Turns out I have internet access here. In transit I read the Enns book, Inspiration and Incarnation, which UPS had delivered to my house earlier in the afternoon. It's a bit short and sketchy, written for a lay audience, but the thesis holds promise. Enns discusses three types of difficult passage: those which have parallels in older Ancient Near Eastern literature (e.g. the Flood story, a version of which is found in the Gilgamesh epic); those which seem inconsistent either with other parts of the OT or with known historical fact (e.g. 1 & 2 Chronicles' rewriting of the historical account in 1 & 2 Kings along the lines of a theological agenda); and NT readings of the OT which seem exegetically fanciful by modern evangelical hermeneutics. Enns argues that these passages seem problematic to us only because we are anachronistically judging the truthfulness of the Bible by modern standards of objectivity and factuality. The analogy Enns draws between Inscripturation and Incarnation is helpful here. Just as the divine nature of Christ becomes incarnated in a human nature limited by conditions of time and place, so the theological message of Scripture is inscripturated in literary forms particular to the ancient near east. It would be as inappropriate to expect Genesis to be a scientific account of cosmology, or Chronicles to be strictly neutral historiography, as it would be to expect Jesus to be a blue-eyed, blond Aryan.

I was particularly interested in the examples of New Testament writers uncritically accepting extrabiblical Jewish interpretative traditions, which seems to me to be a problem for the Protestant tenet of sola scriptura. To follow the lead of the Apostles, it seems that we should accord creedence to the commonly received extrabiblical Christian traditions, e.g. perpetual virginity and sinlessness of the BVM. This isn't something Enns discusses though.