‍How Do We Know Which Books Belong in the Bible?

‍A response to James White’s “golden index” argument

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 13, 2026

‍Many Protestants understand sola Scriptura to mean that Scripture is the only authority in matters of faith and practice, period. They believe that every Christian doctrine and practice must be found in Scripture. When Catholics try to explain their faith, the response is often, “Where is that in the Bible?” If a belief or practice can't be established from Scripture, they dismiss it as a mere “tradition of men.”

‍For example, Faith Baptist Church, an independent Fundamentalist Baptist congregation, declares:

‍The Bible is our only authority for faith and practice (II Tim. 3:15-16). We reject the authority of tradition and church counsels.¹

‍Similarly, Colonial Baptist Church states:

‍Above all, we believe that the Bible is our one and only authority in all matters of faith and practice.²

‍And a Church of Christ congregation states:

‍The Bible is our only authority as to what we believe, teach and practice.³

‍The problem with this position is that in order to make it work we need a Bible. But the Bible we have today wasn't simply handed down from the apostles as a completed collection. And the Bible itself doesn’t tell us which books belong between its covers. The New Testament’s table of contents was actually discerned over several centuries. According to evangelical biblical scholar David F. Payne:

‍It was not until the year A.D. 393 that a church council first listed the 27 New Testament books now universally recognized. There was thus a period of about 350 years during which the New Testament Canon was in process of being formed.⁴

‍So the only way these folks know which books belong in their Bible is through the Tradition they reject. Therefore, their “Scripture alone” doctrine can’t even get off the ground because in order to use it they first have to violate it by relying on a fourth-century Church Tradition to tell them what Scripture is.

‍In his book The Roman Catholic Controversy, Protestant apologist James White admits that this is the “single best argument presented by Roman Catholics against the concept of sola Scriptura.”⁵ However, he has proposed an answer to this argument.

‍Now, White himself does not hold the restrictive version of sola Scriptura I'm addressing here. He and many classical Protestants acknowledge a subordinate role for Church Tradition while maintaining that Scripture alone is infallible. This article may or may not apply to them. It is primarily directed toward those who treat Scripture as the only legitimate source of Christian teaching. So when I refer to “Protestants,” that's who I'm talking about.

‍White begins:

‍The difficulty of the question is that it views the canon as a separate entity from Scripture. This extrascriptural view of the canon makes it itself an object of revelation. In other words, we have here what I have called in the past the ‘golden index syndrome’. Unless the Protestant can produce the golden index to the Scriptures, like what Joseph Smith produced for the Mormons, then we have here the refutation of sola scriptura. Without such an index, the Protestant cannot know what the Scriptures actually are.

‍In real life, Protestants know what the Scriptures are the same way Catholics do: they simply accept the contents of the book they were handed by their ancestors. They know the book of Obadiah, for example, is inspired Scripture because when they open their Bibles, there it is, right between Amos and Jonah, two other books they only know are inspired because they’re in their Bible.

‍The problem, then, isn’t that Protestants can’t know what Scripture is; it’s that they can’t know what Scripture is without relying on extra-biblical “traditions of men,” a source they otherwise reject.

‍But is the canon an extrabiblical revelation? I do not believe it is. The canon is a function of Scripture, or to be more specific, it is a result of the inspiration of Scripture itself. It is not an object of revelation separate from Scripture, but is revealed and defined by God’s action of inspiration. This is a crucial point that I have rarely heard addressed by Roman Catholic or Protestant apologists.

‍Then let me address it now. White argues that the canon is the result of inspiration itself, and that God defined the canon by inspiring a certain set of books. But that is not in dispute, and it misses the point of the question Catholics are asking. We all agree that the canon of Scripture consists of those books that were inspired by God, and thus its existence is the result of the act of inspiration. But the question remains: How do Protestants know which books belong to that canon, and which do not, without relying on Church Tradition, which they otherwise reject?

