Was the Bible Written by God or Humans?
The belief that the Bible is the Word of God is foundational to our lives as Christians. When the Scripture says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105), we assume that in the Scriptures we have truthful and reliable direction from God. But just how secure is that assumption?
In Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, the brilliant historian Sir Leigh Teabing declares,
The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.… The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.
Although this statement is spoken by a fictional character in a novel, it accurately depicts what some people think about the Bible. In fact, in the introduction to this book, Dan Brown claims: “All descriptions of … documents … in this novel are accurate.” It would appear that this is one of those descriptions of an ancient document that he presents as accurate. How do we respond to such an extraordinary charge against the Bible? Is the Bible truly the inspired Word of God?
What the Bible Says about Itself
When Jesus revealed God to us through his life and words, he did more than speak on his own authority. He constantly appealed to the books that we know as the Old Testament as reliable testimony from God himself. He looked upon these thirty-nine books as a collective whole and called them the Scriptures; that is, they are different from any other set of books because they are invested with authority from God. For instance, on one occasion when Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the religious leaders, he chides them because they “know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24). In other words, these religious leaders should know them because God is powerfully at work through them.
The Bible also repeatedly makes the claim that it represents the very words of God. Although it is a book composed by many human authors, the Bible presents itself as a book that ultimately comes directly from God. When the psalmist reflects on the value of the first five books of the Bible, he says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet” (Ps. 119:105, emphasis added). In the prophetic books of the Bible, the recorded prophecies often begin with a line such as, “Then the word of the LORD came to Isaiah …” (see, for instance, Isa. 38:4; Jer. 1:4; Ezek. 6:1). God frequently spoke to his people through prophetic messengers, as the author of Hebrews attested: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets” (Heb. 1:1).
The Involvement of the Holy Spirit
The New Testament writers clarified that it was a special work of the Holy Spirit that enabled human authors to communicate God’s words. For instance, the apostle Peter taught that “no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20–21 NIV). It would have been helpful if Peter would have given a more precise explanation of what he meant by “carried along.” But perhaps it is enough to know that in some way, the Holy Spirit moved and worked in the human authors.
The apostle Paul also spoke of the influence of the Holy Spirit on the human authors of the thirty-nine Old Testament books. He says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16 NIV). “God-breathed” is a literal translation of the Greek word theopnueustos—a combination of “God” (theos) and the word for breath. Many English versions translate this expression “inspired by God.” The expression literally means, “God-breathed.”
The emphasis is upon God as the originator of the Scripture. The Bible did not come into existence as a result of a few people sitting down and deciding to write some stories. God was at work. Because the Greek word for breath is the same word that is used for spirit (pneuma), the apostle is speaking here of the involvement of the Holy Spirit in the process. This fits well with the idea of the authors being “moved” or “carried along” by the Holy Spirit as they wrote, just as Peter explained. Since the Scripture is “breathed out by God” (ESV), we can be confident that the end product is just how God intended it. The Bible is God’s word.
Did the Biblical Authors Become Passive Scribes?
It would be wrong for us to conclude that God so overwhelmed the human authors that they merely served as secretaries from God. The Bible was not revealed in some heavenly language that needed to be deciphered through supernatural means. It was written by people who communicated in their native tongues: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They used their minds, cultural and educational backgrounds, and their thought processes. Inspiration means that God was at work in their minds and their hearts through his Holy Spirit in such a way that their human personalities were not overwhelmed. One evidence of this is in their varied writing styles. Luke’s style was markedly different from the apostle Paul’s, and John’s was quite different from those two. Their individual and human manner of expression is clearly evident in their works.
The process of inspiration likely involved the Holy Spirit’s work in a variety of different ways. When Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), the Spirit guided him in his use of oral traditions and written records to ensure the accuracy of the account and the message. For Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the other prophets, the words that they spoke and wrote came more directly and forcefully. Jeremiah thus begins his work with “The word of the Lord came to me, saying …” (Jer. 1:4). Luke (who also wrote the book of Acts) was a historian who used written and oral records in his two accounts (Luke 1:1–4). No doubt the Holy Spirit guided him in this process so that his readers “may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4). Yet inspiration would have looked different for the apostle John when he wrote the book of Revelation, since this book represented a direct vision and revelation from God.
The End Product: God’s Word
In some way that is beyond our clear and precise understanding, God worked by the Spirit in the human authors. What we know for sure is that the end product—the sixty-six books of the Bible—was precisely as God intended it and could thus accurately be called God’s Word, or Scripture.
The first- and second-century church immediately recognized that these various books written by the apostles (or by people closely associated with an apostle, such as Luke) were inspired by God and equivalent to the Old Testament in terms of their value and significance to the church. One of Jesus’s closest associates, the apostle Peter, spoke of Paul’s letters as “Scripture” (2 Pet. 3:15–16). Similarly, the Gospel of Mark is cited as “Scripture” in one of the earliest Christian writings (2 Clement 2.4). From then on, church leaders regularly quoted and appealed to passages from the New Testament as the Word of God.
The New Testament documents were read and used regularly in the ministry of churches throughout Israel, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, North Africa, and Italy. It was only when certain false teachings emerged in the second and third centuries that denied certain books were inspired Scripture that it became necessary for the church to draw up formal lists of the books that constituted the “canon” of Scripture, that is, the books officially recognized by the church as the rule for faith and practice.
It was the consistent and unanimous view throughout the first seventeen hundred years of the history of the church that the Bible was the Word of God. Although the church quibbled about certain points of theology at times, there was nothing they agreed upon more than the fact that the Bible was the Word of God. As an implication of this, Christian leaders throughout history have regarded the Bible as reliable and free from error (see the next chapter).
As the character Leigh Teabing said, the Bible is a product of humans. But he was wrong to say that it is “not of God.” Just as God has chosen to reveal himself to us in the man Christ Jesus, who is God in the flesh, so has God worked to reveal himself to us in the Scripture—a book written by men, but inspired by God.
Since the Bible is the inspired Word of God, it carries an authority over us because it represents what God wants us to know and how he wants us to live.
