No, The Protestant Bible Doesn't Have a Canon Problem

A Response to Trent Horn

Trent Horn released a video defending the notion that the Protestant Bible has a canon problem.

Now, many of my readers are knowledgeable Roman Catholics, and so every now and then I get a message saying “well online theobros make this argument but this isn’t fair to Rome as a whole.” Granted. But because so much of my audience gets theology through the internet and through said online Roman Catholic apologists, I try to put out materials that can help interact with those claims to assist people in their own ecclesial journey.

I generally like Trent Horn. I think he’s an honest man, a good Christian brother, and a smart guy. However, he joins the chorus of Roman Catholic voices online attacking Protestants for allegedly having no stable ground for confidence in the canon of Scripture. No matter how many times we address this sort of argument, Roman Catholic apologists will always use this—and often promote the argument through a flood of material. So an adequate response, unfortunately, will involve dealing with this sort of argument again and again and again and again…..

So with all those caveats in place (I know this doesn’t represent the more well-read Roman Catholics, yes I know Trent Horn is not the magisterium, yes I know there are more important conversations to have), I offer this because, frankly, unless there is a flood of counter material to address the flood of the RC canon stuff, people will go on making this argument and defending it. So let’s examine Trent’s argument.

"The Church Neither Creates the Canon nor Discerns it, but Declares It”

Trent’s claim, contra Wesley Huff, is that while the Church did not create the canon of Scripture, it nevertheless declared the canon of Scripture. Consequently, Trent Horn makes the astoundingly baseless claim that the Roman Catholic Church does not rely on who authored the books of the New Testament to declare its authority. Instead, the Church declares the books; for Trent, this is an advantage because despite the changing whims of scholarship that try to challenge the authorship of books like 2 Peter, the authority of 2 Peter doesn’t depend on who authored it but instead the declaration of the church.

But that’s a wildly un-Catholic claim. Trent’s argument is tantamount to saying that the canon of Scripture gains its authority by sheer fiat. In other words, the church’s declaration is what constitutes the canon’s authority. But that’s nonsense. It’s not as though the Church declared a book as canonical just because or for funsies. She declared them as authoritative for specific reasons—which means we can actually examine those reasons in principle. And of course, we know that principle: the Apostles’ authority. In other words, Rome, Protestants, and the East in official and magisterial documents have always rooted in the authority of the New Testament in the actual authority of the apostles, not from the church’s sheer fiat. Don’t believe me? Okay, you can, but I’ve documented that before in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Here is my article for reference:

Sola Apostolica A Proposal For An Ecumenical Principle Of Authority

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In other words, whereas Trent Horn claims “2 Peter’s authority isn’t based on whether Peter actually wrote it or is the source of it or not”, the Roman Catholic magisterium in Dei Verbum has said otherwise. This is, yet again, another case of a Roman Catholic apologist not knowing what their own magisterium teaches (as seems to be the case in Trent’s treatments of purgatory, skirting over the fact that it is primarily retributive…but I digress).

How do Protestants Determine the Canon?

Trent Horn claims that Protestants don’t really have a teaching office outside of Scripture. This is false. For the 100000th time (can you tell this is…exasperating?), this is not true.

Why in the world would William Whitaker reference the fathers over and over again in his Disputation on Holy Scripture against Roman Catholics if we had no idea of a teaching office that could establish canonical books? No, instead here is how we determine the canon (following the reasoning, we argue, of the ancient church):

1.) Is this book either written by an apostle or intended to preserve the apostle’s teaching?

2.) Did the community of the early church recognize these books as preserving the apostles’ teaching?

These criteria function together in determining the canon. From the first criterion, you get every single book of the New Testament but Hebrews. Every single one. “But Sean, Mark wasn’t written by an apostle”—but as Papias tells us:

Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took special care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements…Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.

“But Sean, Bart Ehrman says Papias is unreliable. What now PROT?” (I kid you not…this is how chronically online theo-bro Roman Catholics talk…not Trent though, to his credit)

Okay, so the Protestant method is to actually address Ehrman’s argument and not punt to some prior authority. The problem is that Ehrman says Papias is unreliable both because he comes almost 100 years after the writing of the Gospels, and because he gets Matthew allegedly wrong—after all, Matthew’s Gospel shows no signs of being translated from Hebrew. But…I mean come on. Think about this argument. First, that Matthew put together the “oracles of the Lord” in the Hebrew language does not mean that the text of Matthew was written in Hebrew or Aramaic). If Matthew’s Gospel was written so as to condense and organize Matthew’s preaching and other writings he had, then it would be still rightfully attributed to Matthew in the ancient way of thinking. The header of the Gospel text, after all, is “The Gospel according to Matthew”, not “Matthew penned the version of this text and every line of this text”. And if it were attributed to Matthew without any real basis in history for that attribution, why in the world would the community have chosen Matthew of all disciples? When Gospels we know to be false in their authorship claims were written, they usually choose figures that are well represented in the tradition: Peter, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, etcetera (yes, Thomas had a robust tradition of his travels to India in the Acts of Thomas). You choose popular names to garner authority for your work, in the ancient world. And yet here the early Christians are, picking “Matthew, Mark, and Luke” for the Synoptics.

