. What happened is that the grass roots of the Church, knowing the story of the faith that had been passed down, found some works to be more beneficial than others to helping them perserve their faith and these are the books that became canon while the others were relegated to either slightly lower status or dismissed as being suprious works.
Actually,The Pauline church didn't find some works to be more beneficial than others,it was because the writtings were at odds with the prevailing Pauline agenda.
That is why the Church destroyed most of their Gospels and excuted them for being heretics !!!!
Irenaeus, in the second century, in his work against Heretics, stigmatises them with the most abusive epithets, and accuses them of the most abominable crimes. He calls them "thieves and robbers," "slippery serpents," "miserable little foxes," and so forth, and declares that they practise lewdness in their assemblies.
the mean,aggressive,vulgar attitude towards any writing that one could by reading it smell something against the Pauline agenda,hit not only the so called non-canonical Gospels,but the canonical as well !!!!
the authenticity of the Epistle of James In the first centuries of the Church ,was doubted by some followers of the Pauline church:
1-Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia; it is therefore deuterocanonical. It is missing in the Muratorian fragment.
2-because of the silence of several of the western churches regarding it, Eusebius classes it amongst the Antilegomena or contested writings (Historia ecclesiae, 3.25; 2.23).
3-Gaius Marius Victorinus, in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, openly questioned whether the teachings of James were heretical.
4-In Reformation times a few theologians, most notably Martin Luther, argued that this epistle was too defective to be part of the canonical New Testament. This is probably due to the book's specific teaching that faith alone is not enough for salvation (James 2:24), which seemed to contradict his doctrine of sola fide (faith alone).
--"Many sweat to reconcile St. Paul and St. James.... but in vain. 'Faith justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. [Isn't it refreshing to hear an avowed apologist, especially one as knowledgeable as Luther, dispense with all the doubletalk and rationalizing by admitting the obvious--ED.). If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me a fool." The Life and Letters of Martin Luther, by Preserved Smith, p. 269
"We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school (the University of Wittenberg--ED.) for it doesn't amount to much. It contains not a syllable about Christ. Not once does it mention Christ, except at the beginning. I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. Since he heard that Christians place great weight on faith in Christ, he thought, 'wait a moment. I'll oppose them and urge works alone.' This he did.... Besides, there is no order or method in the epistle. Now he discusses clothing and then he writes about wrath and is constantly shifting from one to the other. He presents a comparison: 'As the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.' O Mary, mother of God! What a terrible comparison that is! James compares faith with the body when he should rather have compared faith with the soul! The ancients recognized this, too, and therefore they didn't acknowledge the Book of James as one of the catholic epistles." "Table Talk" in Luther's Works, Vol. 54, p. 424-25
"Therefore, St. James' epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it." Luther's Works, Vol. 35, p. 362
In other words ,just because James' epistle contradict the Pauline agenda in a specific point(Salvation through faith) was said by some Pauline church figures to be rather heretical,and was about to be excluded from the so called Canonical Gospels .
Imagine if the church had ever found writings that contradict the whole Pauline agenda,what would they ever do......
History tells us what they did,and their crimes ,pious forgeries,will pay back for it in day of judgment...
How truth what Thomas Paine wrote!!:
"...the bishop who has answered me has been obliged to acknowledge the fact, that the Books that compose the NT, were voted by yeas and nays to be the word of God, as you now vote a law, by the Popish councils of Nicea and Laodocia, about 1,450 years ago." Works of Thomas Paine. p. 325.
"None of those books have the appearance of being written by the persons whose names they bear, neither do we know who the authors were. They come to us on no other authority than the church of Rome, which the Protestant Priests...call the ***** of Babylon." Ibid., p. 365.
