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Can Protestants prove verbal inspiration from Scripture alone? In this episode, I examine the biblical case for the Protestant claim that apostolic authorship guarantees verbal inspiration—and argue that the case ultimately falls short without appealing to Sacred Tradition.
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Transcript:
Most Protestants believe that the very words of Scripture are inspired by God. Not just the ideas, not just the message, but the exact words are God-breathed.
And when you ask, “Why think that—at least when it comes to the New Testament?” the answer is usually because an apostle, or someone closely associated with an apostle, wrote them. The assumption is that whatever an apostle—or an associate approved by an apostle—writes is inspired.
But can that be accounted for by Scripture alone?
Stick around to find out.
Alright, let’s dive in.
Verbal inspiration, also known as plenary inspiration, is the view that every word of Scripture is God-breathed—not just the ideas or content. The view that only the ideas and content are inspired is called, by some, conceptual or content inspiration.
Most Protestants reject the conceptual/content view and affirm verbal inspiration.
For example, John Armstrong, in his essay “The Authority of Scripture,” published in the book Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible, writes:
“Another more conservative scholar argues that it is ‘the truths which are inspired but not the words.’ But what could this possibly mean since the words are the chosen vehicles for communicating the truths themselves? A fallible ‘God-breathed’ book is a contradiction, a verbal illogicality.”
Matthew Barrett, in his book God’s Word Alone, similarly defends verbal inspiration.
So, for most Protestants, the apostolic writings are inspired in their exact words, having God as their primary author.
Now, when pressed to justify that claim—at least for the New Testament writings—it’s often argued that they were written by an apostle, or at least an associate of an apostle who received apostolic approval.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s call this the apostolic authorship principle.
John MacArthur is one who affirms this principle in his book Why Believe the Bible? He writes:
“Was the book authored by an apostle or someone closely associated with an apostle? Again, the key question was the book’s inspiration; and to be inspired, it had to be written by an apostle, someone who had walked and talked with the Lord, or someone who had been a close companion of an apostle.”
That comes from page 73 of his book.
Armstrong affirms this criterion as well in his essay referenced earlier.
What I want to ask in today’s episode is whether this criterion for verbal inspiration can be accounted for by Scripture alone, and what the implications might be if it can’t.
Many Protestants think they can justify this criterion, and they offer several supporting texts.
A common starting point is Jesus’ words in John 14:26 and 16:13.
John 14:26 reads:
“The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
John 16:13 reads:
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
Frank Turek appealed to these very texts in a popular exchange with a Catholic college student named Chase. Here’s Turek:
“But how do we know that the 27 books in it are correct, truly? Like, not just, well, we think they’re correct because—if that’s our one rule of faith, wouldn’t we need to know?
“If Jesus—and we have good evidence that Jesus said this in John 14 and 16—said, first of all, ‘I will bring to remembrance all that I taught you, and I will lead you into all truth,’ the idea here is that Jesus was going to inspire the apostles, or people that the apostles knew, to write down the New Testament.
“And so the only question we have now is: What documents were written in the first century by apostles or people that knew the apostles that would qualify as Scripture?
“And if you look, there are nine authors of the New Testament, depending upon who wrote the book of Hebrews. So you’ve got Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Jude, James, and then the writer of Hebrews. The only question mark is the writer of Hebrews. All of those other people were either apostles or were confirmed by apostles, like Luke is confirmed by Paul.”
At the beginning of his statement, Turek argues that Jesus’ promises justify two claims: first, that the Spirit would inspire the apostles to write down the New Testament; and second, that the Spirit would inspire people whom the apostles knew to write down the New Testament.
But then, at the end, after reaffirming point one, Turek slightly modifies point two, speaking only of those people whom the apostles confirmed—like Paul confirmed Luke.
I assume Turek is referring to 1 Timothy 5:18, where Paul quotes Luke 10:7 and calls it Scripture.
Now, I do think these texts from our Lord in John’s Gospel successfully provide grounds for Turek’s modified point: that whatever an apostle confirms as Scripture is Scripture.
If they’re promised to be guided by the Spirit into all truth, then their judgments are going to be infallible.
Paul’s confirmation of Luke’s Gospel as Scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18 is an example of such an infallible judgment, since Paul was an apostle. Thus, a Christian can base his belief in the inspiration of Luke’s Gospel on Paul’s infallible testimony.
