Luke 24:44-49

Why are these 66 books the Bible, and why not the Catholic ones?

Nobody voted on it. The church recognised what it had been given, and the argument over the extra books is older, and more evenly balanced, than either side usually admits.

Read the passage in the ESV All questions

The question as it came to us

It arrives in two forms, and they need different answers.

The first is who decided?, usually with an assumption riding underneath it that a committee of bishops sat down, weighed the options, and picked winners; that other gospels were suppressed; and that Constantine had a hand in it. Almost every part of that is false, and the specific version most people have heard, that the canon was settled at the Council of Nicaea in 325, is false in a way that is easy to check. Nicaea did not discuss the canon at all. Its business was the deity of Christ, and its acts survive.

The second is why does a Catholic Bible have more books in it? Seven more in the Old Testament, plus additions to Esther and Daniel. That question deserves better than the two answers usually given, they added books and you removed books, because neither is quite what happened, and the actual history is more interesting than either.

One thing this page is not about: which English version you read. That is a separate question with a separate answer, is there a best translation?, and confusing the two leads people to think the Apocrypha is a translation issue. It is not. Every faithful English Bible renders the same canon; the argument here is about which books are there to render.

Underneath both is one word. Canon is Greek for a measuring rod: a standard, not a collection. So the real question is not which books a church chose, but which books God gave, and how anyone could know. On that, the Reformation’s answer is precise and worth stating before any of the history: the church did not confer authority on these books; it recognised the authority they already had. A jeweller does not make a stone valuable by identifying it.

Short answer

There are two canons to account for, and they were settled in different ways.

The Old Testament came to the church already closed. Jesus received the Hebrew Scriptures as they stood, and named their three divisions on the road to Emmaus: everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke 24:44). Those are the same books as our 39, counted differently, the Hebrew Bible groups them into 24. He argued from them constantly, corrected the Pharisees for their traditions and for reading them badly, and never once suggested they had the wrong books. Paul’s summary of Israel’s privilege is that they were entrusted with the oracles of God (Romans 3:2), which is a strange thing to say about custodians who had mislaid seven of them.

The New Testament was recognised over about three centuries, in public, slowly. The apostles’ writings functioned as Scripture while the apostles were alive, Peter sets Paul’s letters beside the other Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16), and Paul quotes Luke’s Gospel with the formula the Scripture says (1 Timothy 5:18). By the second century, four Gospels and the letters of Paul are simply being used as Scripture across the churches, long before anyone drew up a list. A handful of books were discussed for much longer: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation, and that slowness is the best evidence there is against a conspiracy. Athanasius listed exactly our 27 in a letter of AD 367; the councils of Hippo and Carthage in 393 and 397 confirmed what the churches were already reading.

The disputed books are a third story. The seven: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees: plus the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, were written between the Testaments, came to the church bundled in the Greek Septuagint, and were carried further by the Latin Vulgate. They were valued from early on. They were also doubted from early on: Jerome, the one Latin father who actually read Hebrew, separated them from the canon and said they were to be read for the edification of the people but not to establish doctrine; Augustine received them. The two greatest Latin fathers disagreed, and the question stayed genuinely open in the Western church for another eleven centuries, a cardinal was still arguing Jerome’s line in 1532. What closed it was the Council of Trent in 1546, which made the longer list binding with an anathema, twenty-nine years after Luther’s theses.

And the Reformers did not delete them. Luther printed them between the Testaments under a heading saying they are not equal to Scripture but are useful and good to read; the 1611 King James Bible contained them in a section of their own. They were separated, not burned, and only dropped from ordinary printings in the 1820s, by Bible societies looking to save paper and avoid an argument.

Close to the center Not because anyone’s salvation hangs on the table of contents, but because Sola Scriptura means nothing until you can say which Scripture. Rome and the Reformation share an identical New Testament and disagree over seven Old Testament books; the gospel is legible in both lists. The disagreement is still real, Trent attached an anathema to it, so this page states it plainly and without contempt.

