Q. Are the Dead Sea Scrolls the same as the apocryphal books missing from the King James Bible? If not, what are the differences between the two?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not the same thing as the Apocrypha.
The Apocrypha is a group of books that were written in Greek within the Jewish community in the centuries before Christ. Those books are distinct from the Old Testament because they were written in Greek, not Hebrew, and they are distinct from the New Testament because they were written before Christ came, not after. So there is something about them that sets them apart as different from the books that all Christians accept as inspired Scripture. As a result, Christians hold differing beliefs about how authoritative they are. All Christians agree that they are valuable and edifying to read. But not all Christians consider them to be the inspired word of God. For a fuller discussion of this, please see this post.
The term Dead Sea Scrolls refers to a specific set of manuscripts (that is, handwritten copies of certain works) found in an area near the Dead Sea. Many of these are manuscripts of books that are in the Old Testament. Others are manuscripts of books that are part of the Apocrypha. Still other manuscripts are of books that only a few communities of Christians accept as Scriptural. (I discuss several of those books in this post.) There are also a few manuscripts relating to the specific beliefs and practices of the community whose members created these handwritten manuscripts.
So there is something of an overlap between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocrypha, in the sense that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are manuscripts of books in the Apocrypha. But the Apocrypha is basically a group of books that exists in very many copies, while the Dead Sea Scrolls are one set of copies of certain books, some of which are books of the Apocrypha.
Incidentally, when the King James Bible was first published in 1611, it did contain the Apocrypha because it was produced by the Church of England, which accepted the Apocrypha as Scriptural. But as other communities have reprinted the King James Bible over the centuries, many of them have left out the Apocrypha because they do not consider it Scriptural.
Q. In the book of Revelation 22:18 it mentions the adding or replacing of things written in the Bible as big trouble. The books that where taken out of the Old Testament; like the Jubilees, Enoch, Gospel of Mary, etc., are these people who removed these books in big trouble?
Actually, the books you list were never “in” the Bible, in the way I would understand that, so they were never taken “out” either.
The canon of Scripture—that is, what books the Bible contains, as far as Christians are concerned—was determined over the course of several centuries. Eventually a consensus emerged about the 66 books that all Christians accept as divinely inspired and fully authoritative. Some specific groups of Christians accept further books as useful and edifying, and in some cases they include them within their Bibles, but in every case they make some distinction between them and the other 66 books. (See this post: Do different Christian communities really consider different books Scriptural?)
As for the books you list, Jubilees and Enoch are accepted as Scriptural by one small part of the Christian church. The Gospel of Mary (which would relate to the New Testament rather than the Old Testament) is not accepted as Scriptural by any part of the Christian church. So as I said, these books, and others like them, were never really “in,” so no one is in trouble for taking them “out.”
For more about the issue you are asking about, see these posts:
Q. I have a book listing the “missing books from the Bible.” The following were named in the book. I have never seen or heard of them before, so could you tell me, are they really missing books of the Bible and if so, where would they go in the order of all the books, and are they okay to read?
Prayer of Manasseh, 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Psalms 151, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, Prayer of Azariah, Jubilees, Enoch, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary
You have a list of various works that come from the same communities that produced the canonical Scriptural books, but which are not accepted as the inspired word of God by Christians throughout the world. Some of them are considered to be inspired Scripture by some Christian groups, however, and that is perhaps why your list calls them “missing books from the Bible.” Several of them are found in some Bibles, but not in others, depending on the beliefs of particular groups.
I would say in general that you could read these books to get a perspective on what various people have believed at different times and in different places, but unless you belong to a Christian community that accepts them as Scripture, you should not read them in the same way that you would read the Bible. Here are some further details.
For one thing, some of these books were included in the Septuagint, a popular and influential ancient translation of the Old Testament into Greek, and as a result, various Christian communities have accepted them as canonical. The Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon are three additions to the book of Daniel—written in Greek, however, not in Hebrew or Aramaic like the rest of that book—that Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept as canonical. 1 Esdras and Psalm 151 are other works found in the Septuagint, and Orthodox Christians accept them, although Catholics and Protestants do not.
