True... It’s not as direct as Jesus reading from Isaiah and closing with this prophesy is filled as you hear it... However, at the end of the day for 1000+ years there was no disputing the OT canon and it was validated by the same authority that validated the NT canon used by all Christians to this day.
Thank you for the charitable exchange.
"The Tridentine list or decree was the first infallible and effectually promulgated declaration on the Canon of the Holy Scriptures."
See http://www.ewtn.com/library/councils/trent4.htm
There is also the ever-virtuous book of Jesus son of Sirach, and another which is a pseudepigraph, inscribed Wisdom of Solomon. The first of these I have found also in Hebrew, not titled Ecclesiasticus as among the Latins, but Parables; to which were joined Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, so that it equaled the resemblance of Solomon not only in the number of books, but also in the type of material. The second book is nowhere among the Hebrews, but even the very style smells of Greek eloquence; and several old writers affirm that it is from the Jew Philo. Therefore, just as the church reads Judith and Tobit and the books of the Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical scriptures, so also let it read these two volumes for the edification of the people, not for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical dogma.
See http://sanctushieronymus.blogspot.com/2007/12/jeromes-prologue-to-books-of-solomon.html
Meaning the church in Rome; right?
It's the 'authority' because it says it is.
THAT is simply another often parroted myth by those who apparently only read RC propaganda. Again, see here .
Even your own the Catholic Encyclopedia states,
At Jerusalem there was a renascence, perhaps a survival, of Jewish ideas, the tendency there being distinctly unfavourable to the deuteros. St. Cyril of that see, while vindicating for the Church the right to fix the Canon, places them among the apocrypha and forbids all books to be read privately which are not read in the churches. In Antioch and Syria the attitude was more favourable. St. Epiphanius shows hesitation about the rank of the deuteros; he esteemed them, but they had not the same place as the Hebrew books in his regard. The historian Eusebius attests the widespread doubts in his time; he classes them as antilegomena, or disputed writings, and, like Athanasius, places them in a class intermediate between the books received by all and the apocrypha. The 59th (or 60th) canon of the provincial Council of Laodicea (the authenticity of which however is contested) gives a catalogue of the Scriptures entirely in accord with the ideas of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Oriental versions and Greek manuscripts of the period are more liberal; the extant ones have all the deuterocanonicals and, in some cases, certain apocrypha.
The influence of Origen's and Athanasius's restricted canon naturally spread to the West.... St. Jerome cast his weighty suffrage on the side unfavourable to the disputed books... (Catholic Encyclopedia, Canon of the Old Testament, eph. mine)
● The Catholic Encyclopedia also states as regards the Middle Ages,
In the Latin Church, all through the Middle Ages [5th century to the 15th century] we find evidence of hesitation about the character of the deuterocanonicals. There is a current friendly to them, another one distinctly unfavourable to their authority and sacredness, while wavering between the two are a number of writers whose veneration for these books is tempered by some perplexity as to their exact standing, and among those we note St. Thomas Aquinas. Few are found to unequivocally acknowledge their canonicity. The prevailing attitude of Western medieval authors is substantially that of the Greek Fathers. The chief cause of this phenomenon in the West is to be sought in the influence, direct and indirect, of St. Jerome's depreciating Prologus (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm) ^
Moreover, what is the presupposition and conclusion behind your statement of the same authority validating the NT? That the historical stewards of Divine revelation are the infallible authorities on what it is and means?