Renee read and liked Trevor's review of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them:

"Here’s a question for you. How important is it that the Jesus of the Bible and the historical Jesus are more or less the same guy? Or even better, how important is it that the ideas Jesus was trying to spread by his ministry are the same ideas th...more Here’s a question for you. How important is it that the Jesus of the Bible and the historical Jesus are more or less the same guy? Or even better, how important is it that the ideas Jesus was trying to spread by his ministry are the same ideas that have come to be followed in the various Christian churches?

There was a time when I would have thought that all Christians would have wanted to answer both of these questions by saying that it was fundamentally important to their faith that what they currently believe as Christians is exactly what the historical Jesus taught. I would have thought that Christians would have developed their ideas about what Christ had to say about the world from the Bible (which, I had always assumed was seen by most Christians as the inspired and inerrant word of God) and that their task, as Christians, would be to come to an increasing understanding of that message by close and intense study.

As Ehrman basically says somewhere in this book – if you truly believe that the Bible is a book that God wrote on how you should live your life it seems a bit strange that you might believe that and not have bothered to go on and read it.

The other side to this is that if the Bible is the inspired word of God then you would not expect there to be any contradictions in it – particularly not in the various tellings of the Jesus story which is presented four times, once in each of the first four books of the New Testament known as the Gospels.

But there are differences between these tellings and some of these are not just differences of passing interest only to the pedant – although, I would have thought that the guy responsible for creating the Universe might have been the world’s worst pedant, myself. No, some of these tellings actually say opposite things, that is, are literally contradictory. And some of the differences have fundamental theological significance.

This is a book that looks at what scholarship is able to tell us about the historical Jesus and what his actions meant in his time and therefore the significance of those actions for him. It also shows how the significance of those actions to him would have been quite different to what those actions have come to signify to us a couple of thousand years later. The short version is that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jew and he and his earliest followers believed that they were living at the end of times and that meant their world was about to end and to end immediately. When they say things like there are people here who will see me return in glory that was meant to be taken literally. Paul believed he would be alive to see the second coming. I would think that for these reasons alone the historical Jesus can hardly be seen as identical with the Christian Jesus.

Large parts of this book look at our earliest texts of the New Testament and then question whether Jesus and his earliest followers actually believed that he was divine and then if he was divine when did he become divine. For John, for example, the last of the gospels to be written, Jesus was with God at the beginning of time as the word that created the universe. For the other three Apostles his literal divinity is never quite so well spelt out and if he was divine at all, then he probably became divine after the resurrection.

There are fascinating questions asked in this book. For example, as Jesus was going to his death was he anxious and upset – as he is depicted in Matthew – or was he pretty well cool, calm and collected as he is depicted in Luke. You know, there is a pretty big difference between these two versions of Jesus’ death which can be summed up by what they say his last words on the cross were: either “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me” or “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The point is that Luke and Matthew were wanting to make very distinct theological points with their tellings of the crucifixion story and they do this by telling very different stories. Ehrman makes it clear that how these contradictions are generally resolved is by having Jesus say both of these lines while he was on the cross and for some reason both Luke and Matthew left out the other one, but this does not go nearly far enough to resolve the many, many contradictions in the two stories. The problem with this way of resolving contradictions in the Bible is that it creates a new text which is different from both of the texts you are using as your source. But the real point here is that this third text you have just created by smashing together the two gospel versions has to be less accurate than either of the gospel versions, not more accurate as we generally assume. We confusedly think that the Bible is one book, whereas it is many books telling somewhat similar stories - this can make us think that the differences are just differences in detail, whereas some of the differences are much deeper than that.

These differences are fundamental and make for quite different ways of looking at Christianity. To focus on one more than the other gives quite a different ‘Christianity’. And I would have thought that Christians would be told about the differences that exist in their gospels and the implications of these differences. But this is another reason why Ehrman has written this book. Although standard Christian scholarship has accepted and studied the contradictions in the Bible for around 150 years and have developed many explanations as to why and how these differences arose – this is virtually never taught either in Church services or (much more surprisingly) in Bible study classes organised by Churches – despite the fact that this is precisely what ministers are taught in seminary.

Ehrman’s passion and depth of knowledge always make me want to spend time reading over passages of the Bible and consider the implications of the various differences and emphasises laid by the various authors of the Bible – if he can do that for an atheist, I would imagine he would only have a much stronger effect on a Christian, at least, I would like to imagine that would be the case. But it seems I’m invariably wrong about what interests Christians about their religion. This is another excellent book beautifully written.
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Renee read and liked Trevor's review of Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics:

"The point of this book is to show that there are facts that economists have worked out over the years that are now all but laws that can be used to determine how we should structure our interactions so as to provide the best possible benefit to the g...more The point of this book is to show that there are facts that economists have worked out over the years that are now all but laws that can be used to determine how we should structure our interactions so as to provide the best possible benefit to the greatest possible number. These laws ought to be followed to the letter as ANY mucking about with them can only lead to tears. Unfortunately, it has always been the case that politicians (and even some economists – particularly economists contaminated by the loose thinking of Marx, Keynes or Galbraith) distort these laws either because they don’t understand them or because they have been misguided by wishful thinking. If only there was a greater understanding of economic theory in the community then we would all be so much better off. We would also be much less likely to be fooled by the fallacies that repeatedly undermine both productivity and growth.

