Any attempt to close a scriptural canon is necessarily self-referential: no text within a prospective canon can, by itself, establish its own authority, because doing so presupposes recognition of canonical status that the texts alone do not provide; therefore, the determination of which texts are authoritative must rely on an extrinsic agent—whether a Church, council, or tradition—exercising normative judgment to delimit the boundaries of authority; yet this exercise presupposes the very authority it seeks to regulate, creating a formal circularity in which the canon’s legitimacy depends simultaneously on the texts themselves (whose authority is contingent on recognition) and on the authoritative act that recognizes them, such that canonical closure is epistemically grounded not solely in Scripture, but in the mediated, contingent, and self-referential authority of the recognizing agent.
