Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the
Gospel of the Hebrews (in which Christ calls the Sacred Spirit his Mother),
the Traditions of Matthias, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Didakhê, and the
Acts of Paul. Thus the Codex Sinaiticus of the mid-4th century includes
both Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, while the Codex
Alexandrinus of the early 5th century contains I and II Clement as well as
the Psalms of Solomon. There was no church council regarding the NT
canon until the Synod of Laodicea (363 AD), which indeed rejected John's
Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. Twelve centuries later (!), the Western
Canon was finally settled by the Council of Trent (1546 AD), which
designated the present 27-book listing as an article of Roman Catholic
faith (although episcopal councils have never claimed to be infallible; the
vote at Trent was 24 to 15, with 16 abstentions)— and which the various
Protestant Churches subsequently accepted. The sundry Eastern
Churches have equally complex records on establishing their respective
NT canons: thus, the Armenian canon includes a Pauline III Corinthians;
the Coptic NT contains I+II Clement; the Syrian/ Nestorian Peshitta
excludes II+III John, Jude, and Rev/Ap; the Ethiopian Bible adds books
called the Sínodos, the Epistle of Peter to Clement, the Book of the
Covenant, and the Didascalia; and John's Rev/Ap is still not included in
the Greek Orthodox Bible! (see Biblio.35)
Notably, however, the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth were
evidently not known to any of those traditions at the time of their
attempts at establishing a NT canon, never being so much as mentioned
in their protracted deliberations— and hence were never even under
consideration for inclusion in their respective listings. In any case, the
concept of a canon was certainly never intended to exclude the possible
inspiration of any subsequent textual discoveries or isolated agrapha (Lk
1:1, Jn 21:25).
Precisely what transpired during the first 3½ centuries AD, prior to the
earliest ecclesiastical attempts at forming a canon, is notoriously obscure,
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