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The lexica (BDAG, LSJ) show that outside the Bible this was an ordinary word for a written thing: a document, an official register, a painting, a legal indictment, or a manuscript reading. Its fixed sense of sacred Scripture is a Jewish and then Christian specialization, not a natural development of secular Greek. Gottlob Schrenk (TDNT) traces the seed to the Hebrew idiom behind "as it stands written" and to the Greek verbal formula "it has been written"; the earliest datable use of "the writing" for Scripture is the Letter of Aristeas, and by the early first century Philo can use it as shorthand for Scripture. Within the New Testament, BDAG and the theological dictionaries (TDNT, EDNT) recognize two uses: a single passage of Scripture (usually the singular, often introducing or being fulfilled by a quotation) and Scripture as a collective whole (usually the plural, but also a personified singular as in Galatians 3:22 and 2 Timothy 3:16). Whether the singular ever means the whole rather than one passage was debated by J. B. Lightfoot (always a particular passage) and B. B. Warfield (sometimes the whole, since the whole speaks through the passage); Schrenk and later writers such as Moisés Silva treat the two as porous, because to cite a passage is to invoke the whole. Warfield further argued that for Paul "Scripture says" and "God says" are functionally interchangeable (Romans 9:17 read alongside Galatians 3:8), an observation Cranfield, Moo, and Silva accept and that Richard Hays and James Dunn refine into a hermeneutical rather than a metaphysical claim. Christopher Stanley has shown that Paul adapts the wording of his citations while staying within accepted first-century Jewish conventions. Several citations match no known Old Testament text (James 4:5; John 7:38; and, with a matched Gospel saying, 1 Timothy 5:18), which indicates that the edges of what counted as Scripture were still being worked out; 2 Peter 3:16, which ranks Paul's letters with "the other Scriptures," is widely regarded (Richard Bauckham, Bruce Metzger) as the earliest text placing Christian writings on the footing of the Old Testament. On whether the word implies a closed canon, scholarship divides between those who keep "Scripture" (any authoritative writing) sharply distinct from "canon" (a closed, exclusive list), such as Albert Sundberg and Eugene Ulrich, and those who find canonical awareness already present in the New Testament, such as Michael Kruger, with John Barton mediating between them.