And I think we can be generous and extend that to Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, since that’s considered a continuation of Luke’s Gospel.
Now, some Catholics might push back on that and say we can only know that the single line from Luke’s Gospel is inspired, not its entirety.
But Catholics often appeal to an early Church Father citing one or two lines from a Deuterocanonical book and conclude that he believed the entirety of that book was inspired. So I think this approach is fair game for our Protestant friend.
Now, what John 14:26 and 16:13 can’t justify are the other two points made by Turek.
Consider Turek’s first formulation of point two: that the Spirit will inspire people whom the apostles knew—or, to use MacArthur’s formulation, “someone closely associated with an apostle.”
These promises in John’s Gospel can’t possibly justify this thesis, because that would mean we must affirm the inspiration of Clement’s letter to the Corinthian church, since Clement was a close associate of the apostles.
It would also require that we say the Didache is inspired, since its author or authors would have known the apostles.
But no Christian today believes that these documents are inspired, whether in content or verbally.
So what about Turek and MacArthur’s point about the apostles themselves?
Can John 14:26 and 16:13 justify the belief that whatever an apostle writes is inspired?
I don’t think so.
Notice Jesus never says the Holy Spirit will provide them the very words to communicate the truth that he reveals. He just says the Spirit will lead them into all truth, teaching and bringing to their remembrance what Jesus taught.
That’s a promise that the content will be revealed—not the exact words with which they will communicate that content.
So these texts can give us conceptual or content inspiration, but not verbal inspiration.
Perhaps the most-cited text in favor of the apostolic authorship principle is 2 Peter 1:20–21. There Peter writes:
“First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”
Matthew Barrett calls this the “most explicit” text for verbal inspiration, and he does so within the context of arguing for the apostolic authorship principle.
However, there are two problems.
First, even if we concede that the Spirit’s movement pertains to the very words a prophet speaks in Scripture, this passage only tells us that whatever is Scripture is verbally inspired.
It does not give us a criterion for identifying which writings fit within the category of Scripture.
Thus, it would be circular to apply this text to the apostolic writings, since we’d have to first know whether the apostolic writings are Scripture before applying this verse to them.
Second, there’s nothing in this text that extends inspiration to the apostles specifically.
The verse speaks of “the prophecy of Scripture,” generally speaking. Apostles aren’t mentioned.
Why should this apply to Paul’s letter to Philemon and not to, say, Clement’s letter to the Corinthian church?
There’s nothing in the verse to answer that question.
Now, someone might counter and say that in verse 19 Peter identifies the prophetic word of Scripture as coming from the apostles. He writes, “We have the prophetic word made more sure.”
The problem there is that Peter’s referring to what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration.
He’s speaking of what he, James, and John witnessed on the mountain. The “we” there refers to those three, not all the apostles.
Furthermore, the “prophetic word” in verse 19 is the message they received on the mount:
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
That’s a specific revelation, not something that applies to all future writings.
So reading 2 Peter 1:21 as a blanket validation of the verbal inspiration of apostolic writings requires inserting assumptions that the text just doesn’t supply.
Now, the next go-to verse that perhaps comes closest to supporting verbal inspiration of the apostolic writings is 1 Corinthians 2:13.
Paul writes:
“We speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit.”
Armstrong quotes this text in his essay mentioned earlier, and Anthony Rogers seemingly appealed to it in his 2025 debate with my colleague and friend here at Catholic Answers, Trent Horn.
So what should we make of this?
Well, for starters, Protestant interpreters often assume the “we” here refers to the apostles.
But Joseph Fitzmyer, on page 169 of his Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on 1 Corinthians, argues quite persuasively that Paul uses the first-person plural throughout this letter to mean “we Christians,” not “we apostles.”
The communal “we” is a well-established Pauline pattern.
Another problem with this interpretation is the context.
Paul’s focus is not scriptural inspiration. Rather, he’s contrasting the “hidden wisdom of God” that he’s imparting to the Corinthians with the “wisdom of this age” in verses 6 and 7.
He’s basically saying: the content and authority of what we proclaim comes from divine revelation, not philosophical cleverness.
There’s also the problem of there being nothing about writing here.
Paul is talking about oral proclamation.
