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.

On the specifically rabbinic question of how a disputed text becomes binding practice, not-in-heaven is stronger than self-authentication. A text being recognized as sacred does not decide what its commands require; the Oven of Akhnai insists that even divine confirmation cannot replace the inherited procedures of legal interpretation. This ratio ranks explanatory fit for rabbinic authority, not the truth of Judaism over Calvinism.

Recognition-not-conferral outranks self-authentication from the rabbinic angle because recognition is public, historical, and contestable. A community can preserve disagreements about books and interpretations while still converging in practice; appeal to an inward testimony of the Spirit offers no shared procedure when recognizers diverge. Yet the preference is narrow: recognition describes the social history but does not by itself explain why the recognized text is divine rather than merely customary, which is exactly the gap self-authentication tries to fill.