Baking Cookies and Reading Ehrman.

Our daughter and son-in-law are having their open house tomorrow and Sunday afternoon after church and I volunteered to bake cookies for it so that's what I've done this morning.

Then this afternoon I finished my book. If you recall, I have been reading "The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot" by Bart Ehrman. It was a great read. As usual, he makes some very good points. This gospel is a copy of an ancient document mentioned in 180 CE by Irenaeus, an early heresy hunter and church father. One thing these ancient documents prove is that there was no orthodox Christianity in the early church. There were all kinds of Christianity. It wasn't until much later, in response to these other types of Christianities that the "orthodox" Christianity was finally established. But what became orthodox was not the earliest form of Christianity. And after the orthodoxy was established, the church fathers destroyed all the other documents they could find. The twentieth century has uncovered many of them and that's why we have a much wider view now of what early Christianity was like. This Coptic gospel was found in Egypt was Gnostic in nature. Gnosticism was one of the earliest Christianities.

Ehrman is a very readable historian. I have most of his books and have read them all. They are fascinating to me.

I baked cookies all morning and had a devil of a time keeping Bob out of them. He claimed any that he considered were "irregular". Needless to say Bob loves homemade cookies.

We also washed off the patio. When it rained so hard Tuesday evening, it washed mud all over the patio through a break in the landscaping timbers he had lined the patio with. It left it a mess. We washed and mopped and swept until it looks a lot better. However, in June, after the rains are finished, we need to put another coat of cement paint on it. It needs it.

Now he is preparing to mow again. The rain just keeps growing the grass.