What is settled, and what is not

The left column is what any Christian tradition can be held to on this question. The right is where honesty requires an open hand, and the open hand is not a weakness, since a canon nobody had ever examined would be far easier to doubt.

Settled, Scripture states it

Jesus received a definite Bible and treated it as God’s word. The Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke 24:44); Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35); not an iota or a dot will pass from the Law (Matthew 5:18). Whatever else is disputed, he was not working from an open question.
The apostles’ writings were Scripture in the apostolic age. Peter groups Paul’s letters with the other Scriptures and notes that people were already twisting them (2 Peter 3:15-16). Paul quotes Luke 10:7 as Scripture, in the same breath as Deuteronomy (1 Timothy 5:18). This is decades, not centuries.
The core was never in question. Four Gospels, Acts and Paul are being used as Scripture everywhere by the middle of the second century. Irenaeus argues around AD 180 that there can be four Gospels and no more: a century and a half before any council, and he is defending what the churches already had.
The church recognised; it did not confer. Being immediately inspired by God, the Scriptures’ authority dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church, but wholly upon God (WCF 1.4). A council that recognises a book is doing what a court does when it acknowledges a law it did not write.
No later gospel was suppressed; they were simply too late. The gnostic gospels are second-century and later, and they are different in kind: Thomas has no cross, no resurrection and no narrative at all. They were not shortlisted and rejected. They were never in the running, because the churches knew roughly when the apostles had died.
Nothing necessary for salvation depends on a disputed book. Not one of the seven, and not one of the New Testament books that took longest to settle. The gospel is preached whole from the books nobody has ever questioned.

Not given in this age

The exact process. There is no minute-book. What survives is lists, letters and usage, Melito travelling to Palestine around AD 170 to find out what the Hebrew canon was, Eusebius sorting books into acknowledged, disputed and spurious, Athanasius writing an Easter letter. The canon was recognised the way a language settles its grammar, not the way a parliament passes a bill.
Why some books lingered. Hebrews is anonymous, and the West hesitated over it for that reason; James looked to some like a rival to Paul; Revelation was contested for centuries in the East. The reasons are recorded and ordinary.
Who wrote Hebrews. Origen’s verdict has never been improved on: God alone knows. Its canonicity never depended on solving it.
Whether the Apocrypha should be printed in a Bible. The Reformers said yes, in a section of its own with a warning label. The nineteenth century said no. The Confession says the books are no part of the canon and are to be used no differently from other human writings (WCF 1.3), which permits reading them and forbids preaching from them.

How the canon came to be recognised

Two bars, because the two Testaments reached the church by different routes. Band widths are roughly proportional to time, and the marked bands are moments rather than periods.

The Old Testament

Israel’s Scriptures, already closed and already threefold when Jesus quoted them. The argument that follows is not about these books; it is about what else travelled with them in Greek.

Law, Prophets and Writings written and received Translated into Greek; other Jewish books circulate alongside Jesus: “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” The church inherits Israel’s Bible, and the question of the extras

The New Testament

Written inside one lifetime, used as Scripture immediately, listed much later, and the gap between used and listed is where every conspiracy theory lives.

AD 50-95: the apostles write; letters read aloud in the churches 2nd century: four Gospels and Paul function as Scripture; Marcion’s cut-down canon forces the question 3rd-4th century: lists drawn; a few books still discussed 367: Athanasius lists our 27 393-397: Hippo and Carthage confirm what was already read

Where the lines fall today

The disagreement is not Protestant against everyone else. The four traditions differ from each other as well, and the counts move depending on how books are grouped, Greek Orthodox Bibles add 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and a psalm numbered 151, and the Ethiopian canon is broader again. Every one of these lists contains the same twenty-seven New Testament books.

