they placed some restrictions on the evidences that could be considered.

And that afterwards God, from a special care which He has for us and our salvation, commanded His servants, the prophets and apostles, to commit His revealed Word to writing; and He Himself wrote with His own finger the two tables of the law.

According to Frederic Farrar, Martin Luther did not understand inspiration to mean that the scriptures were dictated in a purely mechanical manner.

[25] The Catechism of the Catholic Church alleges that the Bible's human writers were "consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more".

[26] The Catechism also claims that the Bible "without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures".

Because the Catholic Church designated the biblical canon through its tradition, its authority to identify the inspired books is accepted, rather than any self-contained or inherent claims of the Scriptures themselves.