Fortunately, the great truths of economics can be summed up in one rather pithy little lesson – and that is, when judging the worth of any economic policy you must not just look at the immediate and local effects you think the policy may have, but rather look for all of the broader and long-term effects of these policies. About 23 myths are analysed to show how they ‘make sense’ only when considered in a narrow way, but fall apart once analysed more broadly. When this is done it is also found that anything that interferes with the free operation of the market invariably cause effects that are the exact opposite to those intended. The market rules ok! and those seeking to improve on the operation of the market – particularly those seeking to redistribute wealth or make the economy ‘fairer’ in some way ALWAYS end up making the economy less fair and paradoxically hurting those that they had intended to help.

I have to say that I find it remarkable that economists (particularly those of the radical neo-classical school) still think the ‘laws’ of economics are immutable and incontrovertible truths, truths with the same force as the laws of physics, and therefore believe that anyone who dares disagree with them is, by definition, ignorant or deluded or both. I guess all ideologues are certain of the core tenets of their ideology. But as the history of the past year or so has shown yet again, we are most in need of saving from those who know the truth.

I read this book because I started reading another book – Filthy Lucre – and this one was so highly recommended at the start of that, that I thought it might be wise to read this one first. I don’t want to imply that I learnt nothing from this book. In fact, some of the ground covered here has made me question some of my fundamental assumptions about how things work in the world – some of the arguments were quite new to me. However some seemed like pure nonsense, particularly the rubbish here about trade unions and wages and how the market is best placed to set wages on the basis of the productivity of labour (an idea that is stated repeatedly, but we are never shown a mechanism how this would ever take place. In fact, we are shown the exact opposite in the examples used to ‘prove’ the counter-productive nature of unions seeking better pay…

I’m going to work my way though what I think is one of the counter-intuitive laws discussed in this book, Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage or why free trade is always good and anything that interferes with free trade (import restrictions, tariffs or import replacement strategies) is always bad.

I want to start by saying that I think there is something to this idea (much more than I would have admitted to prior to reading this book) and that I’m not setting out to simply refute it. Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage (the core idea of free trade, an explanation of which can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative...) is something I’ve only recently been made aware of – I have found it discussed in two books I’ve read recently by other radical free market types.

I think it is fair to say that much of what we currently hear and then think about trade could probably be summed up in the phrase, “All exports are good, all imports are bad”. However, this is clearly nonsense if you give it even a moment’s thought. In fact, the only reason, in the end, why we would bother to export anything would be to be able to afford to import things – otherwise exporting makes virtually no sense at all. As Hazlitt points out, in the end imports and exports need to equal each other.

The myths he is seeking to dispel are numerous and long standing. For example, he is seeking to show that trade does not reduce wages to the lowest common denominator (therefore tariffs do nothing to protect local wages and in fact make workers worse off), trade does not make a country less productive, but always more so, and trade is not a competition between countries, but a free exchange and therefore must be mutually beneficial by definition or it could not occur in the first place.

The ‘myth’ that allowing imports from third world countries either has the effect of reducing local wages to third world levels or kills off local industries unable to compete with these lower labour costs is a fairly deeply entrenched one in the Western psyche. The myth suggests that to save our local industries from being swamped by cheap imports we need to erect tariff barriers or other means of restricting imports. But this is based on the idea that there is a limit to the quantity of goods and services that are needed in the world. The fact that other countries may be able to produce goods cheaper than we are able to is not a threat to our productivity – even if it does mean that certain of our less productive industries will end up going to the wall. The point is that this is only the visible effect of trade that comes from a narrow and short-term view of trade’s effects. For trade to make sense, however, to the person that we are trading with they must also import things from us – and if their exports kill off one of our less productive industries, well, actually, we should view that as a good thing. Because it then means that our local capital will be forced to move to one of our more productive industries, one in which we do have a competitive advantage.

A fair amount of rose tint seems to have been added to the glasses used to view this version of free trade. The problem is that although some of the primary assumptions stated here do seem to make sense if everything else is held equal (that is, that over time exports and imports would seem to need to equal each other) in the real world that does not seem to have been the case at all. For example, look at the USA and its massive and growing trade deficit with the rest of the world that is basically being funded from borrowings from China. The current frightening state of the US deficit can be found here http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/tic... and what this shows is that the deficit is long standing and appears very unlikely to ever miraculously pop back into balance any time soon in the way that theory predicts. This does seem to put a bit of a hole in the theory espoused in this book. Not to be too nasty about it, but the view espoused in this book about trade seems not to have kept up with the one lesson of the title.

There are other problems with trade (and free trade in particular) that I have other concerns over. Firstly, one of the problems with the world is what gets called neo-colonialism. The whole problem arises when counties abandon general agriculture that produces a broad variety of food to sustain their own populations and instead produce ‘cash crops’ due to their ‘comparative advantage’. Free trade sounds great in theory, but if all you grow are bananas and the price of bananas drops then your ability to make a living or even feed yourself drops too.

I’m coming to the view that in all things variety is the spice of life. Creating monocultures is bad for the environment, destroying manufacturing industries in first world countries and somehow thinking we can live purely off service industries is bad for the world economy, and forcing third world counties to have single commodity outputs is crushingly bad for their development. We need to find ways to put diversity back into the world economy – I’m not necessarily talking about protection, but definitely diversity.

The final edition of this book was published just before Reagan came to power in the US and Thatcher in Britain. In fact, the last chapter is a lament that more of the ideas espoused in the 1946 edition of this book had never been taken up and applied. Now that we have gone though thirty years of the radical neo-liberal experiment and now that it has caused so much damage, surely it is time to see if we can create an economy in the interests of people – rather than smashing people so that they better fit with the needs of the economy. Of course, that is just a thought…

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