Biblical Inspiration

by I. Howard Marshall

Is the Bible infallible? Can we believe in its inspiration and practice biblical criticism? How is the Bible to be interpreted for today? I. Howard Marshall's answers to these questions will be helpful to all biblical students who are puzzled and confused by current discussions of biblical inspiration and authority. Biblical Inspiration will help to reassure conservative students regarding the value of critical study of the Bible, and will clear away much misunderstanding that the conservative view of the Bible is obscurantist and unscholarly.

Genres: Theology, Biblical Studies, Christianity, Christian

Paperback

First published December 1, 1969

About the author

Ian Howard Marshall (12 January 1934 – 12 December 2015) was a Scottish New Testament scholar.[1] He was Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was formerly the chair of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical and Theological Research; he was also president of the British New Testament Society and chair of the Fellowship of European Evangelical Theologians. Marshall identified as an Evangelical Methodist. He was the author of numerous publications, including 2005 Gold Medallion Book Award winner New Testament Theology.[2] He died of pancreatic cancer in 2015.[3]

Reviews

[Zach Waldis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marshall treats the topic sufficiently, but the gold standard currently is still Wright. Marshall seems to want to appease his conservative friends here, though I am not sure that they would approve.

[Caleb Rolling · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine semi-popular/introductory treatment of the inspiration of the Bible. It helpfully presents numerous perspectives in a concise and clear manner. One must wonder at times whether it’s a bit over simplified. It might be good heuristically, but whether it’s an acute depiction of reality is another question. There are no footnotes and no bibliography (only very occasional citations), so look elsewhere to find a more robust outline of perspectives. The two concluding chapters are more concerning “application.” Coming from a NT scholar, there’s a bit of a NT slant when describing the nature of biblical criticism—not much OT to be found throughout the book. In general, it’s a good conservative treatment that’s charitable but critical of different views that are either more conservative or more liberal than Marshall’s view. It’s nice to have a book on inspiration from a biblical scholar and not a systematic theologian. I’d say that perspective is critical for any attempt at a doctrine of inspiration that does justice to how the Bible truly is.

This is definitely a book born out of the mid-20th century polemics concerning inspiration, but it’d be good for a fresh contemporary take on the topic. I’m not aware of many.

[Brian Z. Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to the inspiration of the Bible, especially if you’ve discovered you had an overly simplistic approach to something much more complex than you first perceived. Marshall also provides a series of examples on why the “I don’t need the words of a man (i.e., commentaries, scholarship) to tell me what the Bible means; I just read the Bible!” approach is inadequate and misguided (this is not his intended goal in the book, but it is a natural consequence of the subject).

[James Korsmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. Howard Marshall is one of the most respected evangelical biblical scholars of the past generation, and in this short book, Biblical Inspiration, he undertakes a careful and balanced investigation into the nature and authority of the Bible. The book is simply laid out in six chapters:
Introduction: the Problem
1. What does the Bible say about itself?
2. What do we mean by inspiration?
3. What are the results of inspiration?
4. How are we to study the Bible?
5. How are we to interpret the Bible?
6. What are we to do with the Bible?

Through this simple progression, Marshall lays out the logic behind a robust doctrine of scripture, based on its character as God's inspired word. He begins by looking at what the Bible claims about itself, starting with the way Jesus and the authors of the New Testament understood the documents that came to be the Old Testament, and finding that they considered them, from the parts that are prophetic words from God to the historical narratives, to be God's Word, a view that culminates in the assertion in 2 Timothy that Scripture is inspired by God. He then moves on to investigate just what this inspiration is. He looks at different understandings, from a "dictation" model of inspiration to the view that the Bible is "inspired" just like good literature, finally asserting what he describes as a "concursive" model of inspiration. This asserts that human writers wrote the documents that have become our Bible, but that in so doing these documents are from God and are fully adequate for his purposes. He then moves on to look at the "results," that is, the implications of this understanding for what we understand the Bible to be. He concludes, after carefully weighing a number of options, and weighing them against the nature of the Bible as we have it, that the Bible is God's infallible word that is trustworthy to accomplish all that God intends. This can include "inerrancy," though the definition of that contested term must be very carefully laid out so that it takes into account the type of literature and the setting in which the Bible was written.

Marshall then proceeds to defend the "grammatico-historical" method of carefully studying the Bible, asserting that careful exegesis is necessary to better comprehending the message and meaning in the Bible. He then extends this discussion by describing how the fruit of this labor must be translated into our modern world, a world both similar to and distant from the world of the Bible, with an emphasis that the Bible must be its own norm and that we must always carefully guard against our own presuppositions and biases, even as we carefully analyze the Bible's message and seek to apply it. He concludes with a call to recognize and submit to the Bible's authority, based on its truthfulness.

Even though this is a short book, I have only skimmed the surface of Marshall's clear and helpful writing. He undertakes a very difficult and contested topic with great skill and profound insight. The result is a balanced yet also bold statement of the Bible's inspiration and authority. He provides some great correctives to especially a "dictation" model of inspiration and the attendant "inerrant" understanding of scripture that focuses almost solely on the Bible's divine character, and clearly this is a dialogue that he has in view with his writing. In short, I highly recommend this book as a short, clear statement of an evengelical doctrine of Scripture.