This is a beautifully constructed question and very pertinent. But how should we attempt to answer it? At one level it requires a careful historical and theological examination of the process of canonization and the content of the texts. That is probably beyond the scope of this website, though people are welcome to express their views. At another level it is a question about the principle of canonicity, which leads in various directions: What do we understand by biblical authority? What effect does canonicity have on truth and plausibility? What is the place of an authoritative collection of documents in the life of the people of God? What is the relation between biblical and non-biblical texts?

These latter questions seem more manageable and more interesting. I am probably still too much under the spell of deconstruction, but I am inclined to think that we should dismantle the canon, if only in our imaginations, if only temporarily - untie the rope of sacredness that binds these books together and let them slip back into the flow of history, rip off the gold-embossed leather covers and let the pages be carried away by the winds of antiquity (see ‘Strange but true: the irrelevance of Scripture for the church today’).

I certainly think we would understand the Bible better if we allowed ourselves to read it as a collection of historical documents among others, if we worried less about precisely determining its boundaries or demonstrating internal coherence and gained a sense instead of how it is part of a much larger thought-world. By isolating a body of texts like this we are bound to misread them to some degree - just as we misread an artistic movement when we isolate its exemplars in a gallery, cut off from their social and cultural environment, cut off from the history of art.

So, for example, we need to read the Old Testament in part as an implicit dialogue with the cultures of the ancient near-east. We need to read the works of the intertestamental period and Jewish apocalypticism in order to understand where John the Baptist and Jesus were coming from. We need to read Josephus. We need to read beyond the New Testament into the period of the early fathers.

We don’t at this point in time need to defend the canonicity of the Bible. We need to understand it, recover a sense of its powerful historicality - then perhaps having understood it better, we might come back to the problem of canon.