WHAT ARE THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS? AND WHY THEY ARE NOT PART OF THE BIBLE?

[list=breadcrumb]
[*]What are the Gnostic gospels? And why they are not part of the Bible?
[/list]

The Gnostic Gospels is a collection of about 52 ancient books based upon the teachings of different writers. These texts were written from the 2nd to the 4th century AD. The word gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”, which is often used in Greek philosophy to refer to “enlightenment”. The Gnostic Gospels are often pointed to as supposed “lost books of the Bible.”
Gnosticism was a Jewish movement which appeared in reaction to Christianity. After the first century of Christianity, two primary divisions developed – the orthodox and the Gnostics. The orthodox Christians held to books we now have in the Bible and to what is today considered orthodox theology while the Gnostic Christians held to different view of the Bible, of Jesus Christ, of salvation, and of virtually every other major Christian doctrine.
There are countless contradictions between the Gnostic gospels and the true Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gnostics fraudulently attached the names of famous Christians to their writings, such as the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip, the gospel of Mary, etc.
The Agnositc followers believed that salvation lay not in merely worshiping Christ, but in psychic or pneumatic souls learning to free themselves from the material world through the revelation. According to this tradition, the answers to spiritual questions are to be found within, not without. Also, the gnostic path does not require the intermediation of a church for salvation. Some scholars, like Edward Conze and Elaine Pagels, say that gnosticism is a mix of Christianity and the teachings found in the Eastern religions.
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in northern Egypt in 1945 represented a major discovery of Gnostic gospels.