Their arguments: First, that either the entire canon taken together is sufficient or the individual books by themselves are sufficient.
Their arguments: First, that either the entire canon taken together is sufficient or the individual books by themselves are sufficient.
§ 380. Bellarmine repeats their stronger arguments in the aforementioned work: [I] “Either the entire canon of the Scriptures taken together is sufficient or the individual books by themselves are sufficient. One cannot say the latter because Chemnitz concedes that there was a usage of tradition in the Church until the completion of the canon. Furthermore, we see that the individual evangelists do not have everything. Also, if one book contains everything sufficiently, what was the need for so many books? Finally, they themselves say openly that the entire canon is necessary for the purpose of having sufficient teaching. Nor can one say the former, for many sacred and canonical books have perished, according to Chrysostom, homily 9 on Matthew.”
We respond. (1) We take Bellarmine’s argument to the absurd. If the canon of Scripture is imperfect because some sacred books have been lost, not even the Papists themselves will have a perfect canon. The reason is that they cannot restore those lost books through their tradition.
(2) Even if some books written by holy men of God did disappear, they nevertheless have not been counted in the number of the canonical books. Therefore the integrity of the canon lost nothing through their disappearance.
(3) Bellarmine lists among the lost books an Epistle to the Laodiceans, which he thinks is mentioned in Col. 4:16. The Greek, however, reads 
[“from Laodicea”]. Therefore this is taken to mean the letter that was written to the apostle from Laodicea but not one the apostle wrote to the Laodiceans.
(4) Books that were extant at that time presented a canon that was sufficient for each time and age according to the state of the Church at those times; so only the five books of Moses were a perfect canon when the other books of Scripture had not yet come into being.
(5) One must distinguish between the inchoate canon and the consummate canon. Even if it were conceded that the inchoate canon was not yet perfect, one still cannot infer from this that the consummate canon, too, was not perfect.
(6) Although in some canonical books no new teaching is set forth that is not contained in other books, God nevertheless wanted those canonical books to be written and added to the rest for the sake of a richer explanation of the same teaching, so that no place might be left for suspecting the imperfection of the canon.