Oliver Twist and the New Testament

I read the book 'Oliver Twist' many years ago and saw the musical ‘Oliver' more recently. I read the New Testament in it's entirety only 4 years ago and saw the musical 'Jesus Christ Superstar' long before that time.

Oliver Twist is the second novel by Charles Dickens, and was first published as a serial 1837–39. The story is of the orphan Oliver Twist, who starts his life in a workhouse and is then sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. He escapes from there and travels to London, where he meets the Artful Dodger, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.

While I never for a moment thought that the characters of Fagin, the Artful Dodger or even Oliver actually existed, I did gain a great deal of knowledge of what society of the time was like and how they treated their most vulnerable citizens in 19th century England including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. It didn’t require that I ‘believed’ Fagan actually existed as a real person, just gave me the knowledge that while he mightn’t, his character was based on reality. And so I have always had a grasp on just what life was like that time in England for the lower classes.

Just over a week ago, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days listening to lectures by Dr. Amy Jill Levine. Now Amy Jill has always puzzled me. She is a Jew, goes to an Orthodox temple , yet teaches mainly New Testament and Early Christianity at Vanderbilt University. She describes herself as a "Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” She has always been an oxymoron to me….. But as Amy Jill explained it, the only books written by and about ‘her’ culture for 200 hundred years ending in 150 BC were the books in the New Testament and writings by Josephus. So she turned to studying the New Testament in order to fill in that gap in her people’s story. And they told her many things: Lydia was both a business woman and a homeowner [Acts 16:14], so women ran businesses and had property. That the story of the centurion who came to have his servant healed, tells us that some Romans were mingling with the ‘locals’ to the extent of building their synagogue [Luke7:1-10] She was looking for sociological clues from the texts, clues to help her explain the development of her religion.

She only had this to say about the ‘truth’ of the New Testament, ’Belief is not like logic, it is like love” and just just as we can never explain why we fell in love with a particular person, we will never be able to explain why a particular religion resonates with us.

Until I heard Amy Jill’s presentation this past week, reading the New Testament never had the same effect on me that reading Oliver Twist all those years ago did. By treating the Bible as a ‘special’ book, one set apart, as something one either believed in or not, I had missed a whole level of understanding of the stories within. Amy Jill gave me an appreciation of new level of understanding of the complete Bible, one that can only enrich my faith by making the stories and the characters live in the time they were written. What a gift I was given!

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