Old Gregg is back like cooked crack, baby. The results are what you expect:
Gregg Easterbrook’s review of Robert Wright’s “The Evolution of God” (Bookshelf, June 8) says that “Paul, by contrast [to Christ], actively wished to start a cross-borders, proselytizing system of belief.” Amazing! Did neither the book’s author nor its reviewer consult the Bible? After all, the Bible describes the unfolding plan in great detail.
Even Sunday schoolers know Jesus’s final words on earth in the Great Commission, “Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, ESV). They also know about his personal conversion of Paul. In Acts 9:15, Jesus says of Paul, “. . . he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the gentiles [non-Jews] and kings and the children of Israel.”
The Old Testament, throughout, points to “a righteous God and a Savior” for “all the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 45:22, 23). Jesus further reveals, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).
Perhaps Mr. Wright shall pen many anthropologic theories, and Mr. Easterbrook many nonfiction reviews, before the end arrives. Meanwhile, for those interested in the facts on the outreach of grace through faith, please consult a Bible.
Dave Reed
Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
He’s right; I checked. (In fairness, Wright may have been referring to “Historical Jesus“, the Jewish apocolyptic preacher who came to Earth to save historians from their sins.) That Old Gregg’s research method continues to center on not doing any research and knowing nothing is, in itself, not surprising. That a man who has spent the better part of a decade scolding physicists for not proving Jesus (or something – trying to make sense of this makes me feel queasy) can’t be bothered to crack the Bible is sort of ironic, if you ignore the previous sentence, and if you are trying to pad out a blog post you are writing on this subject, and/or if your name is Alanis Morissette. Most importantly, this proves conclusively my theory that what we think of as “the Universe” is really just a rather over-broad comic novel called ”Jackass of All Trades”, wherein hilariously inept polymath Gregg Easterbrook – “the DiVinci of incompetence” – rises to the heights of the journalistic and public policy professions, only to be stopped by a deadly asteroid.
In happier news, the world just got less stupid. Brookings will now have to skip the middleman and hire Vox Day directly.
June 13, 2009 at 10:15 am
If the asteroid is really Brit Hume, does that change things? I note the automatically generated related post link:
“Swedes Unveil Life-Size Lego Jesus for Easter”
And I say “indeed.”
June 13, 2009 at 10:26 am
Man, this is like a blog post on the sun managing to rise yet again. Yeah, sure–sunrise is just slightly different every day, just as Easterbrook is wrong in a slightly different (though no lesss spectacular) way every day.
So what, exactly, was your point?
June 16, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Some kind of sunspot? The sun is interesting.
All hail the sun! And the alien Terran deathbombs!
June 13, 2009 at 10:47 am
Well, there’s the historical Jesus, which is a figment of Hollywood’s imagination, and then there’s the Biblical Jesus, which every Christian-thinking Christian knows by heart even before reading the Bible, but they’re both called “Jesus”. I mean, you really can’t blame Easterbrook for confusing the two, can you?
And I’m sure there’s a Marxist theory of Jesus somewhere, and this’ll prove that Obama is the Antichrist or something.
– bi
June 13, 2009 at 11:38 am
…and anyone who doesn’t understand why The Editors calls him “Old Gregg” should stop right now, go to the YouTubes, and search for “Old Gregg” and “Mighty Boosh”. (I’ve missed the Boosh desperately over the last year, when they were doing their British tour instead of their show.)
June 13, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Easterbrook:
Genius.
June 14, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Further research reveals that the daughter of Henry Tudor never used the phrase “Elizabethan era”, or referred to herself as ‘Elizabeth I’.
June 15, 2009 at 7:48 am
The same goes for the so-called “World War I.”
June 15, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Good point, El Cid. It would have been more sensible to call WWII ‘The War to End All War, Again”, but the name didn’t catch on.
June 18, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Not only genius but classical Easterbrookian genius.
June 13, 2009 at 1:26 pm
What I love is that functioning fucking idiots like Greg get paid for being wrong.
I’m basically a functioning fucking idiot. Why can’t I get paid like Greg, Jonah, and Douthat? Oh yeah, I’m a DFH.
I would sell my soul like they did, but it’s already on the counter at the Dollar General.
June 13, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Ya know, my wife used to get real cranky when I’d point at some asshat on one of the financial channels on teevee and say, “I want that job! One where I can be spectacularly wrong every day, all day, and still make 6 or 7 figures!” At the time she still thought we lived in something resembling a meritocracy.
I still want that job, whether in Easterbrook’s slot or somewhere else.
June 13, 2009 at 6:53 pm
That job requires an Ivy League education, sans scholarship.
June 13, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Cross-borders? This surely refers to Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Or, as we say, Canada, USA, and Mexico.
June 14, 2009 at 6:41 am
The “Leonardo of incompetence,” please. “Lionardo” if you still want a funny typo in it.
