#STRask - Can You Explain Verbal Plenary Inspiration When the New Testament Writers Quote the Septuagint?

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Questions about inspiration when the New Testament writers quote the Septuagint rather than the original text, whether we could add books to the Bible if new letters from the apostles were found, and how to handle passages like John 7:53–8:11 that were added to the original biblical text.   Can you explain verbal plenary inspiration with regard to the New Testament writers quoting the Septuagint in places where it’s different from the original Hebrew text? Would it be inappropriate to add books to the Bible if new letters from the apostles were found? How should we handle passages like John 7:53–8:11 and Mark 16:9–20 that seem to have been added to the original biblical text?

Welcome to the hashtag S-C-R-Ask podcast. Greg, we're going to start today with a question from Nick. All right. Can you explain verbal plenary inspiration with regard to the New Testament writers quoting the Septuagint, a translation, instead of the Hebrew text, the original autograph? It seems there are notable differences in their quotes because of this, and then he gives a couple references. Yeah, there are differences, and it does not create any. difficulty whatsoever for verbal plenary inspiration. Because what that doctrine holds, and people can disagree with it, whatever, but I just

given that's the nature of the question, the claim of verbal plenary inspiration is that all of the text of the New Testament, all of the words verbal and all of the words plenary, are inspired by God. So you have Jesus, he's the God man. So you have the red letter editions. Well, those are no more authoritative than what Paul tells Philemon about Onusiferous because it's the Holy Spirit that drives each of these individuals to speak for God. This is the doctrine.

So I'm just describing it, not defending it necessarily. And therefore, the Hebrew scriptures are, are spoken by God, and when the authors of the New Testament, quote, the Septuagint, those words, even though they're quoting a translation, are still inspired by God. So they carry the same authority in the way they're using the Septuagint as the underlying Hebrew document that the Septuagint was translated from. and I realize sometimes they have different meanings, and I can see how that would be frustrating. That is different senses to them.

And regardless, then both senses, the Hebrew that we have and the citations from the Septuagint by the authoritative writers are each equally inspired by God. In fact, Paul was speaking under inspiration when he quoted the Epicurean philosophers in Acts 17 when he's talking there about in the sermon regarding the unknown God, the idol to the unknown God. And now he's not saying that those men themselves are inspired by God, but when he is using those texts, he is using those texts under inspiration. And so all of those words that are Paul's words, quoting these other pagan authors, are God's words also. Again, they're not affirming everything that those authors wrote. Obviously, they were godless taken as a whole. But in this particular instance, in him we live and move and have our very being, somebody pointed out that this is like the three foundational areas.

life, existence, life, and motion, or something like that. And philosophically, these are important categories for trying to explain the nature of the world, metaphysically, you know. But in any event, they spoke something true, and Paul found it useful to cite those passages. So our doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration is that the words themselves are inspired. Notice that Jesus, at one point, made an argument for the resurrection based on the tense of a verb. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

because now they don't exist. They do exist now. Even to God is Jesus' point, and therefore, based on the tense of the verb, this makes possible a resurrection. in the future, and this is an argument made to the Pharisees. So the words are all inspired, verbal, once again, and all of the words are God's words. That's plenary. The word plenary means all. Like, when you have a plenary session for conferences when everybody meets together.

So I don't think that habit, a practice of the apostles or the New Testament writers, in any way undermines the authority of their words. So this isn't to say that the Septuagint, which is a translation, is verbally inspired, verbal plenary inspired, but when the apostles cite the Septuagint, those are God's words just as much as anything else, and carry with it the same authority and meaning that the apostles are giving to those passages themselves. But not necessarily entire translation. Otherwise, we treat the Septuagint as a translation, and we want to be sensitive to the underlying Greek in order to—I'm sorry, the underlying Hebrew in order to get our full sense. There's a curious thing, though, about the Septuagint, one incident, of this unrelated to this particular question, but it's helpful in understanding the Hebrew. In the Hebrew, the Hebrew, the Isaiah, what, seven, whatever that is, the virgin shall give birth.

That particular word is Alma, which means a young woman. And so young women were characteristically virgins. That was the state of affairs there in that cultures. And so it's translated that way, but some people take exception with that, with the Hebrew, because it should just be young woman, not necessarily virgin. But when the Hebrew scholars translated that passage into Greek into the Septuagin, they translated that word, Alma, with the Greek word Parthanos. And I think that's right. Yeah, Parthenos.