Protestant: 66 Catholic: 73 Greek Orthodox: 76+ Ethiopian Orthodox: 81

The seven books, and the additions

Book	What it is	Why it was valued	Why the Reformers did not receive it
Tobit	A family tale of exile, a blind father, a journey, a demon and the angel Raphael. Second century BC.	Warm, devout, and much loved; almsgiving, prayer and burying the dead are all commended.	Absent from the Hebrew canon. Its history and geography do not work, and it teaches that almsgiving saves from death and purges away every sin (12:9), merit for sin, which the gospel denies.
Judith	A widow saves Israel by beheading the enemy general Holofernes. Second century BC.	Courage and providence, vividly told; a favourite subject of Christian art for centuries.	Absent from the Hebrew canon, and its opening sentence has Nebuchadnezzar reigning over the Assyrians in Nineveh, which is not a small slip but an impossibility.
Wisdom of Solomon	A Greek meditation on wisdom, written in Alexandria, presented as Solomon’s. First century BC.	Genuinely fine writing, and its passage on the righteous man condemned to a shameful death (2:12-20) reads like the Passion.	Written in Greek roughly nine centuries after Solomon, and offered under his name. Not in the Hebrew canon, and not quoted as Scripture by Christ or the apostles.
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)	A long book of practical wisdom by Jesus ben Sira, about 180 BC, translated by his grandson.	The most widely used of the seven in the early church, hence the name Ecclesiasticus, the church’s book.	Its own prologue distinguishes the Law and the Prophets and the other books from what follows, and frankly describes the work as the author’s grandfather’s. It is a witness to the canon rather than a member of it.
Baruch, with the Letter of Jeremiah	A confession and a warning against idols, attributed to Jeremiah’s secretary. Second century BC.	It reads as a continuation of Jeremiah, and was often bound with it.	Not in the Hebrew canon, and written centuries after the man whose name it carries.
1 Maccabees	The Maccabean revolt against Antiochus, told soberly. Late second century BC.	The best history we have of the period between the Testaments, and the background to Hanukkah, which Jesus attends (John 10:22).	Valuable and not inspired: a distinction the book itself supports, since it three times reports that prophecy had ceased in Israel (4:46; 9:27; 14:41). A book that says there is no prophet is not claiming to be one.
2 Maccabees	A shorter, more rhetorical account of part of the same period.	Contains the famous martyrdoms of the seven brothers, which Hebrews 11:35 appears to have in view.	The same absence from the Hebrew canon, and the passage at 12:43-45, sacrifice and prayer offered for the dead, which Trent later used to ground purgatory. That is precisely a doctrine the Reformation denied, which is why the canon question could not stay academic.
Additions to Esther and Daniel	Greek expansions: prayers and a dream added to Esther; Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three added to Daniel.	The Esther additions supply the God-language the Hebrew book famously lacks; Susanna is a fine story.	They are absent from the Hebrew text and are plainly later insertions into books that already existed and already ended.

The tests that were actually applied

Not invented at a council and then imposed. These are the reasons the churches gave, over two centuries, for receiving a book or hesitating over it, with the last one added by the Reformation as the ground of all the others.

Apostolicity: is it from an apostle, or from an apostle’s man? Mark writing for Peter, Luke writing with Paul. This is why anonymity slowed Hebrews down, and why a second-century book bearing an apostle’s name did not qualify simply for bearing it.
Antiquity: is it from the apostolic age at all? The decisive test against the later gospels, and the least mysterious one. A church in AD 180 knew when the apostles had died. A gospel appearing afterwards was not being censored when it was declined; it was being dated.
Orthodoxy: does it agree with the faith already delivered? Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed (Galatians 1:8). A writing that contradicted the apostolic gospel could not be from the God who gave it.
Catholicity: do the churches everywhere use it? Not one region’s favourite, and not one bishop’s judgment. The canon emerged from congregations across the Mediterranean finding the same books indispensable, which is why the list took time and why it holds.
Self-authentication: the Spirit’s witness, which is the ground of the rest The Reformation’s actual answer to who decided? Scripture is received because it is the word of God, and our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts (WCF 1.5). Calvin put it as sheep knowing a voice. The tests above describe how recognition happened; this says why it could happen at all.

