Is all of Holy Scripture really divinely inspired?

The following text is the transcript of our Youtube video Is All Of Holy Scripture Really Divinely Inspired?.

This video is part of a series on “The Sources of Faith”. You can find all the videos in the series here.

In previous videos, we’ve talked about divine revelation, and how the Catholic Church has handed this down and preserved it. But how does the Church know all that God has revealed? Or, to put the question in another way: from what sources does the Church draw the truths which she teaches us as revealed by God?

Welcome to Catholic Hub. I’m David, and in this video I’m going to talk about the sources of Faith, and in particular Holy Scripture.

The truths revealed by God are contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition. From these two sources, the Church draws the truths which she teaches. She cannot teach anything that is not contained in these two sources.

In this video I’m going to focus on Holy Scripture, and in a later video I’ll go into into more detail on Tradition.

First of all, what is Holy Scripture?

Holy Scripture is a collection of books written under the inspiration of God, and recognised as such by the Church

This collection of books is called Holy Scripture, or Holy Writ, because it is holy in its origin, its purpose, and its content.

It is also called the Bible, from the Greek word biblia, which is the plural of biblion, and means “books”. In the Middle Ages, the word biblia was used as a singular noun, and it was so translated into English.

No book has been so widely diffused or has exercised such a far-reaching influence on the religion, morality and civilization of mankind as the Bible. It was copied and re-copied innumerable times, and was the first book to appear in print - the Gutenberg Bible, in 1450 AD - and before the end of the 15th century it was reprinted more than a hundred times. Today it is spread over the whole world in hundreds of translations.

The Bible is made up of seventy-two books, and of these, forty-five were written before the time of Christ. Those books contain the revelations made by God to men before the coming of Christ, and are called the books of the Old Testament.

The other twenty-seven books were written after the time of Christ. They contain the revelations which we have received through Christ and his Apostles, and are called the books of the New Testament.

The word Testament, in this case, doesn’t mean a written document like a will, where a person provides for the disposal of his property after his death. What it means here, is a covenant or a promise.

The dealings of God with his chosen people is called, in Scripture, the “covenant or testament of God with men”.

The first covenant was that God was to bring his people into the Promised Land and to be their protector, and they, on their part, were to keep his commandments and have nothing to do with false gods.

The books of the Bible are different from all other books. This is because, unlike with all other books which are the product of human intelligence alone, God, in the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, took such an active part in their composition that He is their real Author.

The human writers merely co-operated with the Holy Ghost. Hence, Holy Scripture is truly the Word of God.

This mysterious working together or God and man in the production of the books of the Bible is called inspiration, from the Latin word, inspiratio, which means means “breathing in”.

When we say that Moses and the other sacred writers were inspired, we mean the following.

1. it was God who moved the human authors to write these books,

2. while writing, they were protected by God against all error.

3. they wrote only what God wished them to write.

4. if God wished them to write something which they did not or could not know, He had to reveal it to them.

This movement of God, this divine guidance and protection ,this inspiration, extends to the whole of the Bible and to every part of it. It extends to everything written down by the human author.

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus in 1893, declared that:

It is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. The system of those who … concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond … cannot be tolerated.

Inspiration does not prevent the sacred writers from expressing themselves on subjects of natural science according to the knowledge and popular views of the time in which they lived.

However, this principle does not apply to historical facts stated by the writers. These must be either true or false. The historical reports of the Bible must present absolute truth.

Inspiration doesn’t mean that every word of the Bible was dictated by the Holy Ghost. This kind of verbal inspiration would turn the sacred writer into a mere scribe.

In conveying His thoughts to us, God did no violence to the writers. Each retains his individual manner, his mode of diction, his peculiarities of thought and language, so that we don’t find two of them that are alike.

To understand this, all we need to consider is the fact that they wrote in the tongue which they had used from childhood, or which they had acquired by education; in the language of the country and the people in which they were born or where they lived, and to whom their writings were addressed.

There is one thing to be aware of here, and that is that the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible which I just talked about, only refer to the original texts. If later on those who copied the original text made mistakes or changes, these would not be the work of the original writers and hence they would not be inspired.

The fact of inspiration is vouched for, above all, by the infallible authority of the Church.

The General Councils of Florence (1442) and Trent (1545 to 1564) call God the Author of both Testaments, and in 1870 the Vatican Council declared that the books of the Bible, “having been written by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, have God for their Author, and have been delivered as such to the Church herself.”

And St Augustine, one of the greatest Fathers of the Church, said:

To the books of Scripture, I have learned to pay such reverence and honor as most firmly to believe that none of their authors committed any error in writing. If in that literature I meet with anything which seems contrary to truth, I will have no doubt that it is only the manuscript that is faulty, or that the translator has not hit the sense, or that I have failed to understand it.

*That concludes this introduction to the sources of faith. In other videos we’re going to cover more aspects of Scripture, such as the biblical canon, the languages of Scripture, the manuscripts and translations, as well as the question of interpretation. So please hit that subscribe button to make sure you don’t miss an update, and give this video a thumbs up if you appreciate.

As always, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.*