During the sixteenth
and seventeen centuries there was a steady movement among Catholic theologians
away from the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. Leonard
Lessius, picking up a hint from Sixtus of Siena, went so far as to defend (at
Louvain in 1585) the view that ‘a book such as II Maccabees, written by human
industry without the aid of the Holy Spirit, may afterwards, if the Holy Spirit
give testimony that it contains nothing false, be ranked as Holy Scripture’. As
Lessius had taken part in controversies about Baius and had made enemies among
his disciples, it was not to be wondered at that he was now pilloried by these
enemies for his temerity. Bellarmine did not quite like the view of Lessius but
thought it could be defended, and Lessius later revised it, withdrawing the
reference to Maccabees and saying that the theory represented as hypothesis
about what God might do, not a claim to describe that he had in fact done. (F.J.
Crehan, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day,”
in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 3: The
West from the Reformation to the Present Day [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963], 199-237, here, p. 217, emphasis in bold added)
