The Westminster Confession of Faith defines the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura this way:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.¹

In other words, God’s revelation is found only in the Bible. “Traditions of men” are not a source of divine revelation. The problem with this theory is that in order to make it work we need a set of inspired books, but the only way we know which books are inspired is through Tradition.

The Bible itself doesn’t tell us what books belong between its covers, and none of the apostolic writings identifies itself as Scripture. According to the International Bible Commentary, an Evangelical Protestant reference book, the list of Scripture we have today wasn’t finally settled until the fourth century:

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.²

To give you an idea of just how long the Christian Church managed to grow and thrive without having a settled canon of Scripture, consider that 350 years ago from the time of this writing was the year 1674. Imagine if the Christian faith began in 1674 and we still didn’t have a settled Bible in the year 2024. Imagine suggesting that Scripture alone was supposed to be our rule of faith and practice that whole time — from 1674 to today — when we weren’t sure what constitutes Scripture.

That’s the situation the Christian Church was in when it finally settled on a list of 27 books for the New Testament. Now, either the Holy Spirit guided the Church to formulate that list, or the list is just a “tradition of men.” If we decide it was just a “tradition of men” but we accept it anyway, we’re sawing off the branch we’re sitting on. And either way, the “Scripture alone” doctrine can’t even get off the ground, because in order to use it, we first have to violate it by relying on this fourth-century Tradition to tell us what Scripture is. 

In his book The Roman Catholic Controversy, (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1996), Protestant apologist Dr. James White admits that this is the “single best argument presented by Roman Catholics against the concept of sola Scriptura” (p. 92). However, he has proposed an answer to this argument (pp. 92-95). Unfortunately, as you’ll see, it doesn’t really answer the question of how we can know the extent of the canon of Scripture apart from Church Tradition. 

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 Obediah, 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.

This handing down of some aspect of the faith from one generation to the next is what Catholics call “Tradition,” and this particular Tradition – call it the “Tradition of the Table of Contents” – has trickled down from the Catholic Church through the various branches of the Protestant Reformation to each Christian community. 

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. 

In order to make sola Scriptura possible in the first place, Dr. White must explain how Protestants can know which books belong in the Bible without relying on “traditions of men.” Unfortunately, he starts to grapple with that question by missing the point of it.

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. Dr. 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?

Dr. 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 come with “This is an Inspired Book” stamped across the top, nor was their divine authorship necessarily obvious right off the bat. That’s why it took Christians almost 400 years to agree on which books were inspired. Obviously, in real life, more than the mere fact of their inspiration was needed to reveal to Christians the extent of the canon.

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, but his public letter to Laodicea (mentioned in Colossians 4:16 and now lost) was not?

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 he has explained what the word “canon” means, hopefully Dr. White will try to explain how he knows, apart from Tradition, 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!

We’ve already agreed that God defined the canon of Scripture by inspiring certain books. Unfortunately, God did not collate those books, bind them in leather, and drop them from Heaven with words of Christ in red. In fact, God did not identify any of them as inspired, and so the inspired books were individually circulated around the ancient Church, along with other, non-inspired books. In the early centuries of the Christian Church, only God knew for sure which books he had inspired.

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 sola Scriptura.

Either God revealed the extent of the canon of Scripture extra-biblically through the fourth century Church, or the canon of Scripture defined by that Church was just their best guess. In the first case we lose the sola, in the second case we lose the Scriptura.

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 Dr. 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 the only thing that’s clear is that Dr. White doesn’t seem to understand the question. We’re not questioning the existence of the canon. We agree that it exists, we simply want to know how Dr. White 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 Dr. White believes he knows which books God inspired, and he’s so certain of that knowledge that he 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 to 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?

What is asserted (by Protestants) is that God’s revelation is confined to Scripture alone, and that Tradition is not a valid source of revelation. The Jews didn’t have that attitude, so the comparison between them and Protestants is invalid. Further, it’s not asserted that Protestants “must have an infallible knowledge of what Scripture is and what it is not,” rather, it’s observed that they think they do have an infallible knowledge of what Scripture is and what it is not. I’ve never met a single Protestant who had the slightest doubt about which books were Scripture and which were not. My question, again, is, “Where did you 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.

The Jews didn’t have a fixed canon 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.

Dr. White is referring to the so-called “Apocrypha,” seven Old Testament books that are part of the Catholic Old Testament canon, but not part of the Protestant Old Testament canon.

The reason those books are missing from the Protestant Old Testament is because the Protestant Reformers removed them. They did so, they said, because the second century Jews had rejected them. But those Jews also rejected Jesus as their Messiah, so I don’t know why we should defer to their judgment regarding the canon of Scripture. Those second century Jews who did accept Jesus as Messiah, and their gentile brothers, generally accepted those seven books as Scripture, and the Christian Church continued to do so until the Reformation. 

According to the Protestant International Bible Commentary:

Even if one holds that Jesus put His imprimatur upon only the 39 books of the Hebrew OT . . . he must admit that this fact escaped the notice of many of the early followers of Jesus, or that they rejected it, for they accepted as equally authoritative those extra books in the wider canon of the LXX . . . Polycarp [one of John’s disciples], Barnabas, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen – Greek and Latin Fathers alike – quote both classes of books, those of the Hebrew canon and the Apocrypha, without distinction. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) in his City of God (18.42-43) argued for equal and identical divine inspiration for both the Jewish canon and the Christian canon.³

Elsewhere, the International Bible Commentary says, “The apocryphal books were excluded from the Hebrew canon at least from A.D. 90 on, but included in the canon of the Christian church.”⁴ The Christian canon has always included the “Apocrypha.” Every time a Church council produced a list of scriptural books, those books were listed among the other biblical books, without distinction; from the Synod of Hippo, which first defined the canon of the New Testament (A.D. 393), to Carthage (A.D. 397, 419), to the Ecumenical Councils of Florence (1442), Trent (1546), and Vatican I (1869).

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 Dr. White comes to answering the question of how he knows what 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 Bible (John W. Haley, Whitaker House, Springdale, PA, 1996) that attempts to explain the hundreds of times the Bible appears to lack “internal consistency and integrity.”

Books like Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible show that we Christians don’t argue for canonicity based upon internal consistency. Rather, we argue for internal consistency based upon canonicity. In other words, because we believe God gave us the correct list of the books he inspired, we believe that set of books must be internally consistent (because God cannot err) despite the fact that it doesn’t always appear to be, and despite the fact that, as Protestant author Josh McDowell wrote, “all Bible difficulties and discrepancies have not yet been cleared up.”⁵

Finally, when Dr. 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.

Dr. White never adequately explained why he accepts the Bible’s fourth century Table of Contents but rejects the validity of the Tradition that gave it to him, or, if he thinks he knows the Table of Contents apart from that Tradition, where he got that knowledge.

I think that’s because he doesn’t know which books belong in the Bible apart from Tradition. Like every other Christian, he accepted the Bible he was handed, and the only way he knows what books belong in the canon of Scripture is to open that Bible to page one and read the Table of Contents. 

In other words, he accepts the witness of the Church and the Tradition that was handed down to him, and he treats it like divine revelation, while simultaneously denying that God revealed anything outside of the books that Tradition told him were inspired.