All of the cross-references I provided were from footnotes in the Good News Bible, subtitled 'Today's English Version'. This is the Bible I use for daily, non-scholarly reading. (for more serious research, I also use the Anchor Bible, as we have discussed, the New English Bible and the New Jerusalem Bible.) So if your mind boggles, and you are being unkind by pooh-poohing the reference to Tobit, your targets are the ABS and their editors, not me. I only selected the ones I thought were of special interest. In this case, I think the similarity is too great to be coincidence, but I suppose it's like considering the glass to be either half-full or half-empty - everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. In any case, these books didn't just appear sometime around the Reformation, they were regarded as canonical by all Christians for many centuries, and it's likely, if not certain, that the NT writers knew of them.

Now, speaking of INDIRECT references, let's just, for purposes of comparison, look at just a couple of instances where the OT allusion is to a protocanonical passage:

Since the holiday season is fast approaching, let's find something Christmas-y. Mt 2:4 states: 'Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and left...for Egypt...This was done to make true what the Lord had said through the prophet, 'I called my Son out of Egypt'. This is an allusion to Hosea 11:1, which reads, 'When Israel was a child, I loved him and called him out of Egypt as my son. But the more I called to him, the more he turned away from me. My people sacrificed to Baal they burned incense to idols.' Surely this is as indirect as anything in the list I gave you! How could this possibly refer to Jesus? A few verses later, Matthew, in order to provide some balance, tells us that Joseph later returned with his family '...and made his home in Nazareth. And so what the prophets said came true: 'He will be called a Nazarene'. So we have both the flight and the return fulfilling prophecy, but the latter seems to be only a literary device on Matthew's part, since no such prophecy is found in the OT.

One more example, if I may: Paul says 'Only the person who is put right with God thru faith shall live (Rom 1:17), and here the reference is to Habakkuk 2:4, but note the difference in meaning: 'Those who are evil will not survive, but those who are righteous will live because they are faithful to God.'

So we find that it is not faith, in the sense of belief, which saves, but faithfulness to God and His commandments through out right conduct, and of course, Paul confirms this in Romans 2. In spite of this, there are many who claim salvation is through faith alone, with good works being useless, so here it is the reader and not the writer who misses the sense of the allusion. Glad to hear that you reject the concept of salvation thru faith alone. No question, however, that faith is vitally important.

In part two, below, I'd like make a few points regarding your 'reasoned conclusion' of Bible truth.