No one has claimed any authorship of any of what we now consider NT writings until after 150 AD. No one ever quoted a verse and identified the Apostle who was believed to have written it. St. Justin Martyr makes first mention only of "apostolic memoirs." Are memoirs scriptures?
Even the Church Fathers, close to the end of the second century AD, did not presume that the Gospels and Epistles were written by God (although I am sure they believed the authors were "moved" or "inspired" by Him), as they began to assign apostolic authorship to the extant manuscripts read in churches.
In assigning authorship to those manuscriptsd, the Church did not fall the sin of presumption and called them outright "the Gospel of Matthew" for example, but simply used the words kata, which means according to, i.e. Kata Maththaion, According to Matthew. Which is to say it is a narrative of Christ's ministry as seen (since he was a witness, like St. John) and remembered (since it was written 30 years after Christ, 60 years in John's case) by the Apostle. In the case of St. Mark and St. Luke, the same would mean "as told by others" (since they were not eye witnesses) and remembered (since both were written decated after Christ).
They even titled the Book of Revelation Apokalypsis Ioannu or The Revelation of John. Which some have found "incorrect" and renamed to John, and some have simply renamed the whole thing as the Revelation of Christ.
So, if we can't even trust the Church Fathers to pick the correct names of the very Bible we consider the word of God, how can we trust their collection of manuscripts as the pristine word of God considering that their pick was but bare two dozen manuscriptis out of a pool of some 200-plus books circulating in the first three centuries after Christ?
In order for the Bible to be accepted as the Scripture, it must be accepted as it was accepted by those who accepted it to begin with. For, if there is any possibility of any error in the canon, or even a title, then we cannot be sure.
Either the decision of what will be in the canon and how it will read is an infallible decision or it is not. If it is infallible, then the Revelation of John stands whether we understand it or not, and the Church remains the correct interpreter of the Scripture. If it is fallible, then none of it stands. Take your pick.
For the time being I will set aside the epistemological arguments since they had already been shown yet unanswered by The Skeptic. As Van Til pointed out and kosta manifested later:
But so soon as you claim that your God has revealed himself in creation, in providence, or in your Scripture, so soon I shall put that revelation to a test by the principle of rational coherence.”“And by that test none of your doctrines are acceptable. All of them are contradictory. No rational man can accept any of them. If your God is eternal, then he falls outside of my experience and lives in the realm of the ‘Beyond,’ of the unknowable. But if he is to have anything to do with the world, then he must himself be wholly within the world. I must understand your God throughout if I am to speak intelligently of any relationship that he sustains to my world and to myself. Your idea that God is both eternal and unchangeable and yet sustains such relationships to the world as are involved in your doctrine of creation and providence, is flatly contradictory.”
All this amounts to saying that the skeptic, the lover of a Chance philosophy, the indeterminist, is at the same time an out-and-out determinist or fatalist. It is to say that the skeptic, the irrationalist, who said that nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” is at the same time a flaming rationalist. For him only that can be which—so he thinks—he can exhaustively determine by logic must be. He may at first grant that anything may exist, but when he says this he at the same time says in effect that nothing can exist and have meaning for man but that which man himself can exhaustively know. Therefore, for the skeptic, the God of Christianity cannot exist. For him the doctrine of creation cannot be true. There could be no revelation of God to man through nature and history. There can be no such thing as the resurrection of Christ.
Thus our skeptic friends are caught in the their logical positivists tautologies and when asked by several Christians to use their empirical acumen to prove God's existence they run like the devil runs from the cross. Not that I am without sympathy since our Eastern friends have long been indoctrinated by atheistic principles. Be that as it may, since the foolishness of the cross infuriates the natural man, perhaps a more edifying area of discussion lies in the realm of historical theology. Because the canard of Tradition is the weapon of choice of the Greeks and Romanists perhaps we can find some fruit for the Christian in responding to these canards.
The Reformation was a renewal back to the what the early Church fathers believed about the relationship between Scripture and Church, that Scripture and tradition coinhere with the Body of Christ. It was not simply on the level of source (Scripture) and interpretation (tradition) but that Scripture and tradition flow from the same source, the word of God, and both the work of the Holy Spirit. The early fathers held no delusions that tradition was on the same level as revelation and explicitly denied any extra-scriptural traditon. In essence, the early fathers saw the oral traditions as the rule of faith of the Apostles and were keepers of that until such time as canonization was complete. They held no delusions that the rule of faith was the definitive interpretation of Scripture. In summary, the early fathers saw tradition as evidence of God working in his Church not as an extra source of revelation.
As the Catholic theologian George Tavard points out this was the Churches understanding up until around the 14th century when the bastardiztion of tradition started to gain footing. It was around this time the concept of post-apostolic tradition as revelation came to the fore and raised the papal oligarchy as supreme judge of these post-apostolic revelations. This was a view that would be foreign to Aquinas as can be seen when he quotes Augustine as an authority:
“sacred doctrine... properly uses the authority of the canonical Scriptures as an incontrovertible proof, and the authority of the doctors of the Church as one that may properly be used, yet merely as probable. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the apostles and prophets who wrote the canonical books, and not on the revelations (if any such there are) made to other doctors. Hence Augustine says (Epis. ad Hieron. xix, 1): ‘Only those books of Scripture which are called canonical have I learned to hold in such honor as to believe their authors have not erred in any way in writing them. But other authors I so read as not to deem everything in their works to be true, merely on account of their having so thought and written, whatever may have been their holiness and learning’” (ST I, q. 1, art. 8, ad 2).
In summary, the late medieval bastardization of Scripture and tradition lead to the privatizing of the Holy Spirit to the papal oligarchy, the denial that all doctrinal truths are found in Scripture and the addition of extra-scriptural post apostolic tradition on the same level as revelation in opposition to what the early fathers believed.
Unfortunately this is not the end of the story. As can be seen by the attitudes of our Greek and Romanist friends the relation between Scripture and tradition is now evolving to the point where neither is a final source but now the magisterium can rewrite it's own official (infallible) dogma overriding both Scripture and tradition. (As we see going on with the low view of Scripture being promoted)