If you are a student of history, you know that Athanasius the 4th century ordered all books he didn't think should be read to be destroyed. It seemed they pretty much had been destroyed, but in 1945 in Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, many of them were found hidden in buried jars. It was thought that monks from a nearby monastaery likely buried them to save them from the destroy order. It was known that they had existed at one time because early writers mentioned them or quoted from them.
We knew there was much diversity of thought in early Christianity, but now we had writings that were outside of the Canon that told the story Of the great variety of early Christian thought.
Many of the manuscripts Did not speak so much from the voice of a believer, but more from the voice of a seeker of God. One of them, the Gospel of Thomas ,had 114 sayings of Jesus, half of which were in the current New Testament, and half of them were new to us.
I mention this to point out that Christianity is not just one stream. There are and have been many ways to look at Jesus and what became Christianity. There are many brilliant thinkers along the way and some very messed up thinkers. I think a dialog today would be healthy instead of different groups sort of standing in their corner and shouting we're right and you're wrong Theere is another way to look at it, many other ways in fact.
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