Both are answers to the circle, and they are close because they answer different halves of it. Recognition-not-conferral fits the historical record better: nothing in the record looks like conferral, and the councils' own language is ratifying rather than constituting. Infallible-list is not a historical claim at all — it is an epistemic one, and it identifies a gap that recognition leaves open, since a witness can be mistaken and the question was how certainty is secured. Narrow edge to recognition on historical fit alone. Deliberately narrow: this is the load-bearing confessional disagreement and a wide ratio here would be a delegate claiming a stake it does not have.

Recognition-not-conferral outranks self-authentication from the rabbinic angle because recognition is public, historical, and contestable. A community can preserve disagreements about books and interpretations while still converging in practice; appeal to an inward testimony of the Spirit offers no shared procedure when recognizers diverge. Yet the preference is narrow: recognition describes the social history but does not by itself explain why the recognized text is divine rather than merely customary, which is exactly the gap self-authentication tries to fill.