The Prayer of Manasseh is included in some manuscripts of the Septuagint, and Orthodox Christians consider it to be deuterocanonical, meaning that it can be read during services of worship, but it is not as authoritative as the other books in the Bible. (Please see this post for a fuller explanation of what that means.)
The books of Enoch and Jubilees are ancient Jewish works that most Jews and Christians do not consider to be Scripture, although the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Jews do accept them. Jubilees is essentially a re-telling of the events of Genesis, while Enoch deals with angels and demons and events at the beginning and end of world history.
Finally, there are some books on the list that come from the first few centuries after Christ, and no Christian communities accept them as canonical. Those include 2 Esdras, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary.
If you do want to read these books, I would start with the ones that are most widely accepted, and I would stay away from the ones that no Christian communities accept. However, personally I would want to make sure that I had first read all of the books that all Christians accept as Scripture before devoting any time to ones that there is much doubt about.
Q. Why were some books removed from the Bible and is it a sin to read them?
I believe you are talking about the so-called Apocrypha. That term refers to books that were written in Greek within the Jewish community in the centuries before Christ. Those books are distinct from the Old Testament because they were written in Greek, not Hebrew, and they are distinct from the New Testament because they were written before Christ came, not after. So there is already something about them that sets them apart as different from the books that all Christians accept as inspired Scripture.
Nevertheless, after lengthy discussion and debate in the few centuries after Christ, regional councils in the western part of the Roman Empire, at Hipppo in 393 and Carthage in 397, approved adding these books to the canon of Scripture, as long as this decision was ratified by the central authority in Rome.
No action was taken in that regard for over 1,000 years. But finally, in 1546, the Council of Trent, largely in response to the way Martin Luther had separated out these apocryphal books and placed them between the testaments in his German translation of Bible, decreed that they were as fully canonical as the others. Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic church still describes these books as deuterocanonical, meaning that they belong to a second group of books “whose Scriptural character was contested in some quarters,” as opposed to the protocanonical books, the collection of “sacred writings which have been always received by Christendom without dispute.”
The Council of Trent also decreed that the Vulgate was the authoritative text of Scripture. That actually sent something of a mixed message about the Apocrypha, because St. Jerome’s prologues were always included in the Vulgate, and in his prologue to the book of Kings, in which he surveyed the entire Old Testament, he specified that the books that had been translated from Greek, rather than from Hebrew, are “set aside among the apocrypha” (inter apocrifa seponendum) and “are not in the canon” (non sunt in canone). He made similar comments in the prologues to several of the apocryphal books themselves. So while the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of these books is explicit, its position on them is not without internal tensions.
Eastern Orthodox Bibles include all the books in the Catholic Apocrypha along with several more. However, it classifies all these apocryphal books as Anagignoskomena (“worthy to be read”), meaning that they are read during services of worship, but that they are not as authoritative as the other books. Orthodox theologians sometimes call the apocryphal books deuterocanonical to indicate their secondary authority, using this term differently from Catholics, for whom it describes how these books were received after first being disputed.
And Protestants, ever since Martin Luther, have not considered the Apocrypha canonical, except for Protestants in the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition.
So maybe the real question is not why some books were removed from the Bible, but why some books that were different from both the Old Testament and the New Testament were added to the Bible. The answer is that, as the Eastern Orthodox say, they are “worthy to be read.” They provide important information about what happened in the years between the testaments, they tell inspiring stories of how people remained faithful to God during difficult trials in those times, and they add to the collection of wise advice for living that is found in the canonical wisdom books.
So it is certainly not a sin to read them. Even Protestants, who do not consider them to be inspired Scripture, say that they are edifying, meaning that reading them can strengthen our faith and devotion to God. As a Protestant myself, I do not have these apocryphal books in the Bibles that I use regularly for study and devotions. But I do have copies of these books in some other Bibles that I own. I have read the apocryphal books and gotten a lot out of them.
