Catholic Apologist Twisted View
Check out the Catholic Encyclopedia on Egypt. They admit that there was a sect of Christianity in Egypt that pre-dates their own. It is funny to watch the way that they denounce things as being untrue ... when you know damn good and well that they are. I love reading it as a source to get a laugh. Remember - the Catholics said the world was flat when all the evidence said it was round. They are notorious liars.
1. Early Christianity in Egypt
We have no direct evidence of Christianity having existed in Egypt until Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-220) when it had already spread over the land. What we know of the Church of Egypt before that time is exclusively through inferences or unconfirmed traditions preserved principally by Eusebius (see below). Thus we may infer the existence of Christianity in Egypt during the second century from the fact that under Trajan a Greek version of the "Gospel According to the Hebrews" was being circulated there (Duchesne, Histoire Ancienne de l'Eglise, I, 126). We know that this gospel was the book of the Judeo-Christians. Its very name points to the existence at the same date of another Christian community, recruited from among the Gentiles. This, presumably, followed another Gospel which Clement of Alexandria calls "the Gospel According to the Egyptians". (On the Gospel of the Egyptians, see Harnack, Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur, I, 1, pp. 612-622; on the Gospel of the Hebrews, ibid., pp. 631-49).
Again, organized Christianity at an early date in Egypt is, indirectly at least, attested by the activity of the Gnostic schools in that country in the third and fourth decades of the second century. Eusebius is authority that "Basilides the heresiarch", founder of one of these schools, came to prominence in the year 134. Other Egyptian founders of such schools, Valentinus and Carpocrates, belong to the same period. Valentinus had already moved to Rome in 140, under the pontificate of Pope Hyginus (Irenæus, Adv. Hær., III, iv, 3), after having preached his doctrines in Egypt, his native country.As Duchesne (op. cit., I, 331) well remarks, one cannot believe that these heretical manifestations represented all the Alexandrine Christianity. These schools, precisely because they are nothing but schools, suppose a Church, "the Great Church", as Celsus calls it; such aberration, precisely because labelled with their authors' names, testify to the existence of the orthodox tradition in the country where they originated. This tradition, from which heresies of such a power of diffusion could separate themselves without putting its very existence in jeopardy, must have been endowed with a vitality which cannot be accounted for without at least half a century of normal growth and organization under the guidance strong and vigilant bishops. We may, therefore, safely conclude as that as early as the middle decades of the first century there was in Alexandria, and probably in the neighboring nomes, or provinces, Christian communities consisting principally of Hellenistic Jews and of those pious men (phoboumenoi ton Theon) who had embraced the tenets and practices of Judaism without becoming regular proselytes. These communities must have had some numerical importance, for on the one hand the Jews were exceedingly numerous (over one million) in Egypt, and particularly in Alexandria, where they constituted two-fifths of the whole population; and on the other hand the philosophical eclecticism that generally prevailed in Alexandria at that time co-operated in favour of Christian ideas with the great doctrinal tolerance then obtaining throughout Judaism, to the extent, indeed, as Duchesne tersely puts it, that one might think like Philo or like Akiba, believe in the resurrection of the flesh or in its final annihilation, expect the Messias or ridicule that hope, philosophize like Ecclesiastes or like the Wisdom of Solomon (op. cit., I, 122). Along with this Judaizing church, whose hopes and expectations were centered in Jerusalem and the Temple, who accepted Christianity and yet continued to observe the Law, there was another Church, decidedly Gentile -- we might say, Christian -- in its character and aspirations, as well as in its practices. It is difficult to surmise what the relations of those two churches to one another were in their details. It is very probable that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Titus, by putting an end to the hopes of many among the judaizing Church, brought them over to the Great Church, which henceforth gained rapidly in numbers and prestige and soon became the only orthodox Christian Church.
newadvent.org/cathen/05329b.htm
but Thomas gospel was known in Greece, Rome and Egypt.
