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How could they answer? There IS no reasonable answer for how leaders can mandate that their "faithful" accept fallible and erroneous writings as equal to divinely inspired Holy Scripture. Especially since they must KNOW those writings aren't the infallible word of God. Honestly, I think it is part of an overall plan to cause people to doubt the Bible. In other words, saying, "Yeah, well, nobody really believes the Bible is the authority for a Christian." "The Magesterium is who you should trust in as infallible, not the words written by mere men thousands of years ago."

Even on this thread, we see that some insist that only the "gospels" should be accepted since only they contain the words of Jesus. That the words of Jesus matter more than the words of men. They totally forget, or at least discount, that ALL Scripture is given by God. Even the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the retelling of what Jesus said AS IT WAS brought to their memories by the Holy Spirit. Some of those words Jesus said could not have been heard by those with him since he was alone a few times. The thoughts and intents of people's hears were also spoken of which MUST have been known only by the Holy Spirit revealing it to the writers decades after it happened. Even little details were not left out - something that cannot be explained as being passed down by "tradition".

Nope, those books were set apart from the Jewish Old Testament for a very good reason - they did not meet the standards God set for determining what came from him. He even told the Israelites that if a prophet spoke something and it was not true or did not come to pass, that that prophet was not from God - that is how they knew who to trust. It IS curious, though, how those questionable books weren't declared officially official as part of the Canon until the Council of Trent and those anathemas were not existing until then either. It was not mere coincidence that they were added just when the Catholic Church was disputing the Reformation. Without some of them, several doctrines would be proved to be unscriptural and, since the Pope was also declared as infallible as well as the Magesterium, it just wouldn't do having a dogma shown to be against Scripture, would it?