Cross-cluster, and scoped tightly to one question: how did the canon in fact come to be fixed. On that question reception is descriptively closest — nothing conferred, usage converged, ratification arrived late and locally, and the last word was uptake. Magisterium answers a question reception answers badly or not at all, which is how a live dispute gets closed while it is live; reception adjudicates only in retrospect, and sometimes never. Narrow, because descriptive fit on canon formation is one virtue among several that an authority claim has to satisfy.

Viewed from rabbinic history, reception fits better than magisterium as an account of how a canon acquires durable communal authority: use and argument stabilize before any single office can certify the result. But the edge is narrow because rabbinic Judaism is not authority without institutions. Courts decide live cases, inherited procedure constrains argument, and communal uptake alone cannot tell a community what to do tomorrow. Reception captures distributed legitimacy; magisterium captures the need for contemporaneous closure. The Jewish analogy needs both and is identical to neither.