Is the Bible human literature?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Google’s AI has a strong tendency to return the answer you want. How it does this I don’t know.

From the same AI using “verbal plenary inspiration” gives

If the human author has control, to some degree, over what is written then all the words did not come from God.

That would be you and your groups definition. It certainly doesn’t apply to all who invoke VPP. And to me there is no difference between “guiding the writers to choose the right words” and “taking dictation”. Bottom line it is God that is putting the words down on the page.

Edit to add:
I wonder if some object to the idea of dictation because it reminds them of Islam or Joseph Smith.

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One way to decide what we believe about the Bible is not to begin with some doctrinal stance we have consciously or unconsciously absorbed from our church background, but rather to approach it as historians looking at ancient documents, and on that basis decide what we want to believe about it.

The story of Israel begins in ancient Mesopotamia, a twin river valley running from what is now Southeast Turkey down to the Persian Gulf. According to the Genesis account, Abraham set out from here, going first northwest from Ur to avoid the desert, and then down south along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea to what is now the land of Israel.

After a sojourn in Egypt, the Israelites returned to what is now Israel. They eventually formed themselves into a monarchy, but after three kings, some of the tribes broke away from Israel to form the kingdom of Judah. Both kingdoms spent much of their time as vassal states of Mesopotamian Empires. In the 8th Century B.C., the kingdom of Israel rebelled against its Assyrian overlords, but was subdued by the Assyrians. Thousands of Israelites were taken away as slaves and the Assyrians imported some people from other parts of their empire to be a ruling elite who would subdue any further rebellion.

It was once thought that all the Israelites had been deported and that the imports practised a corrupt version of Israelite faith. However, over the past 2-3 decades there has been a major re-evaluation of this claim. Based on scripture, such as 1 and 2 Chronicles, archaeological evidence, and DNA samples, it appears that many Israelites avoided deportation by the Assyrians and continued to practice Israelite faith in a way that was no more corrupt than that of the kingdom of Judah.

In the 6th Century B.C., the kingdom of Judah rebelled against its Babylonian overlords. They were subdued and thousand were taken away as slaves to Babylon. After a few generations, the Persians overthrew the Babylonians and the Judahites were permitted to return to Judea. But then the Greeks conquered the Persians and subdued both the remnant of the northern kingdom of Israel and the returned exiles of the kingdom of Judah. Eventually the Greeks were overthrown, first by the Judahites but eventually by the Romans. However, while the Romans conquered the Greeks militarily, the Greeks conquered the Romans linguistically, and Greek became the common language of the Western Roman Empire.

Sorry for the whirlwind tour of history, but it has to do with the language of the Bible and formation of the Bible. Early on in the history of Mesopotamia, the Assyrians conquered the kingdom of Aram militarily. However, the Aramaeans conquered the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians linguistically. Instead of the more than 600 pictographs of Cuneiform, the Aramaeans had an alphabetic script based on the sounds of the spoken language made up of just 22 letters. Aramaic became the common language of these Mesopotamian Empires. So, there were two common languages: Greek in the West and Aramaic in the East.

Hebrew was a Canaanite language, but when the Judahite exiles returned from Babylon, they came back speaking Aramaic as their everyday language. Hebrew became the language of the Temple and the synagogue, but most importantly, the returning exiles began to write Hebrew language with Aramaic letters. And they still do to this day. Evidence of Hebrew written in the original Hebrew script comes mainly from Samaritan contributions to the Bible. Scholars believe that the first language of Jesus in his community would have been Aramaic. The writing of Hebrew in Aramaic script dates it to the Persian/Greek/Hasmonean period.

The relevance of all this to the way we perceive the Bible is the understanding that the books of the Hebrew Bible reached their final editing in the Persian/Greek/Hasmonean period in the few centuries before Christ. We are not able to step backwards from that time to investigate what theology the books would have revealed in earlier editions. The way they were written and the theology they espoused, date from that time.

Let me draw an analogy. Some centuries back, some German migrants came to a community interstate to where I live. A German expat friend of mine travelled over to visit their community. He was fascinated to find that they spoke a version of the German language that was antiquated – frozen in time – from the era of their migration.

The theology of the Old Testament is like that. Frozen in the time of the Persian/Greek/Hasmonean period. In that, we can see the human influence on revelation.

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OK, you can believe this if you want, but this is not what proponents of plenary verbal inspiration believe, affirm, or teach.

That is the broadly agreed and well-documented multidenominational evangelical definition as articulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, so this is not something out of the mainstream of conservative evangelical thought, or somehow limited to me and my little group.