I hope this provides you with some helpful background to the issue. As I said, it would certainly not be a sin to read those books, and I think they would help you learn some useful things if you did read them. If you belong to a community of Christians, and if this issue is important within that community, you could explain to anyone you told about reading the books that you were not reading them as Scripture, but as edifying literature that has come down to us from within the tradition of our faith. I hope no one would be upset about that.
Q. Is the Book of Mormon supposed to be the first book made? I thought the Bible was the only book. Where did the book of Mormon in the Bible come from?
The Book of Mormon is actually not one of the books of the Bible. The biblical books of the Old Testament come from several to many centuries before Jesus, while the New Testament books were written within the first century after Jesus. The existence of these books in these time periods is attested by ancient translations, quotations, and copies. (There is some debate among scholars about the exacting dating of specific books, but I think this is a fair summary of the general consensus.)
The Book of Mormon, for its part, first appeared in the year 1830. It was published by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. He said that the book was a translation of writings that were engraved on buried golden plates that an angel told him where to find. These writings, he said, came from prophets who lived on the American continent up to four thousand years ago. But Smith never produced the plates, no other copies of them are known, and no evidence of these prophets, their lives, or their words is found anywhere else. It’s a matter of faith for Mormons that Smith’s account is true, but others have questioned it because of this lack of evidence.
What we can say is that the Book of Mormon is the oldest of the books that Mormons consider sacred. But it comes from a much later time period than the books of the Bible, which Christians consider to be inspired and authoritative.
Q. Do you read the conclusion to the book of Revelation as an indication that the canon of divine-inspired writings was concluded at that point? I’m specifically referring to the strict commands about not adding anything or taking anything away from what has been written. I understand the historical arguments concerning canonicity of Scripture, but my question is different from that. What I’m specifically asking is whether, in your view, God’s special revelation to John at the end of the book of Revelation was God’s way of saying (in essence) to humanity, “I will not be inspiring any more writings after this.” I’ve heard this argued before, but I’m undecided on it myself.
That statement in Revelation applies explicitly to “the words of the prophecy of this book,” so the original intention is not to close the canon of Scripture. It’s only when Revelation is placed last in the New Testament–where it does not always appear in the historical tradition–that the statement seems to take on this larger meaning.
I would be hesitant to endorse a position that requires a certain biblical book order, when that order was so fluid for so long, before the advent of printing. As I explain in my book After Chapters and Verses: “The books of the New Testament also appear historically in a variety of orders. Bruce Metzger observes [in The Canon of the New Testament] that these books are typically gathered into five groups, in this sequence: the gospels; Acts; Paul’s epistles; the general epistles; and Revelation. But Metzger then notes, “Prior to the invention of printing, however, there were many other sequences, not only of the five main groups of books, but also of the several books within each group. . . . A sequence in which the book of Revelation follows the gospels, instead of concluding the entire New Testament, is attested several times.”
Richmond Lattimore actually revived this presentation in our own day in the first volume of his New Testament translation, The Four Gospels and the Revelation (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
So, once again, since the argument that the warning at the end of Revelation closes the canon depends on a certain book order, but NT book order has varied considerably throughout the centuries, I would not accept that argument.
Q. If what you say is true, then why doesn’t the Christian community periodically open debate/discussion on what additional Christian literature could be included in the present library (canon)? That is, additional (not to be read “supplemental”) literature that, as time rolls on, more and more contemporarily brings greater global value to the witness of that outworking of the divine-human relationship?
Even though I said in my last post that “God inspired the Bible while human authors were in the process of writing to address concerns that had arisen within the believing community,” and even though to this day the ongoing life of that community raises new concerns well worth addressing authoritatively, I would nevertheless argue that the canon of Christian Scripture should be considered closed. And I would argue this on the very same basis that I answered the original question about the uniqueness of the Bible.