‍White alleges that the canon was “revealed” and “defined” by God’s action of inspiration. Well, he’s half right: it was “defined” by the act of God’s inspiration, but its scope wasn’t “revealed” to man by that action. The inspired books didn’t usually identify themselves as such, and their divine authorship wasn’t necessarily obvious right off the bat. That helps explain why it took Christians almost 400 years to agree on which books were inspired. In real life, God inspiring a book didn’t automatically mean Christians knew he inspired it.

‍The canon is a function of the Scriptures themselves. The canon is not just a listing of books; it is a statement about what is inspired. The canon flows from the work of the Author of Scripture, God himself. To speak of canon outside of speaking of what is ‘God-breathed’ is to speak nonsense.

‍Obviously. We all agree that the canon consists of those books that are God-breathed. But the question we’ve asked is, how does a Protestant know, apart from Tradition, which of the ancient books were God-breathed, and which were not? How does he know, for example, that Paul’s private letter to Philemon was God-breathed, while the Shepherd of Hermas, which some early Christians regarded as Scripture, was not?⁶

‍Canon is not made by man. Canon is made by God. It is the result of the action of his divine inspiration. That which is ‘God-breathed’ is canon; that which is not ‘God-breathed’ is not canon. It’s just that simple.

‍Now that White has explained what the word “canon” means, hopefully he will explain how Protestants know which books belong in that canon.

‍Canon is a function of inspiration, and it speaks to an attribute of Scripture. The canon of Scripture tells us something about Scripture: that is, the canon speaks to the extent of the work of God in inspiring Scripture. God defines the canon not by giving some revelation outside of the scriptura but by giving the scriptura itself!

‍So far, White’s argument boils down to that which is Scripture is Scripture. Swell.

‍Since White hasn’t yet told us how we can know, apart from Church Tradition, which books are inspired, perhaps we can come up with some criteria by which we could make that determination.

‍Apostolic authorship. Was the book written by an apostle? That would help with books like Matthew and John, traditionally attributed to apostles. But there’s that word “traditionally” again. Those books don’t actually identify their authors. The only way we know who wrote them is through Church Tradition. Darn. Even our proposed alternative to Tradition ends up relying on Tradition.

‍What’s worse is that some of the biblical books weren’t written by an apostle. Mark, Luke, and Acts weren’t. At least that’s what the Tradition tells us. And who knows who wrote Hebrews. Some say Paul, others say Barnabas, Silas, or Clement of Rome. Martin Luther thought Apollos wrote it. No one really knows. So maybe apostolic authorship isn’t such a great criterion after all.

‍Doctrinal consistency. Only books that are consistent with right doctrine could be inspired. That’s true, but in order to know whether a book is consistent with right doctrine, we have to know what right doctrine is. And if the only way we know that is from the Bible, then we have to know which books belong in the Bible before we can use their teachings to determine which books belong in the Bible. That’s obviously circular reasoning and no help at all.

‍Also, a book can agree perfectly with inspired teaching without being inspired. Hopefully, all of those Protestant Bible commentaries do. So, mere agreement with right doctrine doesn’t mean a book is inspired. Maybe doctrinal consistency isn’t such a great criterion either.

‍The guidance of the Holy Spirit. Right, because everyone who believes the Holy Spirit is guiding him would certainly come to the same conclusions about which writings are inspired. Goodness, can you imagine what would happen if you took a bunch of new Christians and gave them a pile of fifty ancient writings and asked them to figure out which ones were inspired? Do you think they’d all come up with the 27-book New Testament canon we accept today? Yeah, I doubt it.

‍These criteria are all theoretical anyway. In real life, nobody tries to figure out the canon of Scripture for himself. He goes to a Christian bookstore, buys a Bible, and accepts every book in it as inspired to the exclusion of all others. In other words, he accepts the Tradition that was handed down to him by Zondervan.

‍The Roman error lies in creating a dichotomy between two things that cannot be separated, and then using that false dichotomy to deny sola scriptura. Often two separate but related issues get confused when this topic is discussed: (1) the canon’s nature, and (2) how people came to know the contents of the canon.

