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).

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Those are two very different views! Since at least Augustine, “infallible” has meant the concepts/messages and the moral teaching, not every word.

That’s hardly “the next fallback position”! Infallible in faith and morals, infallible in morals and message, infallible in doctrine – all those fall between inspiration as dictation and “in regard to matters of salvation only”.

Except in the background Antioch muttered, “So do we”.

Heh – good way to put it.

To be picky, Erasmus opened those gates by publishing his Novum Instrumentum omne in 1516, making the Greek available to anyone who could read it – which at that point was plenty!

They don’t have a website, but there’s a Lutheran church I visited that held that the original manuscripts were dictated, and that the LXX and the Textus Receptus were inspired.

Donkeys and lambs, too? :grin:

So we could Jesus being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, getting a grin form the audience.

And all too often with serious biblical ignorance.

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But effectively it’s no different because they would be guided to use the best word they knew in each instance, and the vocabularies at least in the OT weren’t that large.

Its algorithms track just about everything you do on the web.

There are lawsuits in progress over this very thing (and at least one place is considering legislation that would declare that all personal data belongs to the person and its use must be paid for).

Heck, even in the late 1980s evidence was emerging that when the Assyrians claimed to carry off everyone, they meant everyone in a walled city or town. Back then, that would have been only five percent of the population, or less.

Except that they had their own Temple.
The Samaritan woman in the Gospel summed up the difference rather well.

I think you mean “Eastern”, with Western inroads in the upper classes.

With a lot of Aramaic loan words even earlier. Modern people seem often unaware that such a thing even happened.

I visited a town in Illinois where German was still spoken. A fellow grad student who’d studied in Germany exclaimed, “They speak like the Kaiser!”

And using a modern binary-legalistic view of the canon.

Like when in college I typed term papers for people: I was in high demand because I read multiple papers they’d done before so I could use their expressions and vocabulary (I also used their outline and research).

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I always envision Jesus holding one up and people chuckling at the notion that they would even be able to see “the smallest seed”.

I saw an article a few months back that tracked what species were called back then; I forget its conclusions.
It’s also worth noting that “small as a mustard seed” was an idiom for “really, really, small” (and later “smaller than a grain of mustard” came to refer to the smallest thing possible).

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Local names of plants and animals varies a lot and changes with time. Here, the common species may have tens of names that have been used in some part of the country. When I use the names used in the part of the country where my genetical roots come from, other people do not necessarily guess what I am telling - the ‘official’ names were adopted from the local names used in some other region of the country.

An added source of confusion has been that the local use of names may change in less than a century so that a name used for one species may become the name of another.

This mess is one reason why the Linnean naming system (taxonomy) is so helpful and was widely accepted. It has made it possible to be relatively sure about the species the other person is speaking about. For example, when I write my notes about the birds I observe, I use shortened Latin species names because that is a way that can make the notes understandable to any person knowing the (shortened) Latin names.

Even the Linnean Latin names are only a relatively certain way to identify the observed species. Digging of historical names may reveal that someone gave a name for the species before the commonly used name was given, which demands a change in the name. Some professionals split or lump species so that new genus names are introduced. Some species prove to be a species complex rather than a single species, which demands new names for all those species. Etc.
For example, the Latin name of one vole species changed several times during my career and that reflected to the names I used in my publications - several papers dealing with the same vole species but using different names about the species.

The general lesson about this mess is that you cannot be fully sure what the species was if you have just a local name that was used centuries ago. The commercially valuable species may be an exception because the trade needed labels that revealed what was sold. For the purposes of the trade, it was enough that the products coming from related sources were similar enough. It does not matter if the ivory originated from an elephant or mammoth, ivory was a sufficient trade name. Similarly, products of different plants may have been labelled under one trade name if the products were used for the same purpose.

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Oh? Can you name a source here? What evidence can you provide that “carry off everyone” only meant “everyone in a walled city or town”?

The Judahites also built their own temple, in Jerusalem, 4 centuries after the Israelites entered the land. Yes, this was a cause of friction with the Samaritans. The building of a temple in Jerusalem was listed as one of the sins of Judah in the last speech of the Christian martyr, Stephen.

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We seem to have differing interpretations about the speech of Stephen. The building of the temple in Jerusalem was not listed as a sin. It has not been listed as a sin in any of the biblical scriptures, as far as I know.

The Hebrews were accused of serving other gods (idols) and disobedience, and killing of the prophets and the Messiah.

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True – indeed true enough that when medieval rabbis spoke of “smaller than a grain of mustard” we don’t even know if they meant the same plant that Jesus meant with “as small as a mustard seed”.
There was a chart of a wall of one of the community college botany classrooms that had several families of plants that grew in the region, using Venn diagrams to show the intersections of common names and scientific names; I don’t remember specific species but there were things called “oak” that were actually in two different scientific families, things called “wort” that were in several different families, plants called “[something] cress” that were in several different families, and so on.

