The major premise begs the question. How do we identify a prophet?
In the dictionary, the first definition of a prophet is "1. A person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed." Certainly that would include any inspired author of Scripture. So the question then becomes, Who are the inspired authors of Scripture? And we're back where we started from.
This theory also flies in the face of numerous New Testament passages which reference passages in the Deuterocanonical books of Scripture.
Here is a partial list of New Testament passages referencing the Deuterocanonical books of Scripture. Some samples:
Matt. 22:25; Mark 12:20; Luke 20:29 - Gospel writers refer to the canonicity of Tobit 3:8 and 7:11 regarding the seven brothers.The story of the mother who watches all of her sons being tortured (dismembered and thrown into a frying pan) for refusing to denounce their faith is one of the most compelling stories in the Bible and is missing from Luther's abbreviated canon:Matt. 9:36 - the people were "like sheep without a shepherd" is same as Judith 11:19 - sheep without a shepherd.
Matt. 12:42 - Jesus refers to the wisdom of Solomon which was recorded and made part of the deuterocanonical books.
"The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here."Mark 4:5,16-17 - Jesus' description of seeds falling on rocky ground and having no root follows Sirach 40:15.
Mark 9:48 - description of hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched references Judith 16:17.
Luke 2:29 - Simeon's declaration that he is ready to die after seeing the Child Jesus follows Tobit 11:9.
Luke 13:29 - the Lord's description of men coming from east and west to rejoice in God follows Baruch 4:37.
Again, in Hebrews 11, 35 we read of women who "received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life."
"There are a couple of examples of women receiving back their dead by resurrection in the Protestant Old Testament. You can find Elijah raising the son of the widow of Zarepheth in 1 Kings 17, and you can find his successor Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4, but one thing you can never find – anywhere in the Protestant Old Testament, from front to back, from Genesis to Malachi – is someone being tortured and refusing to accept release for the sake of a better resurrection. If you want to find that, you have to look in the Catholic Old Testament – in the deuterocanonical books Martin Luther cut out of his Bible."4
Aquinasfan: "The major premise begs the question. How do we identify a prophet?
In the dictionary, the first definition of a prophet is "1. A person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed." Certainly that would include any inspired author of Scripture. So the question then becomes, Who are the inspired authors of Scripture? And we're back where we started from."
You circled back because you refuse you accept the fact that after the aproximate date of 435 B.C. (when Malachi wrote), the Jews recognized no further additions to the OT canon.
The subsequent history of the Jewish people was recorded in other writings, such as the book of Maccabees, but those writings weren't considered by the Jews to be worthy of inclusion in the OT canon along with the collections of God's words from earlier years.
Jewish literature outside the OT shows that they believed that the divinely authoritative words from God had ceased around 435 B.C.
About 100 B.C., the author of 1 Maccabees writes of the defiled altar, "So they tore down the altar and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until there should come a prophet to tell them what to do with them." [1 Macc.4:45-46]
They apparently knew of no one who could speak with the authority of God as the OT prophets had done.
The memory of an authorative prophet among the people was one that belonged to the distant past, for the author could speak of a great distress "such as had not been since the time that prophets ceased to appear among them." [1 Macc.9:27; cf.14:41]
The greatest Jewish historian of the first century, Josephus (born c.A.D. 37/38), explained, "From Artaxerxes to our own times a complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets." (Against Apion 1.41).
This shows that Josephus knew of the writings now considered part of the "Apocrypha", (also called Deuterocanonical books), but that in his viewpoint, and that of many of his contemporaries, no more "words of God" were added to Scripture after about 435 B.C.
In the New Testament, we have no record of any dispute between Jesus and the Jews over the extent of the canon. Apparently there was full agreement between Jesus and his disciples, on the one hand, and the Jewish leaders or Jewish people, on the other hand, that additions to the OT canon had ceased after the time of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
This fact is confirmed by the quotations of Jesus and the NT authors from the OT. According to one count, Jesus and the NT authors quote various parts of OT Scriptures as divinely authorative over 295 times but not once do they cite any statement from the books of the Apocrypha or any other writings as having *divine authority*.
Jude (14-15) does cite 1 Enoch 60.8 and 1.9, and Paul at least twice quotes pagan Greek authors (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12), but these citations are more for the purposes of illustration than proof. Never are the works introduced with a phrase like, "God says", or "Scripture says", or "It is written", phrases that imply the attribution of divine authority to the words cited.
It should also be noted that neither 1 Enoch nor the authors cited by Paul are part of the Apocrypha. No book of what is called, "the Deuterocanonical books" (Apocrypha) is even mentioned in the New Testament.
The definitive work on the OT canon is contained in Roger Beckwith's book, entitled, "The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism" (London: SPCK, 1985, and Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986).
At the conclusion of his study, Beckwith says, "The inclusion of various Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in the canon of the early Christians was not done in any agreed way or at the earliest period, but occurred in Gentile Christianity, after the church's breach with the synogogue, among those whose knowledge of the primitive Christian canon was becoming blurred." He concludes, "On the question of the canonicity of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha the truly primitive Christian evidence is negative" [pp 436-37]
I could cite many more references from Rabbinic literature, and elsewhere, but it all says essentially the same thing as I wrote/quoted above. (It's easily located if one is truly interested).
Bottom line? God, himself, places supreme value on our having a correct collection of God-breathed writings (graphe aka Scripture), no more no less, and pronounces severe punishment on any who would add or subtract from his words.
For His WORDS are our life. [Deut.32:47; Matt.4:4]
Just as God was at work in creation, in the calling of his people Isreal, in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and in the early work and writings of the apostles, so God was at work in the preservation and assembling together of the books of Scripture for the benefit of his people for the entire church age.
Ultimately, then, we base our confidence in the correctness of our present canon on the faithfulness of God.