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"The authority of the scriptures IS the scriptures which was given by God...That authority was never passed on to any institution...It is the 'words' (of God) which are authoritative..."

This suffers from two internal contradictions.

First, authority is passed on to an institution --- the Church ---- by the very Scriptures which you revere.
Second, the canon of Scriptures was determined by the Church centuries before the KJV.

Let’s look at that first point, that the words of Scripture explicitly pass on authority to a divine institution, namely to the Church instituted by our divine Lord Jesus Christ. The authority of the Church to "bind and loose," the authority to determine "whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; whose sins you shall retain, they are retained"; the authority inherent in the possession to "the keys of the kingdom of heaven," whose significance is foretold in Isaiah, the power to "open and shut" the kingdom, with the one who holds the keys clothed in "all the glory of his father's house." (Isaiah 22:20-24)--- all of these bequests of authority are found in the very words of Scripture.

They are found both in their Biblical foretelling and foreshadowing (prophets and kings), their Biblical institution (Gospels) and in their earliest subsequent development (Epistles).

In order to minimize or extinguish the authority of the Church, you would have to minimize or extinguish these Scriptures; and this you cannot do, because these Scriptures are "the Word" which you and we revere.

The second contradiction is that the preservation and canonization of Scripture itself was passed on through the Church.

The King James Bible, first published in 1611, contained the full Bible as defined by the earliest Christian canons of the 3 ^rd-5 ^th centuries. That is, the 1611 KJV included, not just 66 books, but the entire un-cut Bible, including the "books called Apocrypha.” This “whole” canon approved by Catholic councils and popes in the 3 ^rd-5 ^th centuries, is found in print in the Tyndale-Matthew Bible (1537) , the Great Bible (1539) , the Bishops Bible (1568) , the Protestant Geneva Bible (1560) , and the original King James Bible (1611) until parts of it were intentionally deleted by a series of subsequent Bible revisers from 1640-1880.

This leads to the vey natural question, where did they get their new, several-books- smaller Biblical canon, and who authorized that?

Ah, there’s the interesting part. Having rejected the traditional 1500-year-old Christian (Catholic-Orthodox) canon, the revisers had to seek a different OT canon, namely the Jewish Masoretic (Hebrew), derived ultimately from the work of Rabbi Akiva, the father of Rabbinical Judaism.

Rabbi Akiva and his circle (the School of Jamnia) developed their own list of OT canonical books for reasons that were non-Christian, and in fact, theologically anti-Christian.

Rabbi Akiva and the other Rabbis associated with his school, notably Rabbi Meir, Judah ben Ilai, Simeon bar Yohai, Jose ben Halafta, Eleazar ben Shammai, and Rabbi Nehemiah, wished to “purify” the Jewish OT canon from the influences of the early Christian Church. The Christians used the LXX OT canon very effectively throughout the Hellenic Mediterranean world to gain converts; Rabbi Akiva and his pupil and translator, Aquila of Sinope, wished to curb that by delegitimizing the LXX and promoting a shortened and revised, de-Christianized text for use in Jewish synagogues.

Thus, to the extent that all the early Protestant Bibles, including the KJV, retained the book-list of the Catholic Scriptures for more than a century, from 1537-1640, you do owe a debt to the Catholic Church for the preservation and transmission of the Biblical canon.

To the extent that most Protestant Bibles after 1640, and especially after 1880, rejected the LXX books and the Septuagint translation generally, you owe a debt to Akiva and Aquila, and the systematically anti-Christian faction of Rabbinical Judaism.