Is all Scripture inspired by God?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The contradiction bites hardest against a fully developed doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, and dissolves considerably once the texts are read in their own setting. 2 Timothy 3:16 — πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος, "all scripture is God-breathed" — is the locus classicus for that doctrine, but two exegetical facts narrow its scope. First, πᾶσα γραφή in context refers to the sacred writings (ἱερὰ γράμματα) Timothy has known "from childhood" (3:15), i.e., the Jewish scriptures in their Greek (LXX) form. No closed New Testament canon existed when the Pastorals were written, so the verse is not a self-referential claim about Paul's own letters, much less about a Bible that would later include them. Second, the syntax is itself disputed: θεόπνευστος may be predicate ("all scripture is God-breathed") or attributive ("all God-breathed scripture is also useful"), a difference that affects how sweeping the claim is.

Against this, 1 Corinthians 7 shows the historical Paul explicitly grading his own authority. In 7:10 he gives a command "not I but the Lord" — appealing to a dominical saying on divorce (cf. Mark 10:9-12). In 7:12 he shifts: "to the rest I say — I, not the Lord." In 7:25 he goes further: περὶ δὲ τῶν παρθένων ἐπιταγὴν κυρίου οὐκ ἔχω, γνώμην δὲ δίδωμι — "concerning virgins I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion (gnōmē)." Paul distinguishes levels of authority precisely because he does not regard his own pastoral ruling as carrying the same weight as a saying traceable to Jesus. The author of 2 Maccabees closes (15:38-39) by asking pardon if his composition is poorly done — a frank authorial self-disclaimer that sits awkwardly with theopneustic inspiration, and which matters specifically for the Catholic and Orthodox canons in which 2 Maccabees is scripture.

The classic apologetic harmonization, from B. B. Warfield onward, makes two moves. First, Paul's "I, not the Lord" distinguishes which traditions stem from Jesus' earthly teaching from Paul's own Spirit-guided apostolic judgment, but both, on this view, are inspired in the canonical sense; indeed in 7:40 Paul adds "and I think that I too have the Spirit of God." Second, theopneustos describes the divine origin of the texts without erasing the human authors' literary self-awareness, so an authorial humility-formula need not negate inspiration. The first move is partly successful: Paul is plainly distinguishing dominical command from apostolic counsel, not disclaiming all authority, and 7:40 shows he still claims the Spirit. So the relation between 2 Tim 3:16 and 1 Cor 7 need not be a flat contradiction at the level the authors intended.

But the harmonization overreaches when it flattens Paul's gradient into uniform plenary inspiration. Paul's own surface meaning is that his ruling on virgins is gnōmē, opinion, expressly not an ἐπιταγὴ κυρίου; reading that as functionally identical in authority to a divine command imposes a later doctrinal grid on the text. Critical scholars (Ehrman, Marshall as a moderating voice, Collins) note further that 2 Timothy is most likely deutero-Pauline, written after Paul's death; if so, its sweeping inspiration claim cannot retroactively bind the historical Paul's self-understanding, and certainly was not framed to cover the very NT documents and the deuterocanonical 2 Maccabees that later inerrantists include. The 2 Maccabees disclaimer is then doubly awkward, since it explicitly invites the reader to pardon imperfection.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable at the level of the authors' own claims (2 Tim 3:16 concerns the Jewish scriptures; Paul grades authority without denying it), but a genuine contradiction against a later doctrine of plenary verbal inerrancy applied to the whole canon.