(Part of an advent series for apologists: read part one and part two)
It was a wet summer afternoon on Ireland’s famed North Coast and I was avoiding the showers in a second hand bookshop when I spotted the white dust cover of, ‘The Man Born to be King’, by Dorothy L. Sayers, and I couldn’t resist buying it – £5.
Dorothy Sayers was an English crime writer, poet and playwright, and author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories.
It was the B.B.C. who commissioned, ‘The Man Born to be King’, and broadcast it as a series of twelve plays beginning on 21st December, 1941, continuing until October 1942. Interestingly, in the forward, J. W. Welch, the then ‘Director of Religious Broadcasting B.B.C.’ wrote, “The minimum duty of religious broadcasting to those outside the churches is to say: “Listen! This is the truth about the world, and life, and you” – not exactly a widespread view in the 21st Century!
And in her own introduction to the play, Dorothy Sayers wrote about how a writer might treat the story and said:
Not Herod, not Caiaphas, not Pilate, not Judas ever contrived to fasten upon Jesus Christ the reproach of insipidity; that final indignity was left for pious hands to inflict.
To make of His story something that could neither startle, nor shock, nor terrify, nor excite, nor inspire a living soul is to crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame. And if anybody imagines that its conventional presentation has of late been all that it should be, let him stop the next stranger in the street and ask what effect is has had on him…
Let me tell you, good Christian people, an honest writer would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale as you have treated the greatest drama in history: and this in virtue, not of his faith, but of his calling. You have forgotten, perhaps, that it is, first and foremost, a story – a true story, the turning-point of history, “the only thing that has ever really happened”.”