And that means virgin, unequivocally. So this is where the translation, though it itself is not inspired, helps us to understand how. The extant existing Hebrew scholars prior to the time of Christ, and therefore prior to the time of the Gospels being written, which makes a point about the virgin birth, they understood this, given the Hebrew and the circumstances to be properly translated as virgin in the Greek. Curious. So it gives some insight to what they were thinking in the Hebrew. Yeah, what they understood the Hebrew actually mean. Yeah, that's kind of, they use all of these things today to try and understand the underlying text. They use early translations and see how people thought about different things.

And yeah, but I like the way you described that, Greg. All of the words in the New Testament are inspired. So when they use those texts to make a point, when they quote them to make a point, that's all inspired. Because that's the point God wants to make. Right. Using those texts. Keep in mind that inspiration doesn't always mean that the statements are truthful. When a person states something false, like Satan, for example, in the temptation, I will give you all these nations of the world if you bow down to me or something like that.

you know, then, well, that's accurately recorded, and the words are inspired by God in the recording of them, but that doesn't mean what Satan is saying is true. And there's lots of falsehoods that are accurately recorded as having been said, as opposed to having been asserted, having been said by people, that the scripture accurately records because it's God's word. word, and he guarantees the accuracy. So that's a good distinction or important distinction to keep in mind. Let's go into a question from James. Would it be inappropriate to add new books to the Bible if new letters from the apostles were found that didn't contradict any existing scripture,

gave new insights into existing doctrine, and they were legitimate to the same degree as the current books? Well, I think that's a fair question, but I think the correct answer is no. And the reason is, And by the way, there are, we know that Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians, for example, that is not extant. We don't know where that is. And it would be treated, it should be treated as an historical, maybe stronger than a curiosity, but as a historical document written by a person, even by that apostle, for instruction. And we could learn from that if all of the stipulations that were just to say, described, apply.

Notice a lot of stipulations that were making. If, if, if, if, okay, I'll buy the stipulations, but even so. And there's a very particular reason for this. Take, for example, the account of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery you find in the end of chapter 7, I think in the beginning of chapter 8 of John. Well, this is, nobody thinks that's canonical. No, no scholarly person does who examine this. Nobody thinks it's canonical.

It shows up in our Bibles now in John, but it actually has shown up at different places in manuscripts in the past, and it's late. So it's clearly not part of the first manuscript, therefore is not canonical. But I actually think it took place. In other words, it's historical, but not part of God's word. and I think I've talked about this before

on my own show, but I think that it took place. I have a number of reasons for that I won't go into now. But I would treat that then as historically sound characteristic, an account of something that Jesus did, but I wouldn't treat it as holy writ. Okay, so now how this applies to the question that was just asked by James, there were three criteria for canonicity

from the early church. when they're trying to figure out of these available writings, which are apostolic and some that they weren't sure who wrote them like Hebrews, and then others that were useful, like the Shepherd of Hermes or the DEDAK or other what turned out to be more devotional things, They had three criteria. One is apostolic authority. In other words, did an apostle trained by Jesus directly? That would include Paul in a specialized sense, according to Galatians. Was he the source?

Does it have an apostolic source or some close associate with the apostle, like Mark writing for Peter, for example, or Luke writing as a companion to Paul. Secondly, orthodoxy, in other words, the doctrine that was established as solid by the clear authoritative sources, the apostle, has to also be represented in this other work that maybe they're not sure, like Hebrews, for example. And of course, with James's stipulations, that would be satisfied. both would be satisfied. But the third one is Catholicity.

That is, all of the church had to recognize, generally speaking, because canon is an act of recognition, as Dan Wallace puts it, it is not, let's see, it's not an authoritative list of books. It's a list of authoritative books. In other words, the canon. is not established by some external authority, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, that's a claim they make, but it's rather recognized as such by the internal authority of the books themselves. So who recognized them? Well, the church recognized them. And as long as you had, this is the standard of Catholicity, small C, not Roman Catholic,

but universally, if it wasn't universally accepted, if it wasn't universally accepted, by the leadership of the church post-apostolic times, because the apostles are no longer around, they're dead. So they can't affirm all the—but you've still got their writings, and that's authoritative because the apostles who were taught by Jesus were authoritative. Then the confidence is that God is going to guide the church, and therefore you're going to have basically unanimity. You might have a couple of outliers on a couple of things. Revelation, for example, was accepted early on, and then it got lost, fell out of favor because it's weird. And then it later on, it became a secure part of the canon.