To move from “the Spirit taught us what to say when we preached” to “therefore every word Paul ever wrote is verbally inspired” requires a significant leap.
And the text just doesn’t make that leap for us.
And even if we grant all that—even if we say, fine, this applies to their writings too—it still doesn’t prove that every word they wrote is inspired.
The context speaks of divine revelation.
So maybe the apostles were inspired when writing about things pertaining to revelation. But what about when Paul mentions his cloak that he left in Troas in 2 Timothy 4:13?
Is that verbally inspired in the same sense?
1 Corinthians 2:13 just doesn’t answer that question.
So I don’t think 1 Corinthians 2:13 can carry the weight that Protestants place on it.
Alright. Armstrong and others appeal to several additional passages. Let me address them briefly.
Take Romans 1:5. Paul writes:
“Through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.”
The idea here is that if the apostolic witness—whether orally or in written form—produces the obedience of faith, it must be divinely authoritative.
But affirming that the apostolic witness in written form is divinely authoritative doesn’t entail that every word they wrote was God-breathed.
Inspiration of content doesn’t automatically make the linguistic form inspired.
Another passage is 2 Peter 3:15.
Peter refers to Paul’s letters as “Scripture.”
This does provide an infallible testimony upon which Christians can base their belief that Paul’s epistles were verbally inspired.
But it doesn’t prove that whatever an apostle writes is inspired—not even when it comes to matters of divine revelation.
Peter is making a specific judgment about Paul’s letters. He’s not articulating a general principle that apostleship confers verbal inspiration on everything written, or even only those things concerning divine revelation.
Next up is 1 Corinthians 14:37, where Paul writes:
“What I write to you is a command of the Lord.”
The teaching is the Lord’s command—absolutely.
But a divine command to teach something doesn’t equal verbal co-authorship.
God can transmit commands through human agents without those agents’ words being his own words.
So, like some of the other passages, this only gets us content inspiration, not verbal inspiration.
Finally, there’s Revelation 22:18–19.
John warns about adding or removing words from “this prophecy.”
I do think this gives us grounds to believe that Revelation is inspired.
John is an infallible agent—and I’m assuming here that we agree John the Apostle is the author—and he says it’s prophecy.
So we can conclude it’s verbally inspired, since prophecy is often equated with verbal inspiration.
The problem is that this only applies to the Book of Revelation.
You can’t jump from this self-referential claim within Revelation to a doctrine about the entire apostolic corpus.
Thus, this passage fails to prove the presupposed belief that whatever an apostle writes is inspired.
It can’t even get us within the boundaries of things that would pertain to divine revelation.
Alright. Let’s step back and summarize what we have so far.
The Protestant claims that apostolic authorship confers verbal inspiration.
But the proof texts they offer don’t get you there.
If you use 2 Peter 1:21 to establish verbal inspiration, you still need a separate argument for why it applies to the apostles. The verse doesn’t say that.
If you use John 14:26 and 16:13 to argue Jesus promised to inspire the apostles, you get inspiration of content, not verbal inspiration.
If you use 1 Corinthians 2:13 to argue the very words are Spirit-taught, you have problems with who “we” is, what the context is, and the fact that Paul is talking about preaching, not writing.
If you appeal to Romans 1:5 and 1 Corinthians 14:37, you get divinely revealed content in the apostolic witness—which Catholics happily affirm—but not the specific claim of verbal inspiration of everything an apostle writes, even concerning divine revelation.
And if 2 Peter 3:15 and Revelation 22:18–19 are your preference, then you get verbal inspiration of Paul’s epistles and the Book of Revelation—something we wholeheartedly agree with as Catholics.
But you don’t get verbal inspiration for all apostolic writings.
At every turn, the Protestant needs to take at least one step beyond what the text actually says to justify his thesis about verbal inspiration and apostolic authorship.
Now, what does all this mean?
Well, for starters, the belief that apostolic authorship entails verbal inspiration cannot be accounted for by Scripture alone.
And that’s a problem for a Protestant.
If he wants to keep thinking this belief is binding for a Christian, then he must concede that Scripture isn’t the only infallible rule of faith, since he’d be basing this binding doctrine on Sacred Tradition.