Specifically, while I also said in that post that the human authors of the Bible “used their God-given abilities to a significant degree to shape not just the form but arguably even the content of the sacred books,” I also noted that “it can be recognized in retrospect that the impulse for them to do this actually came from God.” And this happened in such a way that, paradoxically, we can also say that much of the initiative behind the creation of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures was divine, even though the initiative behind the composition of the actual books themselves was ostensibly human.
Here’s what I mean. The biblical books, in terms of when and why they were written (as opposed to simply what parts of the story they tell), are actually clustered around significant redemptive-historical events: the exodus of ancient Israel from Egypt; the establishment of the Davidic monarchy; the exile and return; and—consummately—the coming of Jesus Christ to “fulfill” all that came before and bring the unfolding story of redemption to its climax. When we see the Bible in this light, we recognize that God’s contribution to the creation of the Scriptures was to initiate these events; the human contribution was to reflect on them under divine tutelage and express how the community should conduct and reorient its ongoing life in response to them.
Moreover, also when seen in this light, the biblical books, taken together, tell a story that has already reached its conclusion, that is, its dramatic resolution, even though it has not reached its actual ending. To borrow some images from the biblical story itself, the rightful king has now taken his throne; what remains is for his whole realm to acknowledge his authority. Alternatively, we might say that the marriage has already taken place; now the bride and groom must work out how to “live happily ever after,” which (as in a real marriage) will require significant character transformation, at least on the part of Christ’s bride the church—that is the part of the story we are in now.
And the ultimate ending, the return of Christ as acknowledged ruler of his entire realm, is already anticipated and depicted within the biblical story. So our part today is not to add more books to the Bible, as if its story needed more filling out. Rather, our part is to live out the section of the story between its dramatic conclusion and its actual ending—the section between the “already” and the “not yet.” This will necessarily involve more working out, including in writing, of concerns that arise within the believing community. But as valuable and worthwhile as many of these writings will be, they do not need to be added to the Bible. Its story is complete.
This is a follow-up to my post about the recent publication entitled A New New Testament. One of the justifications its editors offer for adding books to the New Testament is this:
Both now and for the past 400 years Catholics and Protestants don’t agree on what is in the Bible, and neither do Episcopalians and Lutherans. Internationally the eastern Orthodox, Ethiopian, and Syriac Bibles all contain different books than the western Catholic and Protestant Bibles.
Now it is true that the Bibles of these various communities contain some different books. However, we need to make some important observations about this:
1. None of these Bibles differ when it comes to the New Testament. All Christians communities agree universally about what books belong to the New Testament. So these differences do not provide any justification for changing the New Testament canon.
2. The current differences are rather about certain Old Testament books that were added to the biblical canon at the end of the Fourth Century in the Western church, but not in the Eastern church. No other books have been considered for inclusion since then by any of the communities the editors of A New New Testament mention. So it’s somewhat misleading to cite these communities in support of adding books to the biblical canon, particularly so many centuries later.
3. Since these books were added, and especially since the 1500s, the trend in newly-formed communities in the West—Anglican/Episcopal, Lutheran, and other Protestant—has been towards rejecting these books as canonical. Only the Roman Catholic Church still considers them fully canonical. In other words, the percentage of Christians who consider these books Scriptural, even in the West, has been steadily decreasing in recent centuries. One could posit that the church is actually moving towards a consensus about the canon that would exclude these disputed books. So the appeal to disagreement among various communities about “what is in the Bible” as grounds for adding to the canon is not really valid.
4. All of this said, there is still ample precedent for putting different books in Bibles, as the examples below will show. Nevertheless, this does not provide justification for adding more books to the canon of inspired Scripture. But that is precisely what the committee of scholars behind A New New Testament wants to do. As the publisher’s web site explains, “Hal Taussig called together a council of scholars and spiritual leaders to discuss and reconsider which books belong in the New Testament. . . . They voted on which should be added” to the “previously bound books” (that is, the ones previously bound together in the canon). As I said in my earlier post, it would have been much better to call the publication An Anthology of Early Christian Literature or even An Expanded New Testament, showing that books were being added to a published volume, but not making a claim that they should be accepted as inspired Scripture on a par with the canonical books.