Article VIII
We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.
We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

To you, yes. And you have every right to your opinion. But to me, and other proponents of Biblical Inerrancy and Plenary Verbal Inspiration, including the 200 scholars and leaders across the evangelical world that signed the aforementioned statement, no.

So respectfully, just because you personally can’t see how something could be both/and (both God guiding the writers to choose the right words, and them being free to write according to their own experience, personality, agenda, etc.), doesn’t mean that others have to share your view. And thus, respectfully, you don’t have the right to construct a straw man and claim that proponents of Verbal Plenary Inspiration or Inerrancy therefore believe that God literally dictated Scripture, when they explicitly deny said position.

(NB, This is a bit like the conversations I have with people about predestination. I’m a Calvinist, and therefore I believe that God predestinating all things including human choices, and human freedom, are in fact compatible. I firmly believe it is both/and. There are plenty of people who claim that they cannot see how divine predestination of human choices and human free choices are compatible, and they don’t understand how believing in predestination could not logically entail humans being puppets or automata. And that is fine, I can’t insist that they believe otherwise. But just because they do not understand how I can believe that those two things could be compatible, does not give them the right to claim that I actually affirm that humans are puppets or automata, when I explicitly deny that position. )

If you don’t understand how I, or the Chicago Statement signatories, or other evangelical preachers can claim that God intended every single word as written, but simultaneously did not mechanically dictate Scripture or otherwise override the freedom and personalities of the authors, that is fine… and if you personally don’t understand how a belief in Plenary Verbal Inspiration does not logically entail God literally dictating Scripture, then you are absolutely free to your (erroneous) opinion.

But I humbly maintain that you do not have the right to claim that proponents of Verbal Plenary Inspiration or Inerrancy actually affirm that God literally dictated the Scripture, when this is something they explicitly deny.

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No, it is because the text is flawed and therefore defies a divine authorship.

Clearly the words of 2 Tim are aimed at a specific person with speciiic scripture in mind, so to extend it beyond that is adding to the text. Furthermore, if you read the passage instead of the verse it is clear that the contextual meaning is

If all else fails do not forget the Scriptures you were brought up with.

It was never meant as a ruling on the validity of Scripture other than

It is useful!

Brilliant!
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Perhaps you would like to explain why God wrote a Love poem? Not to mention all the Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. And I am not even disputing the pre history of Genesis 1-11.

The whole doctrine is a misrepresentation of Paul.

Richard

Edit.
I politely suggest you do not go down the road of how the text is flawed.

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So God did chose the very words that would be used. He just chose words that would agree with their personalities. Correct? So how is this any different from a person taking dictation when the person giving the dictation adjusted their words to match the personality of the steonographer.

I wasn’t trying to create a straw man but simply point out there is more than one flavor of VPI when you were trying to say there was only one. And there are many flavors of Inerrancy so if you want to include that you get to more than 54 flavors rather quickly.

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On this I totally agree with you. I think you are responding to Daniel but quoted me.

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I asked from ChatGPT and it suggested that the smallest seeds in the area were orchids (Orchis, Ophrys, Serapias, Anacamptis species), broomrapes (Orobanche, Phelipanche species) and some sedges and grasses. Some desert ephemerals (annuals that germinate after rain) also have very small seeds.

The tree species with the smallest seeds are tamarisk species (Tamarix spp.) and Euphrates poplar (Populus euphratica).
ChatGPT did not mention cypress, although cypress has also quite small seeds. The size of the seeds of the Mediterranean cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) varies between areas. The varieties with the smallest seeds have smaller seeds than the cultivated mustards.

We often focus on the size of the seed, which is natural as Jesus spoke about the size. We tend to forget that he described the plants with more words. The largest plant in the garden, big branches, birds perch or nest in the shade of the branches. That description does not fit to any known mustard plant.

My grandma brought from Israel a cone that looked like the cone of a cypress. It included tiny black seeds and my grandma told that this was from the plant that Jesus was talking about. It was her opinion but since that day, I have been thinking that the plant in the parable may have been something else than a mustard plant.

It is probable that the writer of the gospel was not a botanist. When he translated the words of Jesus from the local Aramaic dialect (or whatever language Jesus was using) to Koine Greek, Mark may have used the word for another plant that was well known in the Koine Greek-speaking world. Traders and sailors speaking Koine Greek knew the mustard but were probably not botanists. The point of translation was in the key message, not in trying to keep the plant species name the same.
During that era, there were no systematic naming convention for plants. Plant names probably varied locally, except for plants that were important for trade (such as wheat, barley, olive or mustard).