We have over 30,000 copies of books from before they decided what would be included. Their decision on what would be included was mainly based on prevalence and wide distribution of a candidate, the authorship, and uniformity of doctrine. Obscure "gospels" like Thomas and many many others were left out because they had just a few copies, from a small area with suspiciously aberrant doctrines. The lack of wide distribution makes it most likely that it is not a old copy of a text, because of the traditions associated with copying and distributing everything they could get their hands on. When you take the 30,000+ texts and compare them, you find no deviations aside from occasional misspellings, punctuation differences and physical damage. Across all of the deviations, not a single doctrine is brought into question.
We have over 30,000 copies of books from before they decided what would be included. Their decision on what would be included was mainly based on prevalence and wide distribution of a candidate, the authorship, and uniformity of doctrine. Obscure "gospels" like Thomas and many many others were left out because they had just a few copies, from a small area with suspiciously aberrant doctrines. The lack of wide distribution makes it most likely that it is not a old copy of a text, because of the traditions associated with copying and distributing everything they could get their hands on. When you take the 30,000+ texts and compare them, you find no deviations aside from occasional misspellings, punctuation differences and physical damage. Across all of the deviations, not a single doctrine is brought into question.
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