What the text says

Jesus names the shape of the Hebrew Bible Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). That is not a loose gesture at religious literature; it is the threefold division of the Hebrew Scriptures: Torah, Prophets, and the Writings, which the Psalms head. He is naming a known collection, to men who knew its limits, and then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (24:45). The canon in that sentence is closed, agreed, and about him.
From the first murder to the last: in the Hebrew order From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary (Luke 11:51). Abel is Genesis. The Zechariah killed in the court of the house of the LORD is at 2 Chronicles 24:20-21, and Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew arrangement. So Jesus is saying from the first page to the last, exactly as we would say Genesis to Revelation. Two honest notes: it is an argument from the order of the Hebrew Bible rather than an explicit list, and Matthew’s parallel calls this Zechariah son of Barachiah (23:35), which fits the prophet rather than the man in Chronicles. The detail about where he died is what points to Chronicles, and the difficulty is real and old.
The apostles’ letters were Scripture before the apostles died Peter, writing about Paul: there are things in his letters hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16). The other Scriptures. And Paul, stringing two quotations together under one formula: for the Scripture says, ’You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ’The laborer deserves his wages’ (1 Timothy 5:18), where the first is Deuteronomy 25:4 and the second is Luke 10:7. A Gospel is being quoted as Scripture inside the New Testament itself.
The letters were written to be circulated and read aloud I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers (1 Thessalonians 5:27). When this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans (Colossians 4:16). Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy (Revelation 1:3). These documents were public and shared from the start, which is the practical reason a forgery appearing a century later had nowhere to hide.
Being quoted is not the same as being canonical, and Jude proves it Jude quotes the book of 1 Enoch by name and as prophecy (Jude 14-15), and alludes to a story about Michael and the body of Moses found outside Scripture (v. 9). Paul quotes pagan poets three times: Aratus at Athens (Acts 17:28), Menander to Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:33), Epimenides to Titus (Titus 1:12), calling the last one a prophet. Nobody has ever concluded that Menander is canonical. So the argument that a New Testament echo of 2 Maccabees settles the matter proves too much: citation is not canonisation, and the New Testament itself demonstrates the difference.
The books between the Testaments report that prophecy had stopped 1 Maccabees says it three times: they stored the altar stones until a prophet should come (4:46); there was distress such as had not been since the time that prophets ceased to appear (9:27); Simon was made leader until a trustworthy prophet should arise (14:41). Malachi had ended the Old Testament with a promise to send Elijah (4:5), and Jesus closed the bracket: all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John (Matthew 11:13). The silence between the Testaments is attested by the very books written during it.
Jesus corrects Israel about many things, never about which books they had He attacks their traditions for nullifying the word of God (Mark 7:13), their use of Scripture, you search the Scriptures… yet you refuse to come to me (John 5:39-40), and their ignorance of it (Matthew 22:29). The one charge he never brings is that the collection is wrong. It is an argument from silence, and it is a loud one, given how much else he was willing to say.
The disputes are recorded, which is why we can trust the result Eusebius, writing around 325, sorts the books openly into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the spurious (Church History III.25), and names which is which. Origen said of Hebrews’ author that God alone knows. Nobody was pretending to a unanimity they did not have. A canon assembled by suppression would not have left its own working out in the margins.
Nicaea did not do this The council of 325 met over the deity of Christ and produced a creed that says so. Its canons survive and concern church order, not one of them mentions the books of the Bible. The nearest fact underneath the legend is that Constantine later asked Eusebius for fifty copies of the Scriptures for the churches of his new capital, which presupposes a collection everyone could already identify. If a committee had invented the canon there, the disputes recorded for the next century would be unaccountable.
Four Gospels, argued for before any council Irenaeus, around AD 180, insists there are four Gospels and can be no more (Against Heresies III.11.8), and his reasoning is that this is what the churches have. Melito of Sardis, a decade earlier, had travelled to Palestine specifically to establish which books belonged to the Old Testament, and came back with a list that matches the Hebrew canon. This is what the second century actually looks like: people trying to find out, and writing down what they found.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