Here are the details about which additional books appear in the Bibles of specific Christian communities. (I am indebted to this article for leads to much of this information.)
The issue is whether followers of Jesus should consider canonical certain books that were written in Greek within the Jewish community in the centuries before Christ. These books, sometimes known as the Apocrypha, are missing from the Hebrew Bible but they were included in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was most popular among early Christians.
The Roman Catholic Church, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, includes the following apocryphal books in its Bible because it considers them fully canonical: Tobias, Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Wisdom of Solomon, First and Second Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel found in the Septuagint. These books were affirmed as canonical by regional councils at Hipppo in 393 and Carthage in 397, pending eventual ratification by Rome. Around this same time Jerome included them in the Vulgate, his Latin translation of the Bible.
A manuscript of the Vulgate
However, Catholic theologians describe these books as deuterocanonical, meaning that they belong to a second group of books “whose Scriptural character was contested in some quarters,” as opposed to the protocanonical books, the collection of “sacred writings which have been always received by Christendom without dispute.” To the extent that a Catholic considered the consensus of Christendom significant, this distinction would have some bearing on the authority attached to these books.
Nevertheless, in 1546 the Council of Trent, largely in response to the way Martin Luther had separated out the apocryphal books and placed them between the testaments in his German translation of Bible, decreed that these books were as fully canonical as the others—finally validating the decision of the Council of Carthage over a thousand years later. The Council of Trent also decreed that the Vulgate was the authoritative text of Scripture.
This actually sent something of a mixed message about the Apocrypha, however, because Jerome’s prologues were always included in the Vulgate, and in his prologue to the book of Kings, in which he surveyed the entire Old Testament, Jerome specified that the books that had been translated from Greek, rather than from Hebrew, are “set aside among the apocrypha” (inter apocrifa seponendum) and “are not in the canon” (non sunt in canone). He made similar comments in the prologues to several of the apocryphal books themselves.
So while the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of these books is explicit, its position on them is not without internal tensions.
Eastern Orthodox Bibles include all the books in the Catholic Apocrypha, plus 2 Esdras, 3 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. Greek Orthodox Bibles also contain 4 Maccabees, in an appendix. However, all these apocryphal books are classified as Anagignoskomena (“worthy to be read”), meaning that they are read during services of worship, but that they are not as authoritative as the other books. Orthodox theologians sometimes call the apocryphal books deuterocanonical to indicate their secondary authority, using this term differently from Catholics, for whom it describes how these books were received after first being disputed.
The Coptic (Ethiopian) Church traditionally considered all of the books in the Catholic Apocrypha canonical, along with 3 Maccabees, the Letter of Jeremiah, and Psalm 151. However, according to the Coptic Encyclopedia, “At the beginning of the twentieth century and by order of Cyril V (1874-1927)” all the apocryphal books were “removed from the canon,” although they are still “normally included in the Coptic versions of the Bible.”
Anglican or Episcopal Bibles typically include the Apocrypha, and the Book of Common Prayer prescribes readings from it. However, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England specify that the canonical books are those “of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church” (that is, only the protocanonical ones, and not the deuterocanonical ones, in the Catholic sense of those terms). As for the apocryphal books, these “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”
Lutheran Bibles also typically include the Apocrypha, but not mixed in among the Old Testament books; rather, as noted above, they are in a separate section between the testaments. Martin Luther wrote in his preface to this section that they were “books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are profitable and good to read.” (Das sind Bücher so nicht der heiligen Schrift gleichgehalten: und doch nützlich und gut zu lesen sind.)
Other Protestant Bibles contain the same Old Testament books as the Hebrew Bible.
So once again, the only differences between Christian communities when it comes to the biblical canon have to do with books that were added by the Catholic church to the Old Testament in the Fourth Century. The trend in the following centuries has been away from accepting these books. This hardly provides a precedent for adding books to the New Testament today.