And I’m speaking as someone who really appreciates the work the Jesus Seminar and their ilk have done in terms of exploring the competing and conflicting stands of ideology that run through the Christian scriptures and attempting to foreground the passages that illuminate a plausible historical figure–a Hellenistic Jew who preached to other Hellenistic Jews about the imminent “Kingdom of God”–but you can’t jump from there to breezily ignoring the passages in the New Testament that you find inconvenient. That’s what Christians do.
(When’s the last time a bunch of Christians wanted to put a tablet inscribed with “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone” in front of the local courthouse? But I digress.)
June 14, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Not to defend Easterbrook, but if one looks at Matthew 10:5-6 (KJV),
on could argue that Matthew 28:19 wasn’t until AFTER Jesus’s death and that the mission to preach to the Gentiles was a later evolution of the “Christian” mission. Christians, of course, see the pre- and post-crucifixion words of Christ of a piece. They don’t see Acts & the writings of Paul as being any different from the Gospels. The objector fails to note that his quote from Acts *was* directed at Paul.
I’m not saying Easterbrook is right, just that his instinct that it was the later church that wanted to extend the mission to the non-Jews isn’t without merit.
June 14, 2009 at 3:57 pm
There are actually — or perhaps used to be — a few Christians who believe just that.
June 14, 2009 at 8:00 pm
The thing that I hate is that for all the dumb-assery to flow from Easterbrook, this is something where he’s not in the wrong. I still think he should be beaten with a clue-by-four but not for this. It just shows that religious frippery is best left to the frippers.
June 15, 2009 at 8:16 am
One could argue that Jesus probably never said anything he’s supposed to have said because every source we have is, historically speaking, complete nonsense. This would not, however, constitute proof that the Historical Jesus was a mute. It would just be a consequence of having crappy sources.
The only sources we have for Jesus ever saying anything are the canonical books of the Bible, and apocrypha. People have done very clever work trying to massage some kind of plausibly materialist “history” out of these – and I’m not being facetious, it’s really fascinating stuff, bordering on almost convincing – but at the end of the day you are stuck with primary sources that A) frankly attest to all sorts of not-especially-believable miraculous happenings and B) directly and repeatedly contradict the story you have wrung from them. You can personally decide to believe or not believe whatever parts of whatever Bible stories you want – everybody does – and you may even have really well-thought-out reasons for doing so, but you can’t just assert as fact that Jesus didn’t do something *which the only sources we have repeatedly say he did* as if it were a settled issue, like who won the battle of Waterloo.
Next up: the Historical Gilgamesh – did he really even like Enkidu?
June 15, 2009 at 9:14 pm
I agree, it’s like having arguments over why Mumm-Rah managed to keep all the bandages on. Within the realm of the mad, it matters greatly; to the rest of us, it’s laughably insane. The point that I am making is that you’re siding with one of the loonies in the fight to the stupid and it’s so much better to find something juicy you can mock them all for. I love mocking teh Gregg as much as the next DemoHomoCommieHippieFascist but let’s not take him to task for something that another, equally crazy person is criticizing him for.
June 16, 2009 at 9:06 am
Whether or not that other person is crazy, he is quite correct: the sources says exactly what he says they say. And the source says what it says no matter who tells you it says so – that’s the beauty of using sources, and why people who aren’t Old Gregg tend to use them, instead of just believing whatever people you think are pretty tell you. Of course this is all about hating on Gregg Easterbrook, but also why we hate on Easterbrook – he never does the work. If you want to write about Jesus, you kind of have to read the Bible. You kind of have to do that, Gregg. Now, I find the Bible mostly boring, and I think Jesus is pretend, so I’m not gonna do that. Anyone who does do that has done the research Gregg hasn’t, and is someone I’m proud to call an unpaid research assistant.
June 14, 2009 at 1:21 pm
(When’s the last time a bunch of Christians wanted to put a tablet inscribed with “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone” in front of the local courthouse? But I digress.)
Blasphemer!
~
June 14, 2009 at 3:27 pm
People who live in glass houses should definitely not say ‘Jehovah’.
June 14, 2009 at 4:59 pm
The world just got less stupid, or Brookings just got less stupid?
June 15, 2009 at 12:00 am
What would Horus Do?
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm
June 15, 2009 at 5:53 am
Man, you guys really hate Easterbrook. I trust it’s deserved in general, but the way I read the review in question, he was merely passing along what the author he was reviewing had to say.
But regardless of whose opinion it is, what he’s saying about Paul and the Gentile mission is probably more true than not. Paul wrote at least a generation before any of those biblical quotes you guys are throwing around. From an educated perspective, relying on words that “Jesus” said in the Gospels is like basing your historical argument on what Zeus said in the Iliad. When Paul was writing, the movement that would later become Christianity was still a Jewish sect. Jews proselytizing Gentiles across the Mediterranean was a very controversial innovation at the time.
