Picasso’s Napkin (Part 3, “Inspiration”)

I love great quotations, don’t you? When my mother was living she sent me quotes all the time; I made a notebook of them. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Think not of yourself as merely the architect of your career; but as the sculptor. Expect to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselling and scraping and polishing.” (Unknown author)
• “It is not so much the greatness of our troubles, as the littleness of our spirit, which makes us complain.” (J. Taylor)
• “Ideals are like the stars – we never reach them, but like the mariners on the sea we chart our course by them.” (Carl Schurg)
• “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.)

I could go on and on, of course; I have pages and pages. But another of my favorites came through my brother; he introduced me to Kahlil Gibran:

• “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding . . . .” (from The Prophet)
• “Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.” (from The Prophet)

Great quotes appear in countless places: Reader’s Digest’s “Quotable Quotes”; famous speeches from Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and many others; well-known authors, from the illustrious Mark Twain to the modern Kurt Vonnegut; even Hallmark cards can be profound. Words of wisdom abound in literature (both ancient and modern), and sometimes “a word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver” (Proverbs 25:11), invaluable to your life.

And that is why, so often, you find yourself treating Scripture as a handy collection of Quotable Quotes. Among the most prevalent are the following:

• “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11)
• “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9 quoting Isaiah 64:4)

The first verse is often quoted to provide hope and security (those are good things, not bad). The second verse is used at funerals to give hope and security during a family’s grief (also, good things, not bad). In many ways today Christians who employ the Scripture in this way could just as soon benefit from the inspirational words found in countless, oversized, fully illustrated coffee table books. It amounts to the same thing, i.e. encouraging words to give you a positive attitude as you approach each challenging day. And you know, that is certainly some benefit; we all can use it.

The only trouble is this: we never learn the real intent of the words when they were penned. It’s like a person from 2023 having a conversation with someone in the 1850s about being “gay.” You both would derive something from the conversation, but . . . maybe not what was meant. Or maybe it’s like asking if Eli Whitney’s “cotton gin” had to do with a type of liquor; a bit of anachronistic thinking, right? If you value Scripture the way the early church did, and the way the so-called “church fathers” (Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, etc.) did, then it becomes all-important for you to learn what the Scriptures really SAY, not just in what way you’d like to use them.

We say that writers, public speakers, producers, musicians, artists, etc. are “inspired” by their craft. “Inspiration” is used to mean anything from the ability to create a musical composition, to the writing of stories, to the invention of a machine that does amazing things for us. But often when Christians use it a plethora of additional meanings are attached. Foremost among these is the idea of inerrancy; that the words (as they were originally penned) were flawless, i.e. there are no mistakes.

When you do research into the word translated “inspired” you learn some interesting things. The original word (Greek, θεόπνευστος) is used only ONE TIME in the New Testament canon of Scripture:

“All Scripture is God-breathed, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Word definition is determined by usage, right? So, here is our first problem. If we break down the word into its two parts we see that literally it means “God breathed.” But without other uses to compare we are left guessing the parameters of that definition. It does appear several times in secular Greek and appears to mean “life giving,” but beyond that there is little to say. And here we need to be cautious; sometimes our best thinking can get us into trouble. When we “put two and two together” we often end up with 100! Some have reasoned that if Scripture came from God . . . it would be perfect, right? And if it’s perfect, it would have to be flawless, right? And if it was flawless when originally penned, God would not allow it to be corrupted? So, the text is inerrant and has been protected from tampering! There!

One of the many problems with this deduction is that Christians in the early centuries did not all agree with the contents of the canon of Scripture, not to mention that an enormous amount of work has gone into the discovery of ancient manuscripts, comparing them with ancient translations into other languages, archaeological findings, and the decisions about which of the variant readings of certain passages seems most likely. THEN . . . scholars have attempted to translate it into words or idioms you and I could understand; and they update these translations all the time.

The Bible is not a magic book; it is not a spiritual prism: turn it one way and it will speak to you thusly; turn it another way and another message comes to you, adjusting itself to magically fit with the nuances of each generation and culture. But we often treat it in just this way.

So, I want to ask you the question: do you need for “inspiration” to mean flawless?

I don’t know about you, but . . . I’ve not read many books (even modern ones) where there are absolutely no errors. I mean somewhere in the volume I will see an honest mistake that an editor missed: a misspelling, a word that sounds like the word intended, etc. And this is the world of automation. Ancient writings were copied by hand, one after another; no spell check existed.

I don’t NEED inspiration to mean inerrant. In fact, when one defines “inspiration” as flawless it often causes the honest inquirer to doubt the authenticity of the work in question; nothing in this world is perfect. Even God’s people are flawed (see Galatians 2:11-21).

The oldest extant complete copy of the Hebrew Old Testament was sold at Sotheby’s for 38.1 million this year; it is called Codex Sassoon (dated 900 AD). Some of Picasso’s works have sold for almost twice that much, and some for much less. His reputation, of course, is quite sordid, unlike the writers of Scripture. But authenticity is often enough to warrant great value. The Old Testament Scriptures were viewed as “God-given” to the Jews of Jesus’s day, and the New Testament writings eventually came to be viewed in much the same way. Picasso’s work remains valuable because of who created it, and the Scriptures remain valuable not only because of who wrote them, but because they contain the “wisdom from above.”

Can the truth from God be clearly seen even though the vehicles that carry it may be flawed? I certainly hope so. Because people’s words, people’s actions, people’s writings, people’s art, etc. are always imperfect.

So, were the writers of the New Testament documents “inspired”? Absolutely! Were they perfect, without flaws, inerrant? How on earth could they be? Much is made of Paul’s mention of the 23,000 killed in a plague (1 Corinthians 10:8), contrasted with the Numbers 25:9 account that says 24,000 died. Some scholars jump through hoops to harmonize the two, even suggesting that Paul was referring to some other plague (Exodus 32) where no exact number is given. I’ll never forget my Greek professor’s response to this. He said, (and you have to say this with a New York Jewish accent) “You know the Jews . . . 23,000, 24,000 . . . , what’s the difference?”

All I’m saying is this: don’t allow your definition of one (hard to define) word, used only one time in the New Testament, cause you to present these ancient writings as “flawless” to an unbeliever who has never even heard of a book without flaws in his/her life. It is not only counterproductive, it is unnecessary. Authenticity is enough! And that . . . we have! Minor mistakes and all. In fact . . . the mistakes add credibility.