While Catholics like to point to the longevity of their beliefs and the purportedly unbroken line of authority as proof that they have the true Christian church from Christ and Protestants like to point to their belief in a closed canon of scripture and that the Bible is the only source of authority as their proof that they are the true Christian faith, the fact is that many of the tenets of other Christian churches come from Christian leaders who lived centuries after Christ and His apostles. The doctrine of original sin is not from the Bible, but instead comes from St. Augustine around 400 AD. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was proclaimed in 1854 by Pope Pius. The Doctrine of Transubstantiation comes from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Protestants, especially some Baptists and Evangelicals, often point to their belief in the Bible as the sole source of authority as proof that they have Christ’s true gospel and church. But many Protestant doctrines are likewise not found in the Bible and are the products of theologians centuries after Christ and the Apostles lived. John Calvin developed the idea of predestination. The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (that the Bible is the only source of authority for Christianity) and sola fide (faith in Christ is the only thing required for salvation) are not taught in the Bible and are the products of Martin Luther’s interpretation of the Bible. The Winchester Confession of Faith is also not in the Bible. As Millet (2018) said, let’s not kid ourselves about other Christians having a “closed canon”. But that should bring up a very interesting question that really needs to addressed anytime we start discussing the Bible as a source of authority: “What is the Bible?”
Most people would scoff at the question, “What is the Bible?” “The Bible is the book of scripture that starts with Genesis and ends with Revelations. Simple.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The sole authority of the Bible is foundational to Protestants’ beliefs, and that has likewise fueled accusations of us not being Christians. Because Latter Day Saints believe in other scriptures besides the Bible, so the argument goes, and the sole source of authority is the Bible, if a church accepts other writings as scripture, then they don’t have God’s authority, and if they don’t have God’s authority, then the argument goes that they can’t be Christian. Recently, this argument has started extending to Catholics as well as Latter Day Saints in part because Catholics include the apocrypha in their Bible. (Being accepted as a Christian in some circles is getting to look more and more like trying to sit at the lunch table with the Plastics in Mean Girls. If you’re wearing sweatpants on a Tuesday, “You can’t sit with us!”) For one detailed example of this argument, read the October 8, 2021 blog post “Catholicism is Not Biblical Christianity” by a blogger named Julie who writes on The Set Apart Walk. Another example is in the December 18, 2024 blog post “Are Catholics Christian?” By Stephen Kneale on the blog Building Jerusalem where he states that Christians are those who go to Heaven and because Catholics hold to certain beliefs that are not biblical that they cannot go to heaven.
The jump from “you don’t have God’s authority” to “you can’t be Christian”, is problematic in and of itself (Latter Day Saints believe that because other faiths lack the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods that they don’t have God’s authority either, but we would still consider them Christians because they believe that Jesus suffered and died for the sins of the world and that salvation comes through Him), but there are other problems with this argument as well.
As the article on St. John Orthodox Christian Church says, sola scriptura denies the authority of the Christian Church and the consensus of the early Christian Fathers— while still upholding the Creeds they developed. Indeed, the Protestant argument that because Latter Day Saints reject the Nicene Creed and the Trinity they can’t be Christians clings to the principles that were established by a Council that by the standards of sola scriptura would be void. If the Bible is the only source of authority, then the Council at Nicea had no authority and their Creed would hold no power either. This leaves Protestants in a place of contradiction.
The other problem is that what constitutes “The Bible” has meant different things at different times. When Protestants refer to “the Bible”, they are most likely referring to some translation of the King James Version of the Bible, which dates to 1611, though John Calvin and Martin Luther were debating the inclusion of apocryphal books in the Bible in the 1500s (Meade, 2021). A criticism that Protestants often throw at the Catholic Bible is that it doesn’t emphasize or somehow fails to teach certain truths like salvation by faith. Kneale (2021) states: “The means of salvation they [Catholics] propose are explicitly stated in scripture as denials of the gospel itself.”
