I was surprised when I received my first ever reading list from Oxford; as well as listing all the wrong books for the first year course, which I’ve since learnt is typical of Oxford organisation, it also contained the sentence ‘There is no need to begin reading widely in German literature but it would be a good thing to read the Old and New Testaments.’
Why was the Bible more important reading than books directly relevant to my course? I was not so familiar with German literature, having taken my tutor’s comment about not reading widely very much to heart, but when I started to think about it, I realised how much the Bible was behind some of my favourite childhood stories. Harry Potter’s mother sacrificing herself to enable her son, who should have died, to live was more than just a Disney-style leap in logic; it was a sacrifice directly based on Jesus’s death to give humanity life. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, too, Aslan doesn’t come back from the dead as a cop-out happy ending for children; his resurrection, in parallel to Jesus’s, frees humans from a miserable slavery to evil.
As soon as I started thinking about it, I encountered the Bible everywhere. I’ve recently become addicted to ‘Endeavour’, not least because I can shout ‘I know where that is’ each of the 46 times per episode they run past the Rad Cam, and I’ve noticed how much they quote or allude to the Bible. In the first episode of this series, a spin-off of The Great Gatsby, the verse Numbers 32:23, ‘your sins will find you out’, is scratched on Bixby (aka Gatsby’s) car, whilst in the second episode, a hippy quotes the verse ‘consider the lilies of the field’ (Matthew 6:25) to Inspector Thursday, who is less than impressed. We’re often quite like Thursday, I think, dismissing the Bible as old, boring and irrelevant. But if there are no original stories, as some claim and as the appearance of tenuously linked Endeavour/Gatsby episodes would seem to testify, is it not relevant that the story we keep returning to, in Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Narnia, the musical Joseph, Paradise Lost,Lord of the Rings, is the story of the Bible?
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. A conservative estimate is that in 2005 English-speakers purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ and it seems we just can’t get away from it. Both the original Bible, available in over 350 languages, and modern bestsellers with biblical foundations prove that over 2000 years on, we’re still fascinated with this story. And rightly so; far more than ‘lily of the field’ books which bloom for a while and fade away, this is a book that has been changing lives and whole systems of thought for centuries. So that’s why it’s more important than reading widely in German literature, which, admittedly, most things in life are, but this is also what makes it more important than any other book ever written.