Two notes about the New Testament itself:
The publishers of A New New Testament probably refer to the Syriac Church for the following reason. Tatian, a second-century Christian writer and theologian, created a harmony of the four gospels called the Diatessaron. Because Tatian’s influence was felt strongly in Syria, the oldest Syriac Bibles include the Diatessaron in place of the four gospels themselves. But by the middle of the Fifth Century, the separate gospels had been reintroduced in Syriac Bibles, displacing the Diatessaron. There is therefore, as noted above, no difference among contemporary Christians about the New Testament canon. And the very fact that Tatian created a harmony of the four canonical gospels shows that the church accepted these, and no others, as inspired Scripture. This example, therefore, hardly makes a case for adding any new gospels.
The editors of A New New Testament also claim that Martin Luther himself tried to remove some books from the New Testament, and successfully did so from what he called the Old Testament. We’ve just seen that Luther actually removed the Apocrypha, which had always been disputed by the Eastern church, from the Old Testament, and put it in a section between the testaments.
As for the New Testament, in the earliest editions of his German Bible, Luther moved Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, which he said were inferior books, to the back. But he soon reconsidered this opinion, restored these books to their original places, and wrote more appreciative prefaces to them. In addition, as this site explains, “In all the editions of Luther’s Bible translation after 1522, the Reformer dropped the paragraphs at the end of his general Preface to the New Testament which made value judgments among the various biblical books.”
So it’s not really fair to Luther to say that he tried to remove some books from the New Testament when he only entertained this idea briefly, then reconsidered, and even retracted his earlier negative comments about books such as James.
Q. Recently, A New New Testament, published by Hal Taussig, has incorporated 10 new books into the New Testament. Most of these texts are Gnostic. Can you shed some light on the claims of the “Bible scholars” behind the project as to why these texts should be added to the canon?
Your specific question is why a group of scholars wants to add particular books to the New Testament when these books are “Gnostic,” that is, they “come from a different time period than any New Testament document, and they represent a fundamentally different worldview,” as one reviewer has observed. I will answer that question first. But this new publication also raises the issue of whether anyone can add any more books to the New Testament at this point, and if so, how and why might that be done? I’ll respond to that question as well.
I have not seen a copy of A New New Testament, but in my doctoral studies I did read some of the extra books it contains, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla.
The publisher’s web site, in “A Conversation With Hal Taussig,” explains that the committee of scholars behind the edition wanted to include these books precisely because they represent a fundamentally different worldview. Taussig says that the new books will show that “some of the narrow-minded doctrines of orthodox Christianity and the old-fashioned ideas of the traditional New Testament are not the only way that the early Christ movements expressed themselves.” He says that the expanded collection “opens the door to a wider set of expressions, practices, stories, and teachings than [Christians] have previously known.”
In other words, the scholars on the committee behind this publication (a complete list of them can be found in this article) didn’t like traditional Christian beliefs and practices, they wanted to challenge them by adding other kinds books to the Bible, and they’re hoping this will attract people to their own beliefs.
No one can do this. No self-appointed, narrowly-defined committee (this one excluded any scholars who didn’t find orthodox Christianity narrow-minded and the ideas of the New Testament old-fashioned) can decide on its own what books should be in the Bible. The canon of the New Testament was not established by a committee or council of church leaders.
Rather, as I explain in this post, “books that stood the test of time through continuous use in diverse Christian centers were eventually accepted by almost all believers.” The formation of the canon was a process that unfolded over centuries. I believe, by faith, that through this process the Holy Spirit was bearing witness to the church corporately about which books were Scriptural. (For specifics about the virtual consensus among Christians regarding the canon of Scripture, see this post.)
If we were going to add any more books to the canon, the same process would have to unfold in the centuries ahead. For example, suppose we discovered another letter by the apostle Paul—his letter to Laodicea, for instance, mentioned at the end of Colossians but not known now to survive in any copies. This letter would have to stand the test of time and continual use in diverse Christian communities, as the other New Testament documents have, before it was accepted as part of the word of God.
