According to the Pew Forum, an estimated 2.18 billion people around the world identify as Christian and use some version of the Bible as the foundation for their faith. For Christians and historians alike, this is a remarkable text written by multiple authors across a vast span of time.
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It's impossible to calculate just how profoundly these books have changed the world and there is the rub. All of these people are not reading the same book. Some versions of the Bible include works that are excluded in other versions. Some texts have been cut out altogether and some exist only in one version of the Bible. Who decides what to keep and what to cut?
And perhaps the most important question is why? Here's where it gets crazy. We can't trace the evolution of the Bible to a single person. The first Council of Nicaea did not finalize the Bible in 325 CE. The first five books of the Bible were accepted as Jewish law as early as 1250 BCE. By 90 CE, 39 books were canonized, forming the Hebrew Bible. Since Gentile Christians rarely read Hebrew, they adopted a Greek translation along with additional books.
This translation, called the Septuagint, dates to about 250 BCE. While Jewish authorities evaluated books based on their relation to the Torah, early Christians based decisions on their own particular interpretation of what Christianity was, as well as the nature of Christ. At this time, Christianity was a new religion, full of internal disagreements and competing ideas. For example, Gnosticism argued that a person could interact with God without intermediaries, along with concepts of dualism and reality that would be considered similar to mysticism today.
The rivalry between the church and Gnostics led to serious concerns about unity and ultimately a finalized canon was compiled by an Alexandrian bishop named Athanasius. Not all churches finalized their canon at the same time or with the same books, generally for objections concerning doctrine, heresy, or fraudulence. Books that did not seem inspired by God or advocated things contrary to church doctrine were excluded. In some cases, these books present Jesus in a very different light. In the Gospel according to Thomas, Jesus speaks of turning Mary into a man so that she, too, may become a living spirit, along with other sayings that don't seem like the modern image of Jesus. This Gospel according to Thomas wasn't discovered until 1945 in Egypt as part of the Nag Hammadi Library. Research on the evolution of the Bible continues, and, as historians learn more and more about the course of this work, one thing's for sure. There's plenty of stuff the early church didn't want you to know.