One of the areas of theological reflection that I have been thinking about lately is the interface between what we think the Bible is and what it says it is. Evangelicals have come up with very clear formulations of what they think the Bible should be, or rather, what an inspired, authoritative book should look like. Inerrancy debates are looming up all over the place, and part of the debate is exactly about one’s presupposition of the nature of Scripture. Although “inerrancy battles” are mostly fought within evangelicalism, I have come to realize more and more that the assumptions that often fuel the epistemological, pre-suppositional and theological fire of these discussions are not privy to fundamentalists and a certain cross-section of evangelicals. The same question-begging assumptions come from the academia, and the presently raging debates are bringing these to light in more nuanced ways.

James Kugel in his How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now concludes his chapter on the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with what scholars see as the incompatibility of the human elements they find in a text that is taken to be divine. After showing why scholars think that the command not to make any images was inserted at later period (which does not imply that it did not exist early on), he writes the following:

[The Decalogue’s] very form now appears to most scholars to assimilate them to the covenant stipulations found in old Hittite and other ancient Near Eastern treaties. This fact itself raises disturbing questions about the divine origin of these laws. For why should God, in this crucial act of binding the people of Israel to Himself, have chosen to rely on an utterly human set of conventions instead of going about things in some very different, divine sort of way? (p. 259, my emphasis)

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I am almost at the end of G. K. Beale’s (rather frustrating) book The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism. In his chapter on Isaiah’s authorship (in which he takes the traditional view), he says something that sort of jumped out at me. This is in the section where he tries to answer the question of whether or not the single authorship of Isaiah is nullified by minor updating or editing. Here is what he says,

“It is certainly possible that there were scribes of Isaiah who wrote down some of his discourses, so literary style may vary within the book. Furthermore, later inspired editors could have done some minor editing of Isaiah’s prophecies. But the conceptual essence of each prophecy should be seen as stemming from what the historical Isaiah said or wrote in his lifetime; each prophecy is like a footprint left by Isaiah, even if later scribes or editors may have filled in a little tread here and there” (2008, p. 157, my emphasis)

He goes on to say that this is not very different from what happens in the Gospels. Here are a few questions:

• What does it mean that an unknown editor is inspired?
• Is talk of inspired editors only possible because now we have a canon and, in hindsight, we know they were inspired?
• Is “editorial inspiration” a bona fide argument in Evangelical views of inspiration or is this just Beale’s notion?

I raise these questions because at some point you will need to start talking about textual variants and the LXX (e. g. Jeremiah). How then does one decide what is inspired and what is not?