The prologue to Sirach (c. 132 BC) The single most useful witness, and it comes from inside the disputed books. The translator, the author’s grandson, describes his grandfather as a diligent student of the Law and the Prophets and the other books of our ancestors, and apologises for the difficulty of translating. He is testifying to a threefold Scripture already recognised, and quietly placing his grandfather’s excellent book alongside it rather than inside it.
Josephus (Against Apion I.38-41, c. AD 95) A Jewish historian writing for Romans, describing his own nation’s Scriptures: twenty-two books, and no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable. He also states plainly that the exact succession of prophets ended in the reign of Artaxerxes, which is why the later books stood on a different footing. This is the Jewish canon, described by a Jew, within a generation of the apostles.
Melito of Sardis (c. AD 170, preserved in Eusebius, Church History IV.26) The earliest Christian list of the Old Testament, and it exists because someone asked and Melito went to find out, travelling east to the place where these things were preached and done to learn the accurate number of the books. His list matches the Hebrew canon and omits the disputed seven. It also omits Esther, which is worth knowing: the process was real, and it was not yet tidy.
The Muratorian Fragment (usually dated late second century) The earliest surviving list of New Testament books, damaged at both ends, and already containing most of ours. Its most instructive line is about a book it declines: the Shepherd of Hermas may be read privately, it says, but not read out in church among the prophets or the apostles. That is the whole distinction this page turns on, drawn by an anonymous Roman writer eighteen centuries ago, profitable is one category, canonical is another.
Athanasius (Festal Letter 39, AD 367) The first list that matches our New Testament exactly: twenty-seven books, no more and no fewer, in a letter written to tell the Egyptian churches when to keep Easter. He also names books outside the canon which he says are appointed to be read by those coming to faith: again the two categories, kept apart. Note what this is not: not a decree, not a council, not an act of power. A pastor telling his churches what they already had.
Jerome (the Helmeted Preface, and the preface to the books of Solomon, c. 391-400) The only Latin father who could read Hebrew, and the translator of the Vulgate. He separated the books of the Hebrew canon from the rest and said the church reads Judith, Tobit and Maccabees, and Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, for the edification of the people, not for establishing the authority of the doctrines of the church. He translated them anyway, under protest, because he was asked. The Protestant position on the Apocrypha is, almost word for word, Jerome’s.
Augustine (On Christian Doctrine II.8; Hippo, 393; Carthage, 397) And the honest counterweight, because the page would be dishonest without him. Augustine received the longer list, argued for it on the ground of what the churches read, and carried the African councils with him. He and Jerome corresponded, sharply, and did not agree. Anyone who tells you the early church was united on this is describing a church that did not exist, the two greatest Latin fathers, contemporaries and correspondents, held different canons.
Cardinal Cajetan (1532) and the Council of Trent (Session IV, 1546) Cajetan is the one who makes the timeline impossible to spin. The cardinal who had examined Luther at Augsburg wrote a commentary in 1532 explicitly following Jerome’s distinction (the disputed books being for edification, not for doctrine) and was not disciplined for it, because the matter was still open. Fourteen years later Trent closed it, defined the longer canon, and attached an anathema to anyone who would not receive the books entire with all their parts. Rome answers, fairly, that Hippo, Carthage and Florence had already listed them. The Reformation answers that a binding definition arriving in 1546, in the middle of this argument, is not the same thing as a canon received from the beginning.
Martin Luther (1522 preface; and the Apocrypha in his Bible) Our own teacher, and a caution. Luther moved Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to the end of his New Testament and called James an epistle of straw compared with the books that preach Christ, a phrase he dropped from later editions. The church did not follow him, and it was right not to: he was measuring the books by his own grasp of their usefulness, which is exactly the method the canon is supposed to resist. On the Apocrypha, though, he did the thing this page commends. He printed it, between the Testaments, headed: not held equal to the Scriptures, and yet useful and good to read.
The Westminster Confession (1646), 1.2-1.5, and the 1689 London Baptist Confession The confessional settlement, and it is careful. It lists the sixty-six books by name; it says the Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings (1.3); and it grounds the whole thing not in the church’s verdict but in God, received by the inward work of the Holy Spirit (1.4-1.5). Spurgeon’s 1689 says the same.
Wesley Huff (Wycliffe College, Toronto; Can I Trust the Bible?) The scholar to go to on exactly this question, which is his field rather than a sideline: manuscripts, canon, and the popular myths about both, including the Nicaea story that his lecture series takes apart directly. We name him here for that work rather than quoting him, not having his text in hand; go and watch it if this page has left you wanting the evidence at first hand.