And the individuals who contributed to this ultimate determination would all have to be active community followers of Jesus. The committee behind A New New Testament included a Jewish rabbi and an “expert in yogic and Buddhist traditions.” While such people may have an academic background in biblical studies, by their own admission they are not part of the living Christian community that is animated and directed by the Holy Spirit.
I can, however, think of one good use for the extra books in question. Recognizing that “early Christ movements expressed themselves” in ways different from the ones we know today can help us appreciate the good reasons behind many of the beliefs and practices we have adopted.
For example, in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla, thinking she is about to be killed in the arena by wild beasts, baptizes herself. Her life is miraculously preserved and when she finds Paul afterwards, she tells him, “I have received the baptism.” Paul does not correct her, from which we understand that in the circles in which this work originated around AD 80-160, self-baptism was considered acceptable. But over time, Jesus’ followers recognized that baptism had to be the community affirming the work of God’s Spirit in an individual’s life, and so the practice of self-baptism was abandoned.
Since there is value in seeing that our beliefs and practices are the result of careful deliberation over time among alternatives, I think it’s helpful for people to know about early books that describe some of these alternatives. But if we’re going to put these books together with the New Testament documents, I would call the whole collection An Anthology of Early Christian Literature. That’s the title that many universities now use for what used to be called courses in “New Testament.” Saying “Early Christian Literature” gives assurances that the enterprise is secular and historical. The title of the new publication, by contrast, is a bid to change what people believe and practice as Christians by changing their Scriptures, and we should rightfully be concerned about this.
Another response to this questioner is offered in this post on Stephen Miller’s blog.
Q. A student I know is exploring the different religions right now. He recently asked me how the Bible came to contain the books it now has in it. Why were these put in, and others left out? And why does the Catholic Bible have more books than the Protestant Bible? What would you recommend I tell him?
The formation of the biblical canon (the collection of the books in the Bible) is easier to see first in the case of the New Testament, because that process was witnessed by history. No one person or group sat down and decided what books would be in the New Testament (despite what you or your friend may have heard people like Dan Brown claim about the Council of Nicea, which never actually discussed the canon). Instead, books that stood the test of time through continuous use in diverse Christian centers were eventually accepted by almost all believers. Books that were judged inconsistent with the other approved books came to be recognized as edifying, but not scriptural. This process was basically complete by the time Athanasius of Alexandria wrote his festal letter for AD 367, which contains the first listing of the New Testament books as we know them today. A few remaining differences among centers were ironed out in the years that followed. We can infer that a similar process of community acceptance and use over time had earlier created the Old Testament canon.
This is the historical perspective. But from a theological standpoint, as one of my seminary professors once put it, “The Holy Spirit bore witness to the church corporately about what books should be included.” In other words, the contents of the Bible were ultimately determined not by human authority, not even by the authority of the worldwide community of Jesus’ followers, but by divine authority. No sooner did the church recognize these books than it submitted itself to them. The church does not say, “The Bible is our book, and we can do with it whatever we want” (including dropping or disregarding teachings or whole books that are no longer in favor). Rather, the Bible is God’s book, and the church is responsible to understand and obey its message.
An icon of St. Athanasius, who did not determine the biblical canon, but who was the first to list the New Testament books as we know them today.
The Catholic Bible has some extra books because it includes several that were written within the Jewish community in Greek before the time of Jesus. (The Old Testament books were written instead in Hebrew and Aramaic.) Catholics describe these books, which Protestants call the Apocrypha, as deuterocanonical, meaning that they were first disputed before they were accepted. Eastern Orthodox Christians use this same term to mean that these books are of secondary authority. For fuller details about these extra books, see this post.
This is a short answer to a very involved question, but I hope this information is helpful.
Your specific question is why a group of scholars wants to add particular books to the New Testament when these books are “Gnostic,” that is, they “come from a different time period than any New Testament document, and they represent a fundamentally different worldview,” as 
Good Question 