Anyway, my point is not that Thomas rightly belongs in the canon or anything silly like that, but that when it comes to the very early history of the Bible, the actual record of physical and textual evidence is not entirely clear. The fact that multiple versions correspond to each other is helpful in guessing that they are reasonable reconstructions of the oral traditions that their copyists inherited, but there was a period when the Gospels were entirely oral - it's just that nobody knows how long that period lasted. Perhaps there is a written version of one or all of the Gospels, one that is lying undiscovered in some cave or dig site and that predates all currently known versions by a hundred years, but as for right now, the existing historical record doesn't go back as far as we might like.