The earliest recorded debt cancellation was in Mesopotamia in 2400 BC when an amargi was decreed in Lagash. Amargi is often translated by vague words like liberty but means an Economic Clean Slate. There were ten other clean slates in Mesopotamia up to the start of the Babylonian dynasty and another sixteen in Babylonia from 1880 to 1636 BC. King Hammurapi proclaimed four in forty two years. The Hammurapi Code is a key event in economic history and its most binding edicts were misharum...'clean slate' debt, tax and bondage cancellations.

There were also regular edicts for debt cancellations in Assyria and Anatolia. And the custom was adopted by popular reformers until well into the first millennium BC, for example in Corinth and other Greek cities from 650 to 580. Greek reformers were called tyrants by their opponents...their tyranny being to overthrow the landed aristocracies, redistribute the property and cancel debts.

The refusal to lift the Cross of Gold off the back of humanity has now spread right round the world. From Jerusalem, through Rome and Constantinople, to Venice and Florence, Genoa, Amsterdam and Antwerp, London, New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, Quebec, Moscow, Delhi, Buenos Ayres, Johannesburg, Sydney and Stockholm.

Debt is growing exponentially and is now digitised in a world wide web of electronic accounts controlled by 1000 commercial banks and 125 central banks. On top of the pyramid sit the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements and the World Trade Organisation. A washing away of the debt records as the clean slate was called in Anatolia three thousand years ago would mean deleting all financial obligations.

Boudewijn Wegerif was a devout Christian and in his view there is no other way forward for humanity than through a Clean Slate Policy at individual and collective levels. Usury must be brought to an end and all debts entered into for profit must be cancelled. We must finish what Jesus began and end money lending at interest and exploitative merchandising that is now basic to our society.

A correct translation of the original Lord's Prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors'. Jesus' assault on his local synagogue and the Temple are best understood against this background. It is not Christians but radical economists who understand the significance of this episode in endorsing the Clean Slate Doctrine adopted by statesmen like Solon of Athens and Julius Caesar of Rome (almost). The ambivalent attitude of the Jews to debt cancellation in the history of their Jubilee clean slate tradition runs through the Jewish Old Testament. For Jesus...the central figure in Christianity...it was central to his ministry.

Jesus stormed into the Temple in Jerusalem, upturned the benches of the Moneychangers and emptied their moneybags on the floor. He also overturned the tables of the merchants selling sacrificial animals. The Christian Gospels also report Jesus announcing in the words of the Jewish Old Testament prophet Jeremiah (7:11) 'My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves'.

Jeremiah’s central message…like that of other Jewish prophets…is that to prey on the weak, to monopolise the land and wealth is theft. Many centuries later Proudhon was to say succinctly Property is Theft. But Jeremiah also stressed the unique nature of the Jewish Covenant which is a subtle mixture of the solidarity politics that are an article of faith to the left and the individual 'human action' approach beloved by the right. Jesus the Messiah was not required to put the world back in order by organising a clean slate like a Bronze Age ruler. This was the task of each and every Jew.

In Boudewijn's words: 'The whole Jewish Nation, everyone, suffers from the sin of usury and the related ills of land and labour exploitation. Jesus was not singling out the Moneychangers and Merchants as damned. They were after all doing legitimate business. He was serving notice on the whole nation and indeed the whole world that if usury is practised and if the spirit of regular debt cancellation and freedom from land bondage is not upheld the earth breaks down. It is made desolate simply because a sustainable economic order is made impossible by the theft.'