This is where Protestants do find themselves on shaky Biblical ground, though. The Catholic Church didn’t add books to the Bible. The Apocrypha (which is Old Testament— not the New Testament) was considered part of the canon of the Bible from the Council of Nicea in 352. Jerome, who translated the Bible from Greek to Latin (the Vulgate) didn’t think the Apocrypha should be canonical and noted it in his translation, nonetheless, he stated that he was translating it because the Council of Nicea had decided the Apocrypha was canonical. The Apocrypha was still in many Protestant bibles for some time as well. The King James Version of 1611 included the Apocrypha (Heschmeyer, 2023). Some interpretations, particularly Protestant ones, seems to imply that the Apocrypha was already considered to be not-inspired and that inspired the Protestant Reformers to pursue doctrines such as sola fide and sola scriptura and a Heaven and Hell. In one of his early debates before his excommunication, Luther said that since the Book of Maccabees was not in the canon, it could not be considered doctrinal support for the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. Calvin noted that the Apocrypha provided support to some of Catholicism’s doctrines and practices, but like Luther seemed to imply that they weren’t canonical and couldn’t be doctrinal support. (Meade, 2021).
Meade (2021) states:
In 1547, one year after Trent’s decree on the canon, John Calvin in his Antidote argued that the leaders at Trent “provide themselves with new supports when they give full authority to the Apocryphal books. Out of the second of the Maccabees they will prove Purgatory and the worship of saints; out of Tobit satisfactions, exorcisms, and what not. From Ecclesiasticus they will borrow not a little. For from whence could they better draw their dregs?” (Para 18)
These explanations definitely place Protestant Reformers in the best possible light of a tricky situation: Protestants are adamant about the sole authority of the Bible, yet their founders excluded books that were, at the time, part of the Bible. Whichever way you choose to interpret it though, the Apocrypha was considered a part of the Bible prior to the Reformation, but the Reformers decided to exclude it and this did help the Reformers support many of their doctrines that were at odds with some of the books in the Catholic (and Orthodox) Bible.
This is significant because if the premise is that Protestantism is biblically based and that the only authority is the Bible and that other religions that do not share the same canon as Protestants are not Christians, then the Protestant canon presents a problem because it is the product of alterations by men.
Indeed, the concept of a Christian canon has been very fluid and if the basis for being Christian is the correct canon, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter and Paul would all fail that test because they didn’t have the Protestant Bible. They didn’t even have the Catholic Bible either. You could say the Apostles had the teachings straight from Jesus, but Paul became a Christian after Jesus’s ascension and Luke was not an apostle. The early Christians didn’t have a Bible, they had a series or letters and some accounts of Jesus’s life. They studied those and their other texts as they saw fit. Between 100 and 400 AD, a number of books came and went from the Christian and Jewish Canon. For example, the Jews came to regard the Book of Maccabees as non canonical while the early Christians decided it was (Ludlow, 2018). Older versions of the Bible included books and epistles that aren’t found in any versions of the Bible now. The oldest Christian Bible, the Codex Sinaictitus, dates to the middle 300s and includes the Apocrypha, but also the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas (Codex Sinaictitus Project, n.d). So if one of the criteria for being a Christian is belief in a Bible with 66 books as the only scripture, then 4th century followers of Christianity are also out of the running. (Again, being accepted as a Christian is getting more and more like sitting with the Plastics at lunch.)
The fact that older versions of the Bible had other books and the discovery of records like the Dead Sea Scrolls should prompt us to ask what can be a scary question: Are there other sacred records out there could or should be considered scripture? The consensus seems to be that no other books could be added to the Bible. The Bible is complete.
Arnold (2016) explains the criteria and reasoning as to why even if a genuine document from the early Christians was found that it could not and should not be added to the Bible:
(1) Apostolic origin (from the Apostles). From the very beginning, Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Originally, their teaching was spread orally, but once this teaching was written down, churches obtained copies of these documents as soon as they could and used them as the very Word of God for their beliefs and practice. (2) Orthodoxy. The churches rejected out of hand any document that did not conform to the collection of essential teachings that all of the churches accepted. (3) Usage. In the third and fourth centuries, no book was regarded as Scripture unless it had been widely used by the churches from the beginning. Of course, this latter standard rules out the possibility that any document can or should be added to the Bible now.
