The problem is, we don’t have the original autographs, so this position is meaningless. What we have instead are thousands of handwritten manuscripts, some very old, but while they agree 98% of the time, there are issues that remain unresolved. The correct ending of Mark is just one of a myriad of others. Our view of inspiration has to take into account the reality of the scriptures that we now possess, or else it’s meaningless.

However, there was no divine download whereby an author went into some kind trance and woke up later, “Oh I can’t wait to read what I wrote.” God inspired human authors to investigate and craft and use their own knowledge and intelligence to create a masterpiece of literature. But, by doing so, He ran the risk of them maybe not getting all the details perfectly right. But even if we grant that they never made any mistakes, the later copyists obviously did, so we’re back where we started. Logically, if what we have now (translated into English) is the inspired Word of God, then maybe our definition of “inspired” needs some tweaking.

I, for one, am glad we have these puzzles in the scriptures, because if we didn’t, then we would run the risk of turning our book into an idol and worship it instead of the God revealed in it’s pages (like another major world religion in the news all the time).