There’s a wildflower that grows in western Oregon coastal rainforest that has two different names; it was identified and described at about the same time by two different people, so it got two different species names (douglasii and wilsonii, IIRC) and both got used widely enough before anyone noticed the issue that both names were allowed to stand (in our fieldbook it was listed as genus with the first name then “OR” the other. Our professor said the practice now is more commonly to decide on one name, but this was done for so long and was accepted that it was kept (though there was an effort to make the people’s names into “variety” names, something we studied to look at what kind of silliness politics can bring into science).

One of my favorite plant families had one name in all our texts and references when I first started botany, but then as we were reading more recent papers I realized one day that the author was talking about one of my favorite species but with a different family name (just by the way, it happens to be commonly known as the mustard family).

We ran into one that had one common name if used as a medicinal and a different name if used in salad. We joked it was like using marijuana for recreation or for medical purposes.

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Try Bustenay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, who argues that it was even narrower, just the removal of a city’s ruling class, skilled workers, and defenders, rather than every inhabitant of a region. Also Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, and K. Lawson Younger Jr. A Political History of the Arameans.

Both Assyrian records and archaeology affirm that the numbers moved amount to only a small fraction of the population. At most, one of our professors joked, the Assyrians played “eeny meeny miny mo” in the cities and randomly moved entire villages, though he pointed out that in his opinion a lot depended on the nature of the situation, e.g. in a rebellious province a higher portion of the people would likely be moved. There was also some evidence that those who got moved were the ones on the best land.

While not all the sources are making the same exact claim, concluding it was only everyone in walled cities or towns makes sense since those were the centers of power and wealth.

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No kidding.

The temple falls into the same category as the Aaronic priesthood and the kingship; both were instances of something God didn’t want for Israel but gave in. Moses didn’t want to do the whole job, so God appointed Aaron to do the priest stuff; Israel didn’t want to have to rely on a (heavenly) king they couldn’t see, so God provided one they could see; David thought the Tabernacle wasn’t grand enough, so God let Solomon build the Temple.
So unless one is willing to call the priesthood and kingship sin, calling the building of the Temple a sin is just silly.

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Fair enough. Then it should not be difficult to point me to one of these proponents of inerrancy that do affirm that God literally dictated the Bible?

Ah, there’s no website… how convenient… :wink:

Seriously, though, I’m willing to be corrected, but I remain extremely skeptical that any Christian groups actually affirm literal dictation of the Bible by God. Even if out of the mainstream, I’d be interested to be pointed to a website, statement of faith, historical affirmation, or the like of any Christian group that has actually affirmed that God literally dictated the Bible. I don’t doubt that I could find someone’s great-aunt who said something like this in Sunday school… Or perhaps there are some that use the idea of dictation as a metaphor to convey the plenary verbal nature of what they are claiming. But that any actual denomination, church, or other Christian body would unreservedly endorse or affirm literal dictation of the Bible… I remain skeptical, unless anyone might point me to actual evidence to the contrary?

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First, I was going off what I have heard. Initially in church growing up but I have heard preachers, who may have been misunderstanding VPI, say the same thing. It is called the Dictation Theory of Inspiration and from what I have been able to find was widely held before the rise of VPI. Chafer describes it in his Systematic Theology but doesn’t mention any who hold to it. But I do believe there were actual mainstream Christian groups that at one time did hold to this.

And this has jogged my memory. There are groups that hold that the KJV translation was inspired, word for word, and is the only translation they use. Daniel if you want to know more just Google “KVJ Onlyism” or check this Wikipedia entry. So there are current Christian groups that hold to something you have a hard time believing. Surprise, surprise.

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Thanks for affirming that. This brings us to a point I want to make. According to 2 Kings 17:18,

"Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight; none was left but the tribe of Judah alone. (2 Kings 17:18 NRS)

One finds here an example of Judahite propaganda. Other examples are found in Ezra-Nehemiah, where the claim that only Judahites are the remnant of Israel is found, and results in a condemnation of Samaritans as “foreigners”. When the son (or grandson) of the High Priest in Jerusalem during this time, marries the daughter of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, Nehemiah banishes him from Jerusalem. However, a close reading of Ezra-Nehemiah shows that the view of Judah as the exclusive remnant of Israel was objected to by the High Priest in Jerusalem and prophets from that locale.

2 Kings 17:18 shows the insertion of Judahite propaganda into the text during the Persian/Greek/Hasmonean period when these books were being created or edited. This shows the extent to which the Bible can be human literature.

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That interpretation may be partly true but may give a wrong understanding about the priesthood.

It was true in that Moses did not want to go to Egypt and when he tried to use excuses, God sent Aaron as a support and spokesman to the task.

After leaving Egypt, it would not have been wise to have everything depending on one man. Jetro, his father-in-law, gave a wise advice in that Moses needed to share the leadership with the others.
Priesthood was a different matter than the leadership but the same basic rule applies: one man could not do everything without negative consequences.

Priesthood was tied to the service of God in the tabernacle. Was that service, including the sacrifices, something God did not want for Israel?

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