The Man Born To Be King

Someone on a Wade Center podcast I listened to last year said that some people use Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born To Be King as an Advent devotion some years. Listening to it, it is immediately clear that they meant a Lenten devotion, so my wife and I are listening to it 3-4 nights per week.  It can be read at archive.org at The Man Born to be King.  CS Lewis read it every Holy Week for the last twenty years of his life, greatly approving of the down-to-earth quality, the contemporary language, and the informality. It was a weekly radio play beginning late 1941 on the BBC and repeated on radio a half-dozen times.

It was controversial at the time, because many people in Britain thought anything from the Bible had to be quite Authorized Version in its tone, so her townspeople