Rabbinical tradition, with its doctrine of the pre-existence of Scripture and later bestowal of Scripture upon the human race through selected prophets, obviously tended to view the human person involved as a mere channel. Philo developed basically the same concept by applying Greek and and especially Platonic notions of inspiration to the production of the books of Scripture. According to Philo, the human factor (in his terminology, the prophet) becomes possessed by God, loses consciousness of self, and surrenders to the divine spirit, which then operates upon the communicatory powers of the human personality. This theory of ecstatic inspiration is modified in Philo by an accompanying doctrine of a prophet-interpreter, wherein the human personality remains more self-possessed and active. Nevertheless, it was the ecstatic and mantic theory that was the more prominent in his writing and that later proved to be the more influential part of his theory.

The Philonic theory of inspiration was not without Christian adherents. Athenagoras, the early Christian apologist, took over the mantic or ecstatic theory, pointing out that the prophets, when moved by the Spirit, lost the use of their reason and were played upon by the Spirit as a flutist plays on his flute. The Montanists held a similar mantic theory; indeed, they claimed to experience divine possession and fell unconscious when they prophesied. After his conversion to Montanism, Tertullian adopted and defended the same theology of mantic inspiration.

But the mainstream of early Christian thought always rejected the notion of a mantic inspiration of the books of Scripture. Hippolytus insists that the operation of the Word increased the vision and understanding of the prophets. Origen takes the same position; rejecting all identification of scriptural inspiration with the mantic inspiration of paganism, he maintains that under the force of inspiration the writers do not lose their free will but apprehend divine truth more clearly. This is also the basic position of Epiphanius.

Hopefully my readers are getting an understanding that the Church has, since its beginning, had to grapple with a number of different ideas. This is partially due to the fact these ideas about inspiration were extant in the world in which they lived.