God-breathed

Where we are

Third day of four in 2 Timothy. The chapter has just catalogued the vices of the last days — lovers of self, lovers of money, unable ever to arrive at knowledge of the truth. Today's passage turns from that list to Timothy personally, and ends on the sentence about scripture that has carried more theological freight than any other line in the letter.

What happens

You have followed my teaching, way of life, purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, and sufferings — the ones at Antioch, Iconium and Lystra — and out of them all Yahweh rescued me. And then the flat generalisation: all who want to live devoutly in the Anointed Jesus will be persecuted, while wicked people and charlatans will go from bad to worse, deceiving and deceived. But you: remain in what you learned and believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred writings, which can give you the wisdom that leads to rescue through trust in the Anointed Jesus. Every writing is God-breathed and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in right relationship, so that the person of Theos may be complete, fully outfitted for every good work.

What to notice

Theopneustos is a made thing. There is no clear earlier use of it in surviving Greek, and it is plainly a compound: theos + pneō, breathed by Theos. What the word does not say is as interesting as what it does. It is passive, not active — the writings are breathed, they do not breathe — and it says nothing at all about mechanism, dictation, inerrancy, or the state of mind of the person holding the pen. It is a claim about origin, made with a metaphor of air, and the same metaphor turns up in the Gospel two hours later in the day's readings.

The sentence's grammar is genuinely open. Pasa graphē theopneustos kai ōphelimos has no verb. Read one way: every writing is God-breathed and useful. Read another: every God-breathed writing is also useful. Greek allows both, and the ancient versions split. The second reading is the humbler one and, for a letter about how to work, arguably the more pointed — it moves the emphasis from the pedigree of the text to its serviceability, which is where the rest of the sentence goes anyway. And pasa with a singular noun and no article is more naturally every than all: not the collection as a lump, but each passage as you come to it.

The list of uses is a workshop inventory. Teaching, reproof, correction, training — and then the purpose clause, in a vocabulary borrowed from outfitting. Artios means fitted, jointed, in working order; exērtismenos is the perfect participle of a verb used for equipping a ship for a voyage or furnishing a house. The goal is not a person who knows more but a person who is fully kitted out, and the passage assumes the voyage is the point of the outfitting.

And the flat sentence in the middle should not be softened. Pantes hoi thelontes eusebōs zēn... diōchthēsontai — all who want to live devoutly will be persecuted. No qualifier, no may, no in some places. The verb diōkō means to pursue, to chase; the passive here is the hunted animal's. Coming from a letter written from a cell, it is not rhetoric — and it is placed immediately before the passage about scripture, so that the equipment being described is issued to somebody who is going to need it.