Bible authority and authorship
All Scripture is God -breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. [2 Tim 3:16] Authority in the Bible comes from God. The human writers of the books accepted as Scripture claim nothing less than divine inspiration for their own works and for certain of the writings of others. What an audacious assertion for them to make. What did they mean, and what do we mean today, by saying these words are “God-breathed”? God-breathed does not mean that God somehow took over their bodies or pushed them out of the chair and took up their pens. That is the sort of inspiration Muslims claim for the Qur’an . Rather, inspiration means that God breathed his own words through their personalities and pens. He gave them the insight and understanding so that the finished literary product had two authors, one human and one divine. God’s words seem more meaningful and relate to us on our human level so well, because they have been translated through the liv...