vestion on Nostr: How do you know that 2 Timothy 3:16 is straight from God? Trying to justify Biblical ...
How do you know that 2 Timothy 3:16 is straight from God? Trying to justify Biblical inerrancy by appealing a verse like this is circular reasoning, because these statements are only true if the Bible is already thought to be inerrant.
quoting note132t…qlr5The majority of scholars agree that Paul did not write 2 Timothy. The word God-breathed only appears once in the Bible. In the Old Testament, the concept of God breathing has always refers to giving or sustaining life (Genesis 7:15, 22; Job 27:3-4, 33:4; Isaiah 42:5). In Genesis, God breathed into Adam the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Just because scripture is God breathed doesn't mean that it is infallible.
Also, the author's understanding of scripture would have included different versions of books we consider scripture and also other books that we don't consider scripture. So if 2 Timothy 3:16 was saying that all scripture is infallible, then that would have to mean that the later additions we made to the Old Testament are not scripture and that books that he considered scripture that are not in our Bibles are scripture. Additionally, at the time of writing 2 Timothy, the New Testament didn't exist yet.
Not even the real Paul would have been thinking of his letters as being scripture. For him, there was no reason to turn letters into scripture. Often letters contain material that is local and situational. There is no evidence that he knew that he was writing letters that would one day be called scripture by men four centuries in the future.
There is no evidence in the Bible to suggest that the Bible is the Word of God.