How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?

The observation is correct: no Gospel contains a sentence like “this book is the inspired Word of God.” What follows from that is the real question, and it is not what the objection assumes.

1. Self-labelling is a strange test of authority. A document's authority does not come from a claim printed inside it. A forged warrant that says “authentic” is still forged, and a genuine one does not become genuine by saying so. If self-attestation were the criterion, we would have to distrust every anonymous police report and trust every confident forgery.

2. Most of the Old Testament fails that test too. Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and large stretches of the Psalms never say “thus says the LORD” about themselves. Yet Jesus treats “the Law and the Prophets” as authoritative Scripture without asking for a self-attestation clause (Matthew 5:17–18). If the test disqualifies the Gospels, it disqualifies the Bible Jesus read.

3. Jesus answers the question for his followers. He promised the Spirit would teach the apostles and bring his words to their remembrance (John 14:26), and he commissioned them as witnesses (Acts 1:8). The Christian claim is not that the Gospel writers decided to promote themselves. It is that the risen Christ authorised the apostolic witness, and the Gospels are that witness written down.

4. The New Testament does claim inspiration, for Scripture. “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). The sentence is passive: God is the one breathing, and the human author's awareness is not the subject. Peter says the same thing — men “spoke from God” as they were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).

5. One New Testament writer calls another Scripture. Peter places Paul's letters among “the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15–16) — a first-century document ranking another first-century document as Scripture. That settles the principle from inside the canon, not from a later church decree.

6. Paul quotes Luke as Scripture. In 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul cites Deuteronomy 25:4 and then Luke 10:7 under one formula: “the Scripture says.” A Gospel is being quoted as Scripture while other Gospels were still circulating. The church did not wait three centuries to treat these books as authoritative.

7. The physical record shows how they were used. Christians copied the Gospels continuously, preferred the codex over the roll for them, and read them aloud in worship beside the Old Testament. Michael Kruger's argument is that the church recognised an authority the books already carried; it did not grant one.

8. The objection proves too much, twice over. No ancient historian writes “this scroll is inspired”; the demand is a modern evidentiary convention imposed backwards on ancient texts. And the same demand would strip the canon of the books Jesus himself endorsed. A test that eliminates everything is not a test.

9. Recognition took time, and that is not a scandal. The canon had a history: some books were debated, and the church argued about them for generations. But recognition is not authorisation — a jeweller does not make a diamond valuable by identifying it. Honest Christians can say the process was messy and still hold that the outcome was guided.

10. Christians differ on how the human authors worked. Some stress the Spirit's superintendence of the writers' own research and wording; others stress dictation. Luke's preface, where he describes careful investigation (Luke 1:1–4), fits the first better. The difference matters, but it does not touch the claim that God speaks through the text.

The objection asks the Gospels to do something no ancient document does and then treats the absence as evidence of a later invention. What the evidence actually shows is books received as Scripture very early, by people who had reason to know. That is a claim you can check in the manuscripts, the citations, and the church's worship.

Sources: Michael Kruger; Canon Revisited; Peter J. Williams; Wesley Huff; D.A. Carson.

Related challenges:
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!
• The New Testament authors were all influenced by pagan religions. Sorry Christians, but Jesus is an unhistorical myth. If you don’t believe me, Google 'Jesus Mithras Osirus Horus'.