I Howard Marshall, while discussing just some of the many problems with viewing the entirety of the Bible as being dictated revelation, wrote:
Although the ‘prophetic’ or ‘dictation’ theory of the composition of the Bible has sometimes been held by theologians, it has no support from modern scholars. It is open to a number of cogent objections. Basically it does not correspond to the facts in the Bible itself. While it is true that the prophets claimed to hear God speaking to them, and then proclaimed his Word, this was not how the other writers pictured themselves as working. They used human sources of information and worked in the usual sorts of ways practised by writers. They did not function as divine tape-reorders or word-processors, instruments controlled entirely by their users. So Luke tells us that other people before him had attempted to write the story of Jesus, and the implication of his statement (Luke 1:1-4), which is confirmed by a study of his gospel, is that he consulted their works and made use of them in compiling his own. Paul clearly wrote his letter as spontaneous compositions, expressive of his own thoughts and ideas. Various writers are depicted as asking God questions (even the prophets do so), and it hardly seems probable that God dictated their own personal feelings and expressions to them. The whole tenor of what the biblical writers say about themselves is that they composed their books by using normal human mental processes.
Sometimes the biblical writers quote secular sources, such as Persian archives (e.g. Ezra 7:11-26). It is impossible to think of such sources as being dictated by God, and it is farcical to suggest that they became inspired when they were copied out by Ezra.
What in effect has happened is that the biblical writers have been depersonalised—and indeed God himself has been depersonalised, since he no longer acts as a person dealing with persons, but as a workman using a tool. The Bible is no longer regarded as in any real sense a human book; it is simply a heavenly telegram. In short, the theory not only does not correspond to what the biblical writers tell us about themselves; it also leads to a false view of God’s relationships with human persons.
One further point must be made. The theory assumes that whenever a prophet received a message from God it came to him in the form of a message which he heard, so that all that he had to do was to repeat God’s words. There is no need to doubt that this was the experience of the prophets on occasion. What is dubious is whether all divine messages came in this way. For example, when Jeremiah went down to the potter’s house and there heard the Lord drawing a message from what the potter did with the clay (Jer. 18:1-11), it is an open question whether he actually heard the voice of God, or rather came to a personal conviction about God’s purpose for his people as he meditated on what the potter was doing and then realised that this conviction was God’s Word for the people. Since the messages which the prophets proclaimed as the words of God are couched in their own distinctive literary styles rather than being in one uniform ‘divine’ style, it seems quite clear that even in the case of the prophets the theory of direct dictation is not universally applicable. (I. Howard Marshall, Biblical Inspiration [Biblical and Theological Classics Library; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1995], 32-33)
Such can also be said about uniquely Latter-day Saint Scriptures, too, evidenced by Joseph Smith's use of "Elias" to denote a forerunner and other instances of a "synergistic" relationship between the mortal prophet and the divine inspiration they receive.
