Refutation of the Protestant Canon of Scripture, Pt. 1

By: Jay Dyer

Many reformed Protestant acquaintances have, on various occasions, sent me different challenges relating to the canon of Scripture. One of these was a list of arguments proposed by reformed theologian Dr. Ian Paisley against the canonicity of the 7 Deuterocanonical Books (or, the “Apocrypha,” from here on titled “DB”). Another challenger stated the traditional Orthodox arguments for the necessary involvement of a Spirit-led Church in the formation of a definitive canon is not a valid argument, since the Old Testament believer needed no extra-scriptural, infallible authorities, in any sense, to recognize the veracity of the OT books. This second objection is true in principle, but I have decided to kill two birds with one stone. If it can be shown that the Protestant canon of Scripture itself is erroneous, then both of these non-Orthodox challenges fall to the ground, since the question of who has the right canon is obviously prior to one’s right to quote this or that text.

Thus, if 2 Maccabees is part of Scripture, then prayer for the dead is a biblical doctrine: but almost no Protestant holds this doctrine, thus demonstrating for “sola scriptura” the implications of rejecting books of the Bible. It will be shown, then, that the Protestants are the real violators of the written Word of God, having cut out books that did not fit their preconceived notions. This is ironic, since Protestants are always accusing those that do not adhere to sola scriptura, of violating the “Word of God.” One reformed acquaintance of mine likes to think his grammatico-historico syntax arguments cannot be defeated. Rather than go into their maze of texts (as Tertullian recommends against), since they puts on a show of appearing to follow the written Word of God alone, this erroneous position will actually be shown to be violating the Word of God. Just as the Protestant follows a man-Luther-in hypocritically cutting out 7 books of the Word that didn’t fit with his heretical presuppositions, we will cut out from under this view its foundation—the wrong Bible. Until the serious-minded Protestant deals with this question, the sola scriptura claim has no force. Read more of this post