And it took a few hundred years for this to take place. Now, I wrote a piece called The New Testament Canon, which books and why. And I really labored over that to kind of square this away in my own mind. but this is going to be helpful if somebody wants to go to our website and look that up because I go through all the details. But the issue of Catholicity is really important. And this is why books like The Shepherd of Hermes and D.D.K. and some others that were very popular for other reasons, they realize this is not, this isn't the same level as the apostolic writing. So we can use them, but they're not inspired, just like we use devotionals and stuff like that now.

But it's also the reason that the Apocrypha should not be in the canon because there never was anything like a consistent response. Augusta liked it. Jerome didn't. Well, that's huge. And it wasn't even that they liked it or didn't like it. It's that some thought they were inspired and some just thought they were edifying. Thank you for the clarification. Liked it in terms of its, it's inerrant.

It's inspired. It's inspiration. And curiously, in Trent, when it was kind of officially authorized as part of the canon by the Roman Catholic Church, the vote was two to one. One third of everybody at Trent voted against canonizing it. So it didn't even have the satisfy the rule of Catholicity there in Trent. So now that's the one that matters with regards to James' question. because even if we find all of these things, there was no consensus of the early church regarding any of these. So they would be considered a meaningful historical artifacts, but they would not be considered canon, scripture,

because the most important foundational element of canon, which the word means rule or authority, comes from the authoritative position of the apostolic band that was directly trained by Jesus. Jesus was the first authority, New Testament-wise, and those who he trained were the subsequent authorities after Jesus was gone. And by the way, he makes this clear in the upper room discourse. I will send the Holy Spirit who will bring to remembrance everything that I have taught you. And will, in another reference, this is chapter 14 and 15, there's two references here, and will guide you unto all truth.

This is not a promise for Christians. because if we took it that way, then the Holy Spirit has failed because there is no consistency among Christians who have the Holy Spirit in what the truth actually is in a whole host of things or differences of opinion. I mean, even you were wrong on a couple of things, so I'm just saying. But so this is for the apostles, and that's why this is, that apostolic element is so important, and the ability of the early church to recognize this. We are long past that time, and that's why, for all practical purposes, the canon, based on the

criterion of the early church and what they actually went through in terms of determining what is counted by them as scripture in the New Testament, those times are past. It's not going to happen anymore. The canon is closed. And if they had recognized it at the time as being inspired, they would have preserved it. Absolutely. And we would have heard about it. Actually, people would have mentioned it. I would go a step further.

God would have preserved it. Yeah, well, of course. Yes. And so for the human perspective, yes, they would have sustained it, and that's because God protects his word. And he's not going to have his word, or I should say the church bereft of his word for 2,000 years of some important part of his word. So I don't think that's going to work at all.

But we could certainly learn from it, but I guess it's so hypothetical. I don't even know if we should go into this further. But what would you think about assuming it really is original? Yeah, that's stipulated. Because the question here about it gave new insights, obviously we wouldn't want new doctrine, but do you think we could use it to kind of get a better idea of, let's say it's a letter from Paul? And he explains something that explains his thinking in the earlier book. What would you think about that?

Well, I think that should be taken into consideration. It just depends on whether we can take this information and have it comport with a fair understanding of the inspired document. There's another practical problem here, though, and that's the textual problem. Okay, what is the textual history of some document that we find that nobody knew anything about? and 2,000 years later we find, we find, what's the textual history? I mean, that's a practical concern that would, I can think, that many people would be, raises an objection to this. Well, that's why he stipulates it's legitimate.

Yeah. Because you're right, that's, that is the biggest problem. How would we even know where it came from or who wrote it or, you know, I think there, I think there are too many problems that this could ever. actually happened. So I do want to ask one more question since you brought it up. I think just to close off this, what you said about this. This question is from Carter. How should we handle passages like John 753 through 811 and Mark 16, 9th through 20 that seem to have been added to the original biblical manuscripts? Would you treat these passages any differently than the rest of the Bible?

Now, you already mentioned a couple things. But in terms of preaching, reading, How would you treat it differently? Well, the long-ending mark, and that's in segments, that whole ending is choppy. And if you have any Bible with a marginal reference, it's going to let you know, oldest manuscripts do not contain this portion or this portion or this portion of this portion. Plus, there's a number of things that are recorded in the long-ending mark. A couple of them are things that are recorded elsewhere. going to all the world and preach the gospel, for example.

