And, since you can not find such authority in WRITING, anywhere, you obviously support the “Oral Tradition” in some ways, even though you are too stubborn to admit it.
“They just KNEW” you say? How did they know, and who told them, and how were they told, and how did they pass that knowledge down through the ages?
ORAL TRADITION!
Give up!
The words used to describe what is translated as “scriptures” was Tanakh.
“You have to understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics. The canon is rather the separation that came about because of the intuitive insight of Christian believers. They could hear the Good Shepherd in the Gospel of John; they could hear it only muffled and distorted way in the Gospel of Thomas mixed in with a lot of other things.
“When the pronouncement was made about the canon, it merely ratified what the general sensitivity of the church had already determined. You see, the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn’t derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together. The early church merely listened and sensed that these were authoritative accounts.
“For somebody now to say that the canon emerged only after councils and synods made these pronouncements would be like saying, ‘Let’s get several academies of musicians to make a pronouncement that the music of Bach and Beethoven is wonderful.’ I would say, ‘Thank you for nothing! We knew it because of sensitivity to what is good music and what is not. The same with the canon.” Dr. Bruce M. Metzger, Ph.D.