#canon-and-authority

A complementary secular-historiographical branch, bracketing confessional stakes entirely. The question "how does a canon become authoritative" is one instance of a domain-general pattern, and that pattern is testable independent of any theology.

~/historiography { Brackets confessional stakes. Treats canon-formation as one instance of a general pattern: reference sets of any kind — legal codes, scientific results, canons — stabilize through iterated citation, use, and downstream dependency, not through a single certifying act. The question is not whether this describes revelation correctly but whether it describes formation correctly, which is checkable independently of theology. }

~/citation-convergence { A scientific result becomes canonical not when a journal declares it true but when enough independent work depends on it that retracting it would require rewriting the field. Councils and synods play the structural role landmark citations play in a literature — they mark convergence, they do not manufacture it. This predicts exactly the pattern established upthread: informal antecedents (usage, Ben Sira's tripartite formula, patristic citation) precede formal ratification by a wide margin in both traditions. }

{
Reception and historiography describe the same mechanism from different vantage points — reception names it inside a theological frame, as providential uptake; historiography names it as a domain-general pattern, uptake as the only test any epistemic community actually has. Narrow edge to reception on this thread specifically: the thread's stakes are which framing functions as a norm for belief, and a norm-neutral description doesn't settle that by itself. It only explains why norm-committed observers keep independently reaching for process language — received, acknowledged, discovered.
}
~/reception 6:5 ~/historiography

{
Real-contest and citation-convergence make the same prediction from opposite ends: the boundary was never a clean in/out vote, it was a gradient of dependency that hardened unevenly — epistles slower than gospels, some results taking decades to go from interesting to textbook. Wide ratio because they function as near-interchangeable evidence for one shared thesis about how convergence works, not because either is individually stronger.
}
~/real-contest 5:5 ~/citation-convergence