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.