In the past, whenever I  (or anyone I knew) needed to point to the Bible’s inerrancy and authority, the verse of choice was 2 Timothy 3:16:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (vv16-17 NIV)

For many evangelicals, this is the second most important ‘3:16’ in the Bible (the John verse trumps it) and all but settles the argument. ‘All Scripture…’ not just some of it; ‘God-breathed’ i.e. the very spoken words of God.

Now most evangelicals (certainly in the UK) do not subscribe to a dictation theory, that the human writers wrote in some sort of trance. But they do believe, based on the above, that God somehow supervised the writing process in such a way that the actual words were individually inspired (verbal plenary inspiration).

The argument suddenly seemed a little on the weak side to me. Aside from the logical dubiousness of allowing a document to attest to its own sacredness, several questions arose. What did ‘all Scripture’ mean? Did Paul mean only the Old Testament (the only writings that were widely considered sacred at the time)? Did he include his own letters (that seems somewhat presumptuous!) Probably little of the remaining New Testament was written at that point. Or, wait, did God mean it to apply to the canonical New Testament (finalised a few hundred years later) even though Paul was writing in the dark?

What does ‘God-breathed’ really mean? Should we infer that this means verbal, plenary inspiration? If so, why the relatively weak adjective ‘useful’? Why not ‘authoritative’ or similar?

Other problems began to surface. The book of Job, for example, contains long passages from Job’s ‘friends’ that are denounced by God in the final chapter. Are they, too, ‘inspired’? If they’re not, how come they seem to echo the basic tenets of much of the Old Testament, notably Deuteronomy and the Proverbs: do the right thing and all will be well. Calamity is a sign of God’s judgement. If Job’s friends are wrong, is Moses wrong too?

There are more arguments for plenary verbal inspiration than this one verse, to be sure. But the key verse began to look less like a support for this stance, and more like a specific recommendation for Timothy not to abandon Scripture in his ongoing ministry.