‍The canon’s nature is not in dispute. We all agree that the canon consists of those books that were inspired by God. But it is precisely the question of how people came to know the contents of the canon that undermines this version of sola Scriptura.

‍Either God protected the fourth-century Church from making an error in defining the canon of Scripture, or there’s a chance they could have gotten it wrong. In the first case we lose the sola, in the second case we lose the Scriptura. 

‍Interestingly, Protestants don’t act as if there’s any chance the Church got it wrong. They treat the inherited table of contents as beyond all question while dismissing the Tradition through which it reached them.

‍An illustration might help. I have written eight books. The action of my writing those books creates the canon of my works. If a friend of mine does not have accurate knowledge of how many books I have written, does that mean there is no canon of my books?

‍Of course not, but that’s irrelevant because no one’s claiming that the canon of Scripture doesn’t exist if we don’t know what it is. All we’re asking is, assuming it exists, how do you know what it is? It’s easy to identify the canon of White’s books: his name’s on each one of them. Identifying the canon of Scripture was much harder and took hundreds of years.

‍No, of course not. In fact, if I was the only one who knew how many books I had written, would that mean that the canon of my books does not exist? The point is clear.

‍I’m afraid it’s not clear to me. We’re not questioning the existence of the canon. We agree that it exists; we simply want to know how a Protestant knows which books are part of it, and how he knows it in a way that’s consistent with his belief that no part of God’s revelation is found outside those books.

‍The canon is one issue, and it comes from God’s action of inspiring the Scriptures. Our knowledge of the canon is another. Our knowledge can grow and mature, as it did at times in history. But the canon is not defined by us nor is it affected by our knowledge or ignorance.

‍That’s true, but not relevant to the question at hand. The canon exists whether we know anything about it or not. But Protestants believe they know which books God inspired, and they’re so certain of that knowledge that they wouldn’t dream of adding a book to the Bible, or taking one out. Where did that knowledge and that certainty come from, if not from Church Tradition?

‍While the Roman Catholic argument about the canon might appear to have some validity with reference to the New Testament, it falls apart when applied to the Old Testament. I have often asked Roman Catholics, “How did a Jewish man who lived fifty years before the time of Christ know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were Scripture?”

‍Most likely, he simply accepted the testimony of the Jewish community that those two books were Scripture. The ancient Jews accepted Tradition as a valid source of revelation, so if our hypothetical Jewish man accepted the inspiration of these books based on Tradition, he would have been acting consistently with his beliefs.

‍But Protestants reject Tradition as a source of revelation, so it’s fair to turn the question around and ask them, apart from Tradition, how do you know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles are inspired?

‍The question is meant both to define their particular viewpoint as well as illustrate a point. If it is asserted that one must have an infallible knowledge of what Scripture is and what it is not, then how did a Jewish man attain this kind of infallible knowledge back then?

‍No one is arguing that Protestants must possess infallible knowledge of the canon; we’re observing that they behave as if they do have infallible knowledge of the canon. Have you ever met a Protestant who has any doubt about which books belong in the Bible? The question, again, is, where did they get that knowledge and that certainty, if not from Tradition?

‍If the answer is that he gained such knowledge from the Jewish leadership, then one has to wonder why we no longer follow that particular guide if indeed God had an infallible guide on earth fifty years before Christ.

‍There is no clear evidence that all Jewish communities had agreed on the precise boundaries of Scripture before the time of Christ. In fact, they continued to debate the canonicity of some books (e.g., Ecclesiastes) well into the Christian era. By the time they got around to settling on a canon of Scripture, their temple had been destroyed, and the Christian Church had been spreading the Gospel throughout the world for decades. So, we “no longer follow that guide” because God has given us a new guide, the “Church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).

‍And finally, the same source would say that Rome has erred in its Old Testament canon, since it is quite obvious that the Jewish people did not hold to the canon Rome has infallibly defined! So it will not do to go that direction.

‍White is referring to the deuterocanonical books, seven Old Testament books that are part of the Catholic Old Testament canon, but not part of the Protestant Old Testament canon.

