Actually some of the apocryphal books and the pseudepigraphical books
appear to be religious tomes used to hide scientific knowledge coded into the stories.
These stories were oral histories handed down. Early Arabian,[Thousand and One Nights” etc.] Asian and later moslem oral stories repeated these themes. Some of the themes and stories are outlandish and do not make any sense at all unless the original greek language is analyzed and placed into a scientifically described process in chemistry, biology, or physics. Then what appears to modern-day scientific devices and processes appear to be described in the original greek.
The questions arise:
1. “How did 2nd and 3rd century know people about this scientific knowledge?
2.Did the devices described in the greek really exist?
3. How did the descriptions of the processes come to be if they did not have any modern day scientific instruments to do these observations and experiments?
When the translators translate from the old greek and Latin into modern languages, they primarily realize they are working on a supposed religious or fake religious document -Thus they usually attempt to translate these documents in a religious sense. That is why some of the stories do not make any sense in English.
However if the stories are translated into spanish, different words come out that are not in the English because Spanish is closer to the old greek and Arabic than modern english is and those old greek and arabic stems have different colored meanings in Spanish. The result is different from the English translation.- A lot of times if a word that was translated into Latin from the greek by a contemporary Roman translator or other, if the word in greek didn`t make any sense in context, but made sense in the latin version but didn`t have a religious connotation upon the translation into english, it was left out altogether in the later English translation.
Many times a word in the Aramaic and greek would sound similar or the same but have entirely different meanings. Thus author of a religious book who wrote down spoken words would have the text as a play-on-words, but the words would have have to been spoken to an audience that knew greek and Aramaic, and Hebrew also.
Similar to saying in English using Spanish words,
“cold today, hot tamale” because tamale is a play on the sound of the word “tomorrow”. This happens everywhere in the New Testament, OT and other non-canonical books above.’
Lots of times place-names would be introduced into the dialogue so as to compare the writer`s or speaker`s speech to an object they already knew about, e.g, as we would say something as the “Big Apple” which is not a fruit at all.
This also happens in the OT where place-names are used to describe an event there. Or a person`s name is used with a verb in conjunction with an event.
e.g., “Trump got Trumped”
I always though The Gospel of Thomas did have some roots in early church maybe using things joted down by one of the deciples as Jesus was speaking.