Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
But, of course, the writer's burden was that "the Spirit was speaking."
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And for some, that means that every word with all of its nuances is extremely important while others view the passage as a thought, or narrative, with slack in wording allowable.
And since there is a huge difference in the vocabulary and style of the different writers, you either have to assume that God just allows his word to be diminished, or "bumpkinized" if it is, say, Peter writing. Then gives the really important stuff to Paul.
Or maybe it is the sentence, paragraph, or even letter that says obvious things as a whole rather than mining through each word with a detailed lexicon trying to find anything you can force into it.
Probably somewhere in between. Surely there are words and phrases that are important in themselves. But even then, they are not (or seldom) important for reversing or seriously altering meaning, but typically for enhancing.
I like the end of the sentence I quoted. Maybe the words are not always simply thoughts from God flowing through "my" limited vocabulary. Maybe, just maybe, God can actually lead someone — as in a vision concerning lampstands, beasts, seals, and bowls — to write something profoundly beyond their experience. Or he spoke through someone who we just don't see as being one of the expected writers. Yet the church still concluded that it was substantial, coherent within the whole of scripture, and meaningful and/or useful to the church so they kept it in "the book."
And the arguments that note Paul always identified himself can be overcome by the fact that its direction to the "Hebrews" might not be as acceptable to them if they knew the source.
In any case, I find the writer unimportant, especially since his identification was not considered important when written. Unless we have been seriously mistaken, the writer is clearly God. Whose hand was involved is of lesser importance.