One thing that truly fascinates me is the obsession of charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal Christians with the first century AD. They see themselves as being the only "true" Christians, as inheriting the earliest Christian traditions. However, they have accepted the King James Bible, which is very closely based on versions of the Bible standardized in the modern Roman Catholic and Protestant canons since the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century AD. With books like the DaVinci Code and Gnostic Gospels gaining so much popularity, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the diversity of Christian literature before the Church began destroying and confiscating these documents was truly extraordinaty. There were dozens of competing "gospels," as we have seen with the recent success of the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas, as well as others such as the Gospels of Mary and Peter.
The Church has used methods through the centuries including persecution, the Albigensian Crusade, and the Spanish Inquisition to enforce the use of the officially sanctioned canon, used today by the evangelical right wing Christians. Other texts were burned, and a few were fortunately buried and have recently been recovered.
But, today, it is clear that the ongoing attempt of the Church to destroy these old, lost, almost destroyed scriptures (destroyed intentionally by the Church during all the inquisitions and purges and crusades) have finally failed.
In other words, "THE GENIE IS FINALLY OUT OF THE BOTTLE." (or, if you prefer, the cat's out of the bag).
Now, if the right wing Christians want to claim that they are drastically different from mainstream Protestant demoninations and Catholicism, WHY DO THEY USE THE VERY SAME BIBLICAL CANON?
WHY DO THEY NOT ADOPT THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS, IF THEY ARE SUCH ARDENT "ORIGINAL CHRISTIANS?"