Two Protestant answers, and the honest one is stronger. Self-authentication makes a testable prediction — that Spirit-led readers converge on the same list — and Luther is the counterexample, having applied precisely that criterion and demoted Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to an unnumbered appendix, James being the epistle of straw. Fallible-collection concedes what self-authentication must explain away, and pays for the concession in the right currency: certainty about the list traded for sufficiency of the books.

A Jewish historical lens favors fallible-collection over infallible-list on one limited epistemic question: can scripture bind a community when the history of its boundaries is human, gradual, and partly uncertain? The Tanakh's authority does not require a claim that one institution produced an irreformable table of contents. Covenant, liturgical use, study, and legal practice can sustain confidence without converting historical reception into infallibility. Narrow rather than wide because the Christian claim concerns a different doctrine of inspiration and may demand a kind of certainty rabbinic Judaism does not seek in the same form.