It says it is god breathed, which implies infallibility.
The point of saying something is God-breathed is to communicate that it is
alive. But to explain that, a bit of a lengthy post...
What was Paul referring to as Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:15-17? I think we as Christians tend to both expand and shrink what Paul had in mind. We
expand it because Paul is speaking about the Old Testament. Yet, I think Paul's words show us how to recognize Scripture by its qualities, not by giving us the table of contents. Scripture instructs for salvation through faith in Jesus, it is God-breathed, it's useful, it equips us for good works. In the time since Paul wrote that, the church has recognized that some of Paul's own letters, as well as some writings of others, fit this description. This process was already starting in those days, as we see in another 3:16, 2 Peter 3:16. Because we can say about the New Testament what Paul says about the Old, it fits to call both Scripture.
Christians also often
shrink what Paul is talking about. We tend to think that only the original manuscripts were inspired, and sadly they are lost to time: Our English Bibles
derive from an inspired original, but since we can't be sure they match the originals in every detail, they are not themselves inspired. However, Paul says that
the very writings that Timothy knew from childhood (which were copies and almost certainly translated copies) are among the sacred writings that are inspired by God. It doesn't matter that those copies weren't perfect, or that translations always change things a bit. What Timothy had received as a child was still Scripture. If we struggle with that, I think it's because we have a faulty idea of what it means for a writing to be inspired by God -- to be God-breathed.
Progmonk already pointed out the connection that both Adam and Scripture are said to be God-breathed. I did a bit of a word study on this. In Greek, the term translated God-breathed in 2 Timothy 3:16 is unique to that verse, but it appears to be a compound word made from θεός (God/god) and πνέω (blow/wind). The seven New Testament occurrences of πνέω all refer to blowing winds.
In Hebrew, the closest parallel to this Greek verb is the one that describes God breathing into Adam, נָפַח (
naphach). It is used again to describe corpses being breathed to life in Ezekiel 37:9. It also describes the animated movement of a boiling pot (Job 41:20, Jeremiah 1:13), and blowing on a fire to fan it to life (Job 20:26, Isaiah 54:16, Ezekiel 22:20-21). The other references are either more basic (simply referring to breath or blowing) or in the final two cases, more difficult to interpret, due to being part of unusual idiomatic expressions. From the references where the meaning is clear, there is already a lot of evidence that
naphach often portrays the source of life and vigorous movement.
There are some connections in ancient cultures and languages that aren't apparent to us. It's well-known that in Hebrew, the same word can mean either wind or spirit/Spirit (which is one reason why Genesis 1:2 is hard to translate). It isn't that the Hebrew word has two very different meanings. It has
one primary meaning, but that one meaning includes both wind and spirit, since for the Hebrews what we consider two distinct concepts
were one concept. In English, we need to pick one word or the other, which hides the unified meaning, encapsulating both, that the Hebrews would have understood. Similarly, in Greek, the same word can mean both living and moving. When Jesus speaks of living water (John 4:10), the Greek phrase refers to moving water -- water that flows and bubbles up rather than being stagnant. In English, we need to choose whether to say the water is moving or living, but in Greek, the single word ζάω says
both. (This is one reason why early Christians were baptized in flowing water, while most churches I've attended have no problem with baptismal tanks of still water.) Movement and life weren't as separated as those concepts are for us.
After doing this study, I became pretty sure that
when Paul says Scripture is God-breathed, he's saying it's alive -- it's fire that God is blowing into, a bubbling pot on his stove, a rushing wind from his heavens. I think this is a far more important claim than what we often try to turn "inspiration" into. While the trustworthiness of God's message is declared elsewhere, that is not the focus of this phrase. Inspiration isn't just an ancient way of saying inerrant; modern attempts to define Scripture's trustworthiness and truthfulness in our terms are far from the concern of this passage. This is seen by how those who see inspiration as implying inerrancy also typically limit inspired Scripture to the original manuscripts, contrary to what Paul does. That limitation is necessary to give inerrancy even a fighting chance, but it just shows that we're trying to fight a battle on the wrong field.
I'm sure each of us has held a book in our hands that was inerrant in a far stricter sense than the Bible -- a book that didn't just derive from an inerrant original, but was itself inerrant. No typographical errors, no spelling mistakes, no rounded numbers, no paraphrased quotations. Maybe it was our grade 3 math textbook, or the church directory for that small congregation we were part of a few decades ago. Whatever it was, I doubt that book had a huge significance in our life. In fact, the books most likely to do well on the inerrancy test are precisely the books that are less likely to be considered good literature and more likely to be artless collections of facts.
The Bible is not artless, and it is not a dead book. The Bible is
alive. It is God-breathed and
useful. That's why I still read my Bible, still wrestle to understand my Bible, still get challenged by my Bible, while my grade 3 math book has disappeared into the mists where all dead books eventually go -- and with no complaint from me.
