The Holy Art of Lying

Forged: Writing in the Name of God by Bart D. Ehrman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


If you've read the rest of Ehrman's oeuvre, there won't be a great deal more in this book to sink your teeth into.  Right now I suspect Ehrman's a popular New Testament exegesis factory but even a factory turns out good material, even if it all starts to look the same.  He does, however, footnote everything.  He gives you the location of his source material in English so you can check up behind him.  He does not make things up (as colorful as Borg and Crossan's book might have been, they made stuff up, just showing how easy it is to extrapolate, infer, and they produce a factual lie) and it doesn't lose anything for being relentlessly factual because of Ehrman's easy-going, highly readable style.
A better title for this book, though, might have been "Forgeries and Other Bare-Faced Lies."  Ehrman stretches the definition of "forgery" to the breaking point over Acts. Perhaps the title as it stands is the last punch pulled.  Ehrman's gloves are off (as my husband pointed out) as he makes no bones about lies perpetuated in the name of an alleged "Greater Truth."  Normally we call such lies "Fiction," or perhaps "Politics As Usual."  At no time does Ehrman deny the existence of an historical Jesus.  All he's saying is that the people who were inspired by his story fibbed about some things.  And if they fibbed about who wrote what or made up false attributions, what else might they have fibbed about, eh?
The last chapter of the book does make a person think about Lying.  Do you side with Augustine, that a lie is never excusable?  Do you permit small social lying?  Where do you draw the line?  To get a child to take its medicine?  (To get my mother to the hospital to have her tonsils taken out, my grandmother told her she was going to get a pony.  My mother felt utterly betrayed and refused to lie to us kids about anything like that.)  Is a lie permissible to save someone from eternal damnation?  It might depend on how hard you believe in that damnation to make you think it's not just okay, but imperative, to lie in the name of Truth.



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Fresh As the First Time I Read It

Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I dearly love this book and its author, so take that into consideration when you read the review.  I also used it for a dramatic reading in college (just happened to see the notes for that in my paperback copy) and managed to get through what I thought was the funniest part without breaking up.  To my best recollection, the listeners did not fall over in paroxysms of hilarity, but I may have been numbed to their reaction in order to get through it.

Yes, it's as funny as it was the first time. 

The Hon. Freddie Threepwood is engaged to Aline Peters, but his father (Clarence, the third Earl of Emsworth) has just "stolen" her father's prized scarab in a typical fit of forgetfulness. He now wants to retrieve some letters he wrote to Joan Valentine when she was on the stage but his go-between, R. Jones, has decided to milk more out of him than the 500 pounds he didn't need to give Joan because she said she threw the letters away.  Joan is an old friend of Aline and promises to help her retrieve the "stolen" scarab, however, Joan's new friend, Ashe Marson has been hired by Aline's father for the same dark purpose.  George Emerson fell in love with Aline on board ship and is using his friendship with the Hon. Freddie to get close to her again.  Got all that, or do you need a diagram?  They all convene (save R. Jones) at Blandings Castle where they land under the beetling brow and jaundiced eye of Freddie's father's secretary, the Efficient Baxter.

Wodehouse tackles the theme of equality of the sexes with a deft hand one would not expect from an author of that time period (ah, but it's comedy, so he can get away with that).  Sadly, it's not developed fully and it does wobble at the end when Joan succumbs to Ashe's petition for marriage.  We don't get to see her fall in love with him the way we see him fall for her and her sudden craving for dullness in place of adventure doesn't ring true.  We do get to see Aline fall in love with George and we are with her when she does.  She is obstinate in her keeping the engagement to the Hon. Freddie in the face of George's high-handedness, but begins her melt when he realizes that it rightly doesn't work to badger the one you love into loving you.  Her subsequent interview with her fiance gives her the opportunity to view what life would be like married to a complete ass.  The romance of living in an English castle among the peerage loses its appeal. 

One of Wodehouse's earliest successes, Something New (or Something Fresh) introduces the third Earl of Emsworth and the gang at Blandings.  It is also rich in over a dozen Biblical references and about 40 other literary and Classical references (at least according to the annotations I found online).  Unlike the Bertie and Jeeves stories, it is narrated by what is normally called an omniscient narrator, but you can see an inkling of Bertie in the narrator's casual forgetfulness as well as the Biblical saltings (Bertie having won a Bible verse contest of some kind in his youth).  The novel also demonstrates the winning formula Wodehouse finally developed and delightfully abused for another 70 books or so: something needs to be stolen (whether scarab, silver cow creamer, painting, manuscript, or necklace) and returned to its true owner, true love will out, and the Hon. Freddie and his chinless comrades will never get married.  Although Wodehouse admitted to writing the same story over and over, it's the details of characters, the lovely language, and the absurd slow-motion description of slapstick that make each successive novel something fresh.



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