Lot's of "I never thought about it that way" moments here

The Gnostic Gospels
by Elaine Pagels

If you can make it through the world's longest introduction, you'll learn that this is a book about what the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi tell us about the formation of the early Christian church. In several fascinating chapters, Elaine Pagels tells how certain principles of the Christian creed, held in common by all modern denominations, were necessary--both politically and socially--to unify diverse churches into the one Catholic faith. Anyone who disagreed was cast out and any heretical writings were destroyed.

Most exciting are the chapters on the bodily resurrection of Jesus; the belief that God is sole king, creator, master and judge; and the necessity that the church leaders be the ones to whom Jesus appeared in the flesh and delivered special powers to.  Peter was the leader and ultimate authority as selected by Jesus.  Later the disciples added Matthias, to restore the original count of twelve disciples; women were not included.  Less interesting--and highly speculative IMHO--was the chapter that compared Gnostic beliefs to Carl Jung's encounter with the unconscious. It didn't seem to belong in the book.

Just kidding about the introduction. It was important stuff and not at all boring. It dealt with the finding of the clay jar near Nag Hammadi and the slow, winding and treacherous road that the writings took to publication. It was about 20 years from the finding in 1945 to the publication of the complete translation in English in 1977, although photographic editions were available earlier.

They were:
Coptic translations, made about 1,500 years ago, of still more ancient manuscripts. The originals themselves had been written in Greek, the language of the New Testament: as Doresse, Puech, and Quispel had recognized, part of one of them had been discovered by archeologists about fifty years earlier, when they found a few fragments of the original Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas.

This quote is from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html which I highly recommend if you're thinking about reading them. Odd, though--this page reads almost exactly like the original book. I wonder...oh, yeah.  It's a reprint from the introduction.