If he wants to keep his belief in sola scriptura, depending on how he defines it, then he must either reject this belief because it’s not found in Scripture, or at least concede that this belief isn’t binding for Christians.
Neither is favorable for a Protestant.
Moreover, without biblical grounds to justify the principle that apostolic authorship entails verbal inspiration, a Protestant has no infallible testimony upon which to base his belief in the verbal inspiration of some books in the New Testament.
That means he can’t know for certain whether those books are verbally inspired.
Hebrews is a clear example, since scholars agree that we don’t really know who wrote it.
Matthew is another example.
There’s nothing in the New Testament where Jesus or an apostle confirms for us that Matthew’s Gospel is Scripture, like in the case of Paul’s epistles and Luke’s Gospel.
The same is true for the epistles of James, Jude, and Peter.
The only other way a Protestant could know whether these books are verbally inspired is by the apostolic authorship principle—assuming that James and Jude were written by two of the Twelve who go by these names, and that 2 Peter was actually written by Peter.
But the apostolic authorship principle isn’t available to a Protestant, since it can’t be verified by Scripture, as we’ve shown so far in today’s episode.
Therefore, a Protestant has no objective grounds to believe that Matthew’s Gospel, along with the epistles of James, Jude, and Peter, are verbally inspired.
He may say he has the inner testimony of the Spirit, but that’s subjective.
I’m only concerned here with objective grounds for faith.
Now you might wonder: What about Mark? He was a disciple of Peter.
And what about John’s Gospel and epistles?
When it comes to Mark, I do think the apostolic authorship principle can get you to content inspiration insofar as we know from early Christian testimony that Mark recorded the apostolic preaching of Peter.
But since Mark wasn’t an apostle, obviously it can’t get you verbal inspiration.
And we don’t have any confirmation from Jesus or the apostles that Mark’s Gospel is verbally inspired.
They never refer to it as Scripture or quote it and say, “It is written.”
So a Protestant is left with no objective grounds for believing Mark’s Gospel is verbally inspired.
Now, what about John—his Gospel and epistles?
Don’t we have grounds for his writings to be inspired insofar as his Book of Revelation is verbally inspired as prophecy?
Well, assuming that John the Apostle actually wrote these texts, it’s a bit of a leap to say that because John was verbally inspired in writing one book, he is therefore verbally inspired in every book that he writes.
How would a Protestant know that if he doesn’t have the apostolic authorship principle available to him?
I don’t think he can know that.
Now, there’s one more problem that underlies all of these arguments. It’s something I mentioned earlier when I commented on 1 Corinthians 2:13.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, the apostolic authorship principle could be verified by Scripture.
Here’s a crucial question:
How could a Protestant possibly know when an apostle is verbally inspired in writing and when he’s not?
Would he be inspired if he wrote down a list of things to get at the market?
I seriously doubt Christians would concede that.
But if he’s not verbally inspired in everything he writes, then perhaps he’s not verbally inspired when it comes to details that don’t pertain to divine revelation—like Paul’s cloak in Troas, which I mentioned before—or issues that deal with historical and/or scientific details.
Most Protestants wouldn’t want to make those concessions.
Yet there’s nothing in Scripture that can exclude them as a possibility.
So our Protestant friend faces yet another dilemma: make those concessions or give up on sola scriptura.
Now, a Protestant might counter that the list of things to get at the market would be inspired if it were in one of the apostolic books recognized as Scripture.
But that would just beg the question, since we’re trying to figure out when an apostle is writing as verbally inspired in the first place.
So here’s where we ultimately land.
Unless there are other biblical passages that I’m not aware of, a Protestant can’t successfully show from Scripture alone that whatever an apostle writes is verbally inspired.
He doesn’t even have anything to restrict the apostolic authorship principle to whatever they write concerning divine revelation.
And given his sola scriptura framework, that means he can’t know for sure whether some books in the New Testament are verbally inspired.
So either he bites the bullet and simply says that his scriptura is not as expansive as he once thought—questioning the verbal inspiration of Hebrews, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the epistles of James, Jude, and Peter, and potentially John’s Gospel and epistles—or he accepts the binding nature of Sacred Tradition that tells us those books are verbally inspired.
Neither position is favorable for a Protestant.
Well, my friends, that’s it for today.
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My friends, thanks for hanging out with me today.
I’ll see you next time.
God bless.