The sola scriptura paradox is the problem that arises when trying to use the Bible alone as the ultimate authority in Christianity. Sola scriptura means that everything Christians believe should come directly from Scripture. However, the Bible itself doesn't tell us which books should be included in it. Early Christians and different traditions have disagreed on which books are part of the Bible, and the list we have today was decided by church leaders over time. This creates a paradox: sola scriptura says the Bible is the only source of authority, but you can't use the Bible alone to figure out which books belong in it in the first place. This means that determining what counts as Scripture actually requires decisions made outside of Scripture, which challenges the idea that Scripture alone is enough.
The paradox of sola scriptura is further complicated by the fact that different Christian traditions hold to different canons of Scripture. For instance, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes books such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Shepherd of Hermas, which are not recognized in the Protestant canon. This diversity in canons highlights that the concept of a closed canon was not universally accepted in the early church and suggests that the 66-book canon used by Protestants is not necessarily the definitive collection of divinely recognized texts. Instead, the formation of the canon appears to be the result of historical and ecclesiastical decisions influenced by specific theological concerns. This challenges the core premise of sola scriptura, which relies on a fixed, authoritative collection of texts. If there is no universally agreed-upon canon, then it becomes difficult to determine which scriptures sola scriptura should apply to. Since sola scriptura cannot resolve this issue using Scripture alone, it must depend on external authorities or traditions, a reliance that contradicts its own principle of Scripture being the sole rule of faith.
Moreover, the early Christian communities had a more fluid understanding of what constituted Scripture, further complicating the sola scriptura framework. For example, the Muratorian fragment, one of the earliest known lists of New Testament writings, includes texts like the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypse of Peter, which are not part of the Protestant canon. This fluidity indicates that the boundaries of the canon were not fixed in the early church but were subject to change and debate. Such historical realities challenge the notion that the Protestant canon is the definitive set of Scriptures and underscore that the process of canon formation was influenced by later theological and ecclesiastical considerations. This further exacerbates the sola scriptura paradox by showing that the doctrine is dependent on a settled canon, which itself was established through processes that sola scriptura theoretically seeks to bypass. Without an agreed-upon canon, sola scriptura lacks a clear foundation, revealing a significant internal tension within the doctrine as it struggles to validate the very collection of texts it upholds as the ultimate authority.
