Forged

(I feel bad for writing a review of this when I have left other books, ones I liked a lot more, unreviewed.)

I didn't come to this book with an axe to grind—everyone has had the experience of discovering that a fact long held is actually disproven or contentious. A couple of delicious examples. Several people have told me how the "ring around the rosies" children's song is about the bubonic plague and Black Death, taking delight in how a gruesome ghastly grim piece of history is hidden innocuously in a playground song, but as David Wilton in [b:Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends|410941|Word Myths Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends|David Wilton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347794587s/410941.jpg|400206] points out, the song is likely from much later than the last plague outbreaks in English-speaking areas, and he wonders what it says about people that they like to propagate this urban legend.

Similarly, we all have been told how spinach has a ton of iron in it. Popeye. But this turns out to be an indescribably convoluted academic urban legend, as meticulously documented by Ole Bjørn Rekdal in their 2014 paper, “Academic urban legends” available for free on Sagepub. The story goes that spinach has a lot of iron in it. Then people found out that this isn’t true: someone misread a decimal point in the original German research done in the late 19th century, and that this showed how lazy academics continued to perpetrate the myth. Then it turns out that those authors upbraiding lazy academics were the lazy academics: the original research did not have a decimal point error. Then it turns out that whatever iron is available in spinach isn’t bioavailable, so there’s not much point in eating a bunch of it. I’ve sketched out this story but the real thing is pure gold: Ole Bjørn Rekdal is a delightful writer and “Academic urban legends” will be the best article you’ll read this year.

So yeah, if you spend any time observing yourself, you’ll find yourself regularly updating your beliefs, and that makes you less wedded to beliefs. Beliefs can give you lots of badge honor and are great for tribal signaling, but you know what’s even better? The sport of belief-busting, and unbusting, and re-busting, and so on.

So Bart Ehrman’s book is kind of like Rekdal’s paper, but necessarily much more coarse and foggy because while Rekdal can read all the scientific literature relevant to the great spinach irony misquoting fact-fabricating urban legend debacle, Ehrman is dealing with two thousand years of urban-legend-making.

Also. Marcion is hella cool.

I've read a lot of Ehrman's books, and I'm burning out a bit on them, but there's always something new and interesting, and Forged is no exception.

My problem with the book is it is speaking to people who want to argue with the title. Ehrman tells us that the New Testament is full of forged documents, but that many biblical scholars refuse to refer to them as forged, arguing that the negative connotations in the word are inaccurate.

A huge part of the book is devoted to this debate, but as an atheist, I really don't have any problem with the idea that the New Testament was written by people who lied to get their words read. I had never given it any thought before I started reading Ehrman, but it makes perfect sense.

If you're a Christian, the claim that your holy book is a web of lies may be distressing, turning you to euphemism. If you're an atheist, endless pages trying to convince you of something you are already convinced of can be a little dull.