Again, we get into some very thorny territory here. Even if an actual letter written by Peter himself were discovered, it couldn’t be included as scripture simply because we didn’t have it until now, the assumption being that it must not have been in wide use at the time and therefore shouldn’t be included in the Bible. Paul referenced other letters which he wrote, but which we don’t have and are not in the New Testament. He referenced them frequently (Apologetics Press). We don’t have copies of them, though that doesn’t mean they might not be doctrinally relevant— or challenging to some faith traditions. There were works like the so-called Epistle of Barnabas (that was more like an essay than an epistle and never claims to bewritten by Barnabas) that were included in the early Bible (such as the Codex Sinaictitus) Eusebius and the Early Church (Ehrman, 2025). some early Christian scholars and leaders considered them canonical and some did not (Adams, 2010). The Epistle of Barnabas and these other epistles are not considered canonical any longer though, despite the fact that they were widely read and used. Complicating the Bible further is that some of the epistles that are currently included might be pseudepigrapha, meaning they carry the name of an apostle, but may not actually have been written by him. Pseudepigrapha is a common feature of literature from ancient Mediterranean peoples and it is a feature of Old Testament texts, such as Proverbs, which is said to be written by Solomon, but probably wasn’t. More controversially, there are some New Testament letters that many scholars say are pseudepigrapha, these include Ephesians, Colossians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, and James (Lester, n.d.). An interesting side note with this though, is that rejecting the idea of pseudepigrapha in the New Testament has been regarded as a litmus test for whether one is truly an Evangelical Christian. Quoting Conrad Gempf, Brown (2003) “Formerly it was the case that a person’s views on pseudonymity in the canon could be ascertained merely by finding out whether the person was an ‘evangelical’ or not. Indeed, for many, this was precisely the test: if someone believed that the NT contained pseudonymous works they were, by definition, not an evangelical.” (Brown, 2003). In other words, to truly be an evangelical, one cannot believe that any part of the New Testament could be pseudepigrapha. This shows an interesting phenomenon in Evagelicalism: the tendency towards defining religious identity for others. “You can’t be a Christian or an Evangelical unless you meet these requirements…” Jennifer Roach Lees has mentioned a few times in FAIR New Testament podcast series that Evangelicalism has historically had a problem with defining itself, having started as a reaction to mainline Protestantism. Some Protestant churches also lack the formal rites of membership that Catholics, Orthodoxy and Latter Day Saints have. If you ask a member of these faiths who is a member of their faith, their answers will have something to do with who has received baptism and perhaps PERSONAL OPINION ALERT: I think this might be why there is a such a strong undercurrent of exclusion in some Evangelical dialogue is because of the difficulty in defining themselves.
The bottom line is that our Bible was compiled by people over a series of council, not written in stone tablets and handed off of a mountain by the Lord Himself. Even the order of the books in the Bible is a decision of men. While it’s convenient to have the Book of Revelations at the end of the Bible with its warning not to add or take away anything from these things, but that’s not what the Book of Revelations was meaning to do when John wrote it. Some of the epistles were quite possibly written after the Book of Revelations. Most scholarly dating of the books of the Bible place the Revelation of John 2 Peter is thought to be the most recently written at around 110 AD, while the Book of Revelations is thought to be written around 81-96 AD in the reign of Domitian. 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and the epistles of John may have been written after the Book of Revelations (Marina, 2024). And the admonition in Deuteronomy 4:2 to not add or take away anything from the writings in it thus far, would, by that logic, negate everything in the Old Testament that comes after it. And, of course, the Bible didn’t exist as a book until a couple of centuries after any of the Books in the Bible were written. Placing the Book of Revelations at the end certainly gives the Bible a sense of finality and may have served as a warning from its compilers not to make any other changes after centuries of changes. Latter Day Saint theology has a much more comfortable place for this because of the open acceptance of an open canon and the understanding that parts of the Bible have been mistranslated and misinterpreted over the centuries. The sticking point of nothing being added to the Bible seems especially pronounced for Protestants. (There might be Catholic or Orthodox sources that have addressed the issue of new books in the Bible, but the most popular sources tend to be Protestant, particularly of an Evangelical leaning.) And if you are looking to the Bible to be the sole source of authority, trying to “corral” the revelation in might seem necessary to keep Protestantism in a cohesive whole. However, that doesn’t stop different interpretations from coming up, even from congregation to congregation.
Millet (2018) points out that this is a relatively new criticism of Latter Day Saints that seems to have started around the 1960s— not long after the Evangelical Christian movement began. He traces it back to a book called Kingdom of Cults by Walter Martin. Before this, there were many criticisms of Latter Day Saints, but not being Christians was not one of them. (Millet, 2018) Perhaps the accusation of not being Christian was the result of increasing membership and visibility of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the increasing popularity of the Evangelical movement around the same time. I have encountered different publications from people of other faiths that seem to have an underlying feeling that “Mormons” are out to “steal” away their members. The fact that this criticism has now been extended to one of the oldest Christian faiths in the world might reflect another wave of growing unease within the Evangelical movement.