Where it lands

It lands where Luke 24 lands, which is the reason that chapter is the passage for this page. Two men walk seven miles with the risen Christ, and what he does with the time is exposition: beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (24:27). Then, to the eleven, the same thing again, and he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (24:45). The canon is not a list of approved religious writings. It is the collection of documents that testify of him, and he is the one who says so.

That is also the answer to who decided?, and it is better than the answer either side of the Reformation usually gives. The church did not vote these books in, and the church did not need to: my sheep hear my voice (John 10:27). Calvin’s whole argument on this comes down to that: Scripture is self-authenticating, carrying its own evidence as light does, and the Spirit persuades where argument only prepares. The tests the churches applied were real and are worth knowing, but they describe how the recognition happened. They do not explain why it could happen, and the Confession is right to put the Spirit’s inward witness underneath the whole structure (WCF 1.5).

Which is why you do not have to be able to reconstruct the fourth century in order to be sure of your Bible, any more than you need a genealogist to be sure who your father is. Know the history, it will serve you when someone tries to unsettle you with a half-remembered documentary, but do not think your confidence rests on it. It rests on the voice you hear in these books, and on the fact that both testaments were authorised by the same person: he received Israel’s Scriptures as the word of his Father, and he commissioned the men whose writings became the rest, promising that the Spirit would bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you (John 14:26).

And on the seven books, hold the line where the Reformers held it, which is further from contempt than the argument usually runs. Read them: Luther printed them, the King James Bible carried them, and 1 Maccabees will tell you what happened in the four hundred years your Bible passes over in a page. Do not build on them, because they were not given for that and they say as much themselves. And do not let the disagreement become a sneer: Christians who use the longer list are reading the same four Gospels, and the Christ of Luke 24 is fully visible in every edition of this book that has ever been printed.

What the passage does not settle

The passage does not hand us a table of contents, and neither does any other. There is no verse listing the books, which is why this page is built from history and usage as well as from Scripture, and anyone claiming the canon can be established from the Bible alone, without the historical record, is asking the text to do something it has not offered to do.

So a number of things stay open. The exact process and its dates. Why the Spirit allowed the disputed books to be disputed for as long as they were. Whether Matthew’s son of Barachiah is the Zechariah of Chronicles. Who wrote Hebrews. Whether the Apocrypha ought to be bound into Bibles again, as the Reformers had it, rather than left out altogether as the nineteenth century decided.

One further limit, stated plainly because it cuts our own way. The Protestant case rests heavily on the Hebrew canon that Jesus received, and that canon’s own boundaries in the first century are known from Josephus, from usage, and from the New Testament’s citation habits rather than from a decree. The evidence is good and it is not a receipt. The Roman argument that the church’s judgment is required to identify the canon is a serious argument, answered here rather than dismissed, and the answer is not that the church has no role, but that its role was to recognise a voice it already knew.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

Before this page, did you think a council chose the books of the Bible? Where did that idea come from, and who benefits from it being believed?
Jerome and Augustine, contemporaries and correspondents, held different canons. What does it do to your confidence to learn that, and should it do that?
The Muratorian Fragment allows a book to be read privately but not preached. Which books do you treat that way now, and do you keep the line clear?
Luther judged James by how well it preached Christ, and the church declined to follow him. What is the danger in measuring Scripture by how useful we find it?
My sheep hear my voice. Can you say honestly that you recognise a voice in these books, and when did you last read one of them as though listening for it?