‍But did you know that the same fourth-century councils that listed the 27 New Testament books also included the deuterocanonical books among the Old Testament writings?⁷ Those books were part of the Christian Bible for over a thousand years before the Protestant Reformation. The reason they’re missing from Protestant Bibles is that the Reformers and their followers removed them.

‍Isn’t it strange, then, that Protestants trust the fourth-century Church's discernment of the New Testament as though God handed it down leather-bound, with words of Christ in red? Yet they reject that same Church's discernment of the Old Testament because Reformers in the sixteenth century judged that part mistaken.

‍It’s ironic that the Protestant Old Testament exists in its present form because earlier Protestants were willing to remove books from the Bible—something today’s Bible-only Protestants would regard as illegitimate and unthinkable.

‍Some have replied that our Jewish man living fifty years before Christ couldn’t infallibly know that Isaiah and 2 Chronicles were Scripture. And yet, as we have seen, Jesus held men responsible for the Scriptures and their teachings (Matthew 22:31). To say that such a person did not need to have an infallible knowledge, but only a sufficient knowledge—based upon the overall acceptance of God’s people and the internal consistency and integrity of the Scriptures as a body—is to say nothing more than what Protestants say about all the Bible. It admits there is no need for the ‘golden index’ in this case, or any other.

‍This is as close as White comes to answering the question of how Protestants know which books belong in the Bible. But he’s going to have a hard time arguing that we know we have the right collection of books “based upon … the internal consistency and integrity of the Scriptures as a body.”

‍I have a book over an inch thick called Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible⁸ that attempts to explain the hundreds of times the Bible appears to lack “internal consistency and integrity.” Evangelical scholar Gerald F. Hawthorne writes:

‍Only those books can be judged canonical that are free from contradictions, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, peculiar practices, etc. … Had the question of its canonicity rested purely upon standards such as this it is impossible to see how the Jews could ever have come to accept the OT books as being of divine authority.⁹

‍This is why we Christians don’t typically argue for canonicity based upon internal consistency. Rather, we argue for internal consistency based upon canonicity. In other words, because we know which books God inspired, and because God can’t err, we argue that those books must be internally consistent, even if they sometimes don’t appear to be.

‍Finally, when White says we know what the canon of Scripture is “based upon the overall acceptance of God’s people,” that’s just another way of saying “Tradition.” Which brings us back to where we started.

‍White never adequately explained why Protestants should accept the Bible’s fourth-century table of contents but reject the validity of the Tradition that gave it to them—or, if he thinks they know the table of contents apart from that Tradition, where they got that knowledge.

‍I think that’s because they don’t know which books belong in the Bible apart from Tradition. Like other Christians, they accept the Bible they’re handed, and the only way they know which books belong in the canon of Scripture is to open that Bible to page one and read the Table of Contents. 

‍In other words, they accept the witness of the Church and the Tradition that was handed down to them, and they treat it like divine revelation, while simultaneously denying that God revealed anything outside of the books that Tradition told them were inspired.

‍__________

^‍ 1 Faith Baptist Church, “Our Distinctives,” https://folsom.church/disctinctives.

^‍2 Colonial Baptist Church, “Our Beliefs,” https://colonialbc.org/our-beliefs/.

^‍3 Gary L. Hutchens, “The Church of Christ—Who Are We?”, Sunny Slope Church of Christ, March 28, 2021, https://www.churchofchrist.com/articles/the-church-of-christ-who-are-we.

^‍4 David F. Payne, “The Text and Canon of the New Testament,” International Bible Commentary, ed. F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986), 1005.

^‍5 James R. White, The Roman Catholic Controversy (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1996), 92–95.

^‍6 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.2. Irenaeus quotes the Shepherd of Hermas and introduces the passage as Scripture.

^‍7 Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), canon 36; Council of Carthage (A.D. 419), canon 24. The canonical lists include the 27 New Testament books and the deuterocanonical writings.

^‍8 John W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (Whitaker House, 1996).

^‍9 Gerald F. Hawthorne, “Canon and Apocrypha of the Old Testament,” International Bible Commentary, ed. F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986), 37.