The Evangelical movement started around the 1950s and by the 2000s, about 30% of the population of the United States identified as born again Christians (Keller, 2022). That number has dropped to 26%. Many of these former Evangelical Christians become part the “nones” (“no religion” or “spiritual but not religious”), but a significant number are joining other denominations, particularly Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Eastern Orthodoxy has seen an increase in conversions with 65% of those new converts coming from a Protestant background and 60% of them citing theological reasons for changing faiths. Many Catholic dioceses are seeing a 30 to 70% increase in conversions as well (Voigt, 2024). The expansion of classifying other Christians as “not Christians” might be a reflection of the underlying anxiety about the pull of other faiths attracting Evangelical Christians away from Protestantism.
References
Adams, J.P. (2010). Eusebius and the Early Church. California State University at Northridge.https://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/euseb_ch.html
Arnold, C.E. (2016). Why were some books left out of the Bible? The Good Book Blog, Biola University. https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2016/why-were-some-books-left-out-of-the-bible
Apologetics Press (2003 December 1). Are there lost books of the Bible? https://apologeticspress.org/are-there-lost-books-of-the-bible-66/
Brown, D. (2003 June 13). Pseudonymity and the New Testament. Faith Baptist Theological Seminary. https://faith.edu/faith-pulpit/posts/pseudonymity-and-the-new-testament/
English Translation of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of America United States Catholic Conference, Inc.Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997). Catholic Culture https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/catechism/index.cfm?recnum=610
Codex Sinaictitus Project, (n.d.). Significance. https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/significance.aspx
Ehrman, B. D. (2025 November 11). The Epistle of Barnabas in a Nutshell. Bart Ehrman Blog. https://ehrmanblog.org/the-epistle-of-barnabas-in-a-nutshell/
Ehrman, B.D. ed (2003). The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings. OUP
Heschmeyer, J. (2023 July 6). Did the Catholics Add 7 books to the Bible? Or Did Protestants Remove Them? Catholic Answers.
International OCD Foundation, 2026) What is OCD and scrupulosity? https://iocdf.org/faith-ocd/what-is-ocd-scrupulosity/
Julie (2021 October 8, 2021). “Catholicism is Not Biblical Christianity”. The Set Apart Walk. https://thesetapartwalk.com/catholicism-is-not-biblical-christianity/
Keller, T. (2022). The Decline and Renewal of the American Church, Part 2– The Decline of Evangelicalism. Gospel in Life.
https://gospelinlife.com/article/the-decline-of-evangelicalism/
Kneale, S. (2024 December 18). “Are Catholics Christian?” Building Jerusalem. https://buildingjerusalem.blog/2024/12/18/are-catholics-christian/
Lees, J. R. [Come Follow Me With FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions] (2023). "Don’t Latter-day Saints worship a different Jesus?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSTUCUYUHzw&list=PLw_Vkm1zYbIGG3QXZLu1A9JLOXbLj4lAF&index=16
Lees, J. R. [Come Follow Me With FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions] (2023). What Must I Do To Be Saved? Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUt_QTgfoV0&list=PLw_Vkm1zYbIGG3QXZLu1A9JLOXbLj4lAF&index=8
Lees, J. R. [Come Follow Me With FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions] (2023). Who is– and who is not– a Christian? Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCt2cbrfY7Y&list=PLw_Vkm1zYbIGG3QXZLu1A9JLOXbLj4lAF&index=30
Lester, O.S. (n.d.) Pseudepigraphy. Bible Odyssey. https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/pseudepigraphy/
Marina, M. (2024 July 6). Bible in Chronological Order (Every Book Ordered by Date Written). Bart Ehrman Blog. https://www.bartehrman.com/bible-in-chronological-order/
Meade, J.D. (2021). Why are Protestant and Catholic Bibles Different? Text and Canon Institute. https://textandcanon.org/why-the-catholic-bible-has-more-books-than-the-protestant-bible/
“10 Differences Between Orthodox and Catholic Churches” (2022 August 30).https://www.saintjohnchurch.org/differences-between-orthodox-and-catholic/
United Conference of Catholic Bishops (2026). Nicene Creed. https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe
Voigt, A. (2024 August 13). Some Evangelicals are Leaving Protestantism for Other Traditions. Christianity Today. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/08/protestant-conversions-roman-catholicism-eastern-orthodoxy/
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