Mark’s connection to Peter is internally vindicated from the features of Mark’s Gospel (there is an inclusio and Mark doesn’t have to explain who Peter is"), and the historical character of Mark is supported in that Mark name-drops others (assuming the community knows them) like Salome, Joanna, Rufinus and Alexander, etcetera.

Luke is explicitly drawing from the apostles; he tells us this.

Now, John is interesting because it is claimed by and attributed to a known apostle: the apostle John, one of the twelve on the inner circle. However, John’s connection to the apostle is attested to in John 21:23, which addresses an ongoing rumor that St. John was not going to die before Jesus’s return.

Okay, but what about 2 Peter? Didn’t some books of the NT take time to be accepted? Yes, but the reason for it actually proves the very point I’m arguing: the church wasn’t always convinced that certain books were actually written by the apostles. Quite literally no one was saying “even if Peter wrote 2 Peter, we still don’t know if it is infallibly authoritative.” I can’t find one father who reasons that way. The reason for why it took time is because it took time for the church as a whole to confirm the apostolic authorship of Peter.

But what about Hebrews? Hebrews is canonical for 2 reasons: it was written before 70AD (it is unbelievable to think the sacrificial system was gone and for the book of Hebrews to speak as though it is ongoing, when the destruction of the temple would have tremendously bolstered Hebrews’ argument that the sacrificial system was obsolete), and it was remembered by the community as being intended to preserve the apostolic teaching for the community and was thought to have done so reliably.

How could they have known this? Evidently, the author of Hebrews travelled with Timothy (Heb. 13:23), and they were in contact with the community of the Roman Church from Italy (Heb. 13:24). In these early centuries, these communities would have been known the function of the letter, and the community from Italy (likely carrying the letter) would have been able to confirm the function and role of the letter, as well as its authorship and provenance.

And this fact leads us to rebut Trent’s claim that Protestants don’t have a teaching authority outside the New Testament. We do: it’s called the actual consent of the church through time. The consent of the church functions together with historical evidence to solidify the probability that a given book is actually intended to and reliably does inscripturate the apostolic teaching. This is why the fact that a book gains ascendancy through time is relevant to us, whereas if a book remains controverted, that counts against it.

The truth about the deuterocanonical books is that people were disputing it all the way up to the medieval era. It didn’t win assent through time. The Council of Trent went ahead and dogmatically “settled” the issue—but here, in a really powerful way, we see the Roman Catholic aberration on how church authority is supposed to function. The Council of Trent “settles” the issue by fiat, rather than for any principled reason.

So to sum up: how do Protestants determine whether a book is canonical? The central issue is over whether the book puts to writing the teaching of the apostles. How do we know that a book does this? We look at the historical evidence for the authorship and reliability of a book, and at the way the communities that received these books read them (since that provides evidence for something like authorship—did the communities themselves hear these books as preserving the apostolic teaching?). And as such, if a book is controverted at first, but then gains assent through time in multiple regions, that counts as good evidence together with the evidence of its antiquity that it really does go back to the apostles.

We can apply this method (and I intend to on my channel) to every book of the NT to show its canonicity.

Remaining Objections

“But Sean, other people are going to disagree with you, so how do you decide who is right?”

I really never understood the alleged strength of this argument. This is just true in life. If you have a stance, there will be a million other people with a million other stances. That’s irrelevant to the truth or strength of your stance. That other people will claim our reasons are bad doesn’t make them so; the Protestant approach is to actually engage those arguments and not hide behind an ecclesiastical fiat.

“But Sean, this requires so much work, surely God wouldn’t want everyone to do this”

True, and no one is claiming this! Hence, Protestants like Whitaker on the Anglican side or Johan Gerhard on the Lutheran side have affirmed that the church is reliable in her consent, not infallible. One doesn’t need to be infallible to be reliable. Hence, given that there is a stable set of things that has gained the assent of 90+% of professing Christians (Protestant, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox), you can use that as a starting place for building out more complex theological beliefs.

But if someone challenges the authority of the church’s consent on things (as many have done), the Protestant approach isn’t just to scream “muh ecclesial infalliblity BROOO” and then run away patting themself on the back in self-proclaimed victory, like some pigeon strutting on a chess board in victory after ignoring the rules of play and knocking down the pieces. Our approach is to actually engage the arguments.

The Protestant principle therefore prepares us to be able to give a defense for the hope that is within us.