Growing up, I was taught that the Bible is the Word of God, and that it is therefore inerrant, infallible, and authoritative.
The verse used to support this idea was 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”
The general assumption was that “God-breathed” meant that God had told human beings what to write down and that the Bible was thus free from error and authoritative because it came straight from the mind of the Creator.
But is this a good reading of that text?
What does it mean for something to be God-breathed? Is this the metaphor that the author would have used if the author had really meant to say that all Scripture is inerrant, infallible, and authoritative? I highly doubt it.
My assumption is that the author was Jewish and would have thus been very familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures. So the question I ask is: do the Hebrew Scriptures have anything to say about the breath of God?
As it turns out, yes they do.
In Genesis 2, God takes the dirt and forms the man and breathes into him the breath of life. In Ezekiel 37, there are four mentions of God restoring the people of Israel and breathing life into them once again.
The Hebrew word for “breath” is the word ruach, and it is also the word for “spirit.” The same is true in Greek, the language of the New Testament, where the Greek word pneuma is the word for both breath and spirit. In the ancient world, people… [Read more…] about God-Breathed: Questioning Inerrancy