Although it is a little curious, that isn't the way Jesus put it. In the Great Commission, he says, go into all the world and make disciples. Now, of course, that entails preaching the gospel, but preaching the gospel and getting people saved is not the ultimate end. The end is disciples. The way Paul put it is presenting every man complete in Christ. So this is kind of a truncated, a significantly truncated version of the Great Commission. Then you've got the snake handling stuff in there, and you've got drinking poison and whatever. And it also is a whole, there are aspects of it that are not, that don't sound like Mark.

And so they're embellished. So I would, the things that are in there that are repeated in canonical literature are reliable. But they're not reliable because they're in Mark. They're reliable because they're somewhere else in unquestionable canonical material. And then the other kinds of things, they shall drink poison, it won't hurt them, they will bit by snakes. Now, we do have an occasion in the book of Acts where Paul was bitten by snake and it didn't hurt him. I'm not sure if that's ex post facto, you know, after the fact, now they're importing this into Mark. And Mark is supposedly the first gospel.

And Mark, remember Luke, this is the end of Luke where this happens to Paul, end of Acts, where this happens to Paul. Acts is written by Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke before that, and by all accounts, Mark wrote the gospel of Mark before Luke. So, I mean, clearly, these are all these reasons you can see that this has been tampered with. So I would not take anything seriously after the end, the canonical ending of Mark. And I'm just looking where it is right now. So this is Mark 16. It may be, I'm trying to read the marginal references here. Anyway, anything that's indicated as being questionable, I wouldn't read anything past that.

So you don't even read it. I would read it, but I don't take it as scripture. If I'm going to say I'm going to read the Gospel of Mark, I'll read everything that's in the book. But I am not going to do anything with it, theoretically at all. And I'm not exactly sure. Here I got verse 14. The disciples are commissioned. And my writing is marginal writing is too small.

What about the woman caught in adultery passage? Well, that's a different situation. Again, I don't take it as holy writ, but there's some very, very interesting things about this passage. If you read the Gospels, if you're a student of the Gospels and a student of Jesus handling challenging circumstances, you realize Jesus has a certain voice. He has a certain style. He has a way of doing this, doing things and engaging people and foiling attempts to make him look ridiculous. And that's why when I read things that people write, And here's Jesus, Jesus calling, you know, and all kinds of nonsense like that.

Pardon me, but this is beyond the pale. It doesn't sound like Jesus. It sounds like the woman who's writing it, you know. And so when I read this text with that in mind, I see a couple of things, a trap. We know it's a trap because the woman is caught in the very act, but there's no guy. Where's the guy? Okay. So she's dragged before him, and the loss is this, what do you say?

There's a trap. Okay, for Jesus now. She's trapped, and now they're trying to trap Jesus. And the law says, you know, stoner. So what he then says is something that is not theologically sound. Let he was without sin cast the first stone. If that were the case, theoretically, then no one could execute anyone ever, except for Jesus, you know, because he's the only one without sin.

but he's making a challenge. And then he starts writing in the dust. And we don't know what that is based on the account, but I saw one movie that characterizes it. He's writing the sins of the people who are accusing him. And one by one, the oldest first, the text says, peel away and disappear. And pretty soon nobody's left.

And so Jesus says to the woman, is there no one here to accuse you? And she says, no. And Jesus then says, and this is one of the most misunderstood, parts of the sayings of Jesus and part of that passage, neither do I accuse you or condemn you. Why does Jesus say that? Not because he's so compassionate and it's okay for her to commit adultery and he's given the

short shrift on the sexual sin. It's because he's not a witness to the crime. And if he's not a witness to the crime and all the witnesses are gone, there is no, it doesn't satisfy the conditions in the mosaic law for a stoning, for a capital punishment. And so he foiled the trap, and he also upheld the law. That's Jesus. I mean, that was very clever. But then he tells the woman, go in sin no more.

He addresses the sin. So everything about that passage is quintessential Jesus. And this is why I think it really happened. I talked to Dan Wallace about it too, and he agreed with me on that particular point, as I recall. But in any event, it's certainly not canonical, but I think it's historical. And it's part of the oral tradition that survived, and there are real things that happen. Remember, at the end of Gospel of John, John says, hey, there's so many things that Jesus did that they'd fill all the books of the world. So, but these have been written here for a particular reason to convince people that Jesus is the Messiah, believe in him, and have eternal life.

So, I mean, that's the way I would treat the woman caught in adultery in the gospel of John. Thank you, Greg, and thank you, Nick and James. And if you have a question, send it on X with the hashtag STR Ask, or you can go to our website at STR.org. We hope that you will send it in. We always love getting your questions, and we hope to hear from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.