Thanks. The apostolic authorship was important, but what established the apostles as being of God was their holy qualities, scriptural conflation and complementarity and supernatural attestation, (Acts 17:2; 28:23; 2Cor. 4:2; 6:1-10; 12:12) which qualities were behind the gradual establishment of the Divine writings as being that. I believe the relatively obscure apocryphal writings fail this witness, but whether the were quoted is not a deciding aspects, as books such as non-canonical Enoch are.
But i do not think it is correct to say that no early church “fathers” considered the apocryphal works as equal to the already established Jewish Scriptures, as Augustine did and led a majority, while i also think the local councils mentioned were in full agreement at least as re their formal ratifications of books.
My point was that there was debate while Trent was the first to issued an infallible canon which ended any debate for RCs, although there some Catholics who reject some of what Trent affirmed, such as in its attribution of authorship re Hebrews, 2 Peter, etc.
Thanks for the reply. I find it very interesting that the MAIN reasons why some accept the Apocryphal books is that they have a few verses in them that seem to speak of prayers for the dead. This is then used to develop the doctrines of both indulgences and Purgatory - things definitely NOT taught in the rest of the commonly accepted books of the Bible.