John C Poitier's book, "The Invention of Inspiration . . . " explores the ancient (pre early 3rd century AD) meaning of theopneustia as in 2 Tim. 3:15-17. His conclusion is that the word meant "life giving", perhaps based originally on the creation story (God breathed into the form and it/he became a living person). He cities various greek examples in literature pre-early 3rd century AD and occasionally beyond, but notes that with Origen the word meaning had shifted to something that happened not from the text (life-giving) to something that happened to the text (inspired), a move from active to passive, and since that time has been the default meaning of theopneustia.
Has anyone read the book or otherwise has comments. My own thinking is that the cognate thoughts regarding 'inerrancy' have made the doctrine of scripture less helpful rather than more so, by refusing to see problems that exist, or have built up ingenuious walls around the problems to hide them — while secular readers see only problems in the biblical texts and Christian obstanse against their existence. By troubling texts I mean things like proleptic remarks, apparent contradictions, erronious statements (such as attributing a prophetic statment in Matthew to the wrong prophet, the difficulty of making the variant synoptic sayings truly congruent, etc
barry willbanks