June 15, 2009 at 6:45 am
I tend to think that the whole of Acts is, as described by itself, an apologia for Paul, it is written by an acknowledged disciple of Paul, it stands as a testimony of Paul’s actions, and especially his mission to the Gentiles. The whole thing with Peter and the ‘slay and eat!’ vision is nothing more than an attempt to give divine sanction to Paul’s eclecticism, so that Peter would accept it.
As for conflating the occasional letters of Paul with revealed Truth — hah! Estupido.
But … Jesus never knew Paul … never. Not in ‘the flesh’ as both Acts, and many of his own letters explicitly state.
June 15, 2009 at 7:51 am
“If God dropped acid, would he see people?”
– Steven Wright
June 15, 2009 at 10:59 am
In happier news, the world just got less stupid.
Are you sure you’ve got the right link there? Because it says something about an ‘expert.’
June 15, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I’m really only interested in the works of the Hysterical Jesus.
June 15, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I like when they make Jesus look like a lady.
June 15, 2009 at 4:48 pm
June 15, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Jesus’ ‘keep it home’ message would arguably have been before the sucker got strung up and died.
After that, well, now it’s personal, I guess? The gloves come off and alla that.
June 15, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Now when I talked to God, I knew he’d understand. He said stick by me and I’ll be your guiding hand. But don’t ask me what I think of you; I might not give the answer that you want me to.
June 15, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Shame how all three of them went bonkers here and there. But specially poor Danny.
June 15, 2009 at 6:30 pm
I’m thinking Nina would scare the daylights out of jesus…
June 15, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Or the bejesus out of Jesus.
June 15, 2009 at 7:28 pm
No harps for Nina. Just clouds of bad hair.
June 16, 2009 at 9:16 pm
BTW, thanx for introducing this aged specimen to Nina.
I iz so ignorant…
June 17, 2009 at 9:25 am
You’re welcome. I too, iz ignorant, didn’t discover Nina till a couple years ago. I missed out on the interesting music (meaning non-mainstream) in the ’80s because I was busy raising my kids. Thanks to the internet (arrr, matey) in the last few years I’ve discovered hundreds of worthy bands I missed during the 1960s-1990s. Collection is nearing 1TB.
June 18, 2009 at 11:33 am
I thought i posted one of her vids here a while back.
Maybe, google: ‘Auf’m Bahnhof Zoo’ from some 1990′s show.
June 18, 2009 at 4:20 pm
The lady’s got all kinds of chops: vocal, terpsichorean (I always wanted to use that word at least once in a manner that was direct instead of merely meretricious, which is another word I always wanted to use at least once in a manner….ahem), and theatrical.
I note also that w/out the horrific cake makeup, she is a beautifully formed physical human being.
But mostly I just love the way she rides the microphone stand “with the cross of Jesus going on before”.
June 16, 2009 at 10:34 am
Actually, Nina Hagen is the secret incarnation of the Virgin Mary,
Just sayin’
June 18, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Or is old Gregg back like a hot shot of the cooked Smack, Jack
June 18, 2009 at 4:26 pm
It’s an MTVesque reinterpretation of Dicken’s A Halloween Carol, in which she portrays the ghosts of Halloween Past, Present, and Future right?
Right?
Oh. I’m all alone in this little comment box. Hmmm… I wonder what this button does… *!*
June 19, 2009 at 8:34 am
Then again Shakira and her divine ass could do worse than to take Hagen’s “Heiss” and translate it into Spanish.
The ‘Yo soy calor…soy CALIENTE’ part would be teh ho++.
June 19, 2009 at 8:46 am
Behold:
a young Nina with her original band ‘Spliff’ courtesy of WestDeutscheRundfunk. A little ditty about a young woman who is hot, and wants to take a shower, whereupon amusing complications ensue.
June 15, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The Old Testament, throughout, points to “a righteous God and a Savior” for “all the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 45:22, 23).
It’s hard to see this as an indication that Jehovah was expecting conversions, what with his Old Testament preference for genocide.
June 15, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Waddya think “all *ends* of the earth” means?
June 15, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Anecdotally, I was at a CLE session at the Chicago Bar Assn two weeks ago and listened to Easterbrook and a couple other 7th Circuit judges (Bauer Flaum & Kanne) talk about practice in their circuit. He was funny and intelligent in person. No rolling eyes, spittle, or ululation, and a considerate deflection of one lawyer’s 3 minute harangue about how Chicago school judging w/r/t punitive damages has a negative effect on the plaintiff’s bar, and thus plaintiffs.
No point, except that I didn’t know the guy was someone I shouldn’t like going in, and wound up liking him by the time it ended.
June 16, 2009 at 9:37 pm
craig-
That’s Gregg’s brother Frank you’re talking about, I think. Much smarter but also more pernicious — along with Richard Posner he’s one of the godfathers of the law & economics movement.