Featured A subtle attack

This is an unsupported assertion. Why does your understanding inspiration require EXACT WORDS? That is dictation and nothing more.

They can be both God's words and Luke's words at the same time WITHOUT having to be dictated. Writing style is more than just vocabulary - it has to do with themes, selection of material, perspective (Luke's perspective is quite a bit different than Matthew and Mark's perspective), to name just a few elements.

While that view may be "common," it is not necessarily correct. For instance, an enormous number of people believe that when Christians die, they become angels. That is an extra biblical and totally erroneous view based on ignorance of the scriptures, but that doesn't mean it is not widely held.

Your appeal to popularity is a logical fallacy. Moreover, you have not demonstrated verbal inspiration at all.

You are equating "oracles of God" with scripture? On what basis do you make that equivalence?

Oracles in the ancient world were tied to priesthoods, priestly authority, and spiritual knowledge through those channels. What is being claimed by Paul is that Jewish people benefitted from the priesthood and the Law that gave them understanding.

This scripture cannot legitimately be wrestled to support your assertion that only Jewish persons wrote the scriptures. Paul is NOT talking about such a thing and the word oracle does not meaning scripture. If Paul wanted to make the point you assert, he could have easily done that.

 

I think that's a non sequitur. Because the Jews were the custodians of Scripture, it doesn't follow that they wrote it all. Was Job a Jew? I don't know. Nor am I particularly bothered about it.
But in any case,Paul is speaking in the Past Tense, and therefore about the Old Testament. It does not follow that the same applies to the N.T., and nor does it matter for the reason I gave.

 

If this is true, why do we find the name Quirinius in Luke 2:2 rather than the name Quintilius Varus—the governor of Syria at the time that Jesus was born? For a very detailed essay that explains the problem from a secular viewpoint, please see this essay,

http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html

For a conservative, evangelical answer to the problem, please see this article,

https://bible.org/article/problem-l...nsus-taken-when-quirinius-was-governor-syriai

I believe in the inspiration of Scripture, but the subject is not nearly as simple as some Christians believe it to be.

 

How does this verbal inspiration account for the extremely loose citations of the Old Testament - including outright paraphrases - if both the Old Testament and New Testament sources are VERBALLY (word for word) inspired? Also, what about the differences in wording between the Gospel in direct quotations of Jesus where we know the setting is the same? It seems a meaning-oriented view of inspiration would be better suited to that evidence.

Moreover, what about the grammatical and spelling issue we have in the manuscripts we have now? Does that mean that there is only one VERBALLY-inspired edition of God's word? What good is VERBAL (word for word) inspiration if God did not supernaturally preserve that copy in a way that is apparent? (Of course, this is where our King James Only friends raise their hand and present their theory, but lets deal with the real issue.)

If God provided scripture based on meaning, not specific words, then we can be confident we have reliable copies of scripture. If it is verbally-inspired, then we have some major problems because we have to determine which one of the many text variants is the TRUE scripture.

 

Its not an attack to point out that the NT (or OT for that matter) were created by something other than the dictation view of inspiration. Most Baptist theologians today hold to something where the personality and context of the author works with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in producing Scriptural texts. Holding to a dictation view of inspiration actually does greater damage to the authority of the Bible than helps it along.