The Song of Thomas Gnostic Gospel Excluded from Bible

I think this is beautiful, and you start to wonder why this and other books were not included in the bible.

The sparse and trenchant sayings of Jesus, a record of his life in his own words, identified as a Gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi documents of the earliest Christians; a poetic version written and voiced by Jabez L. Van Cleef.

The Gospel According to Thomas, also known as The Gospel of Thomas, is a New Testament-era apocryphon, nearly completely preserved in a Coptic papyrus manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

The text is in the form of a codex, bound in a method now called Coptic binding. It was written for a school of early Christians who claimed Thomas the Apostle as their founder. Unlike the four canonical gospels, Thomas is not a narrative account of the life of Jesus and is not worked into any overt philosophical or rhetorical context. Rather, it is logia, or gospel sayings, with short dialogues and sayings attributed to Jesus.

In the incipit, the writer is styled Didymus Judas Thomas. Didymus (Greek) and Thomas (Hebrew) both mean twin, and the name Judas , also Jude or Judah, is the anglicized Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Yehudah.

The work comprises 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of these sayings resemble those found in the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Others were unknown until its discovery, and Christian scholars assert that a small number are incompatible with sayings in the four canonical gospels. No major Christian group accepts this gospel as canonical or authoritative.

When this Coptic version of the complete text of Thomas was found, scholars realized that three separate portions of a Greek version of it had already been discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in 1897[1]. In 1903 two more different fragments were discovered in Oxyrhynchus, seemingly originating from the same collection of sayings bearing the Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas (P. Oxy. I 1; IV 654; IV 655) dating from between AD 200 to AD 250, with another Greek fragment discovered in 1905 predating AD 200; the manuscript of the Coptic version dates to about 340. Although the Coptic version is not quite identical to any of the Greek fragments, it is believed that the Coptic version was translated from an earlier Greek version, itself recorded from an earlier oral version.

The original text was published in photographic facsimile in 1975. The James M. Robinson translation was first published in 1977, as part of The Nag Hammadi Library in English, (E.J. Brill and Harper & Row). The Gospel of Thomas has been translated and annotated in several languages. The original manuscript is the property of Egypt's Department of Antiquities. The first photographic edition was published in 1956, and its first critical analysis appeared in 1959