“Your mom is so old that she owes Jesus a quarter?”
“Why would she owe him a quarter?”
“Because she’s so old.”
“Yeah, but why did she borrow a quarter?”
…
“She’d better hope Jesus doesn’t charge interest.”
Clearly, we needed to calculate this. But there were some questions:
- What interest rate would Jesus charge? We’re fairly certain that it’s un-Jesus-like to charge interest. One of my less-culturally-sensitive friends pointed out that Jewish bankers were generally hated in ancient times for usury, so we settled on 10%.
- How long ago was the investment? The obvious answer, 2007, doesn’t make sense, since Jesus probably wasn’t loaning people money as an infant. We settled on 1,990 years. At age 17, Jesus may have loaned someone a quarter.
I don’t have a financial calculator handy, so I had to use a web-based form. Not many of them worked that well. $2.97 came up fairly often. Frustrated, we just used the Future Value formula. Jesus is apparently owed $5.88 x 1081.
This shows why interest rates really matter. If she had negotiated a 5% interest rate, she’d owe only $3.67 x 1041. But if she put it on a credit card, where 27% is more typical… She’d owe $9.28 x 10205.
First of Jesus would probably have made a gift rather than a loan. Secondly since Jesus was all about forgiveness he would likely forgiven the loan had someone not been able to repay him. Thirdly it might depend on if she was Jewish or not. I don’t think Jews were allowed to charge each other interest back then.
The reason Jews went into the banking business was because Christians were not allowed to charge interest in the middle ages. Moslems are still not allowed to charge interest. They are apparently (in some areas) allowed to charge rent on money. Not sure how that works out to be different than interest but there you go.