Gnostic Gospels are bad news

GNOSTIC GOSPELS -- The Bible "is the book whose whole narative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God's people risen from the dead, this should come ... as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along. (This, by the way, is the deep-level reason why the other gospels were not included in the canon. It isn't that they were the really exciting or subversive bits that the early church excluded in the interests of power and control. They were the books that had stopped talking about new creation and were offering a private, detached spirituality instead. The sudden enthusiasm for these other gospels in cetain quarters of the Western world in our own day is a token not of the rediscovery of genuine Christianity but of the desperate attempts to avoid it. New creation is far more demanding -- though ultimately, of course, far more exhilarating -- than Gnostic escapism." -- N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperCollins, 2008), 282-283.