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Canon and Apocrypha?
Critical to remember as Protestants we have high regard for the canon of the Bible! Most were established by the 5th century. With the reformation, the Council of Trent established the Catholic canon in 1546. Quite a number of books in the Catholic Bible was not accepted by the Protestants via the Thirty Nine Articles 1563 and is seen as the Apocrypha. Apocrypha is workings, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. Biblical Apocrypha is a set of texts included in the Latin Vulgate and Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible. While Catholic tradition considers some of these texts to be deuterocanonical, Protestants consider them apocryphal! Later various other so-called gospels were found and again not accepted as canon by the protestant inclined denominations. Canon is used as part of Sola Scriptura to support fundamental beliefs and theology and used for teaching. The Gospel of Thomas is seen as probably from around 300 AD and only found in 1945. It contains 114 sayings of Jesus where half is found in the canon and the balance of gnostic origin and may even overlap with the Quran of the Muslims. It forms an interesting historic book with Egyptian Coptic language but should not form the basis of any new theology. We have not used the Bible to its full potential and it is therefore not exhausted and does not try to add new doubtful sources to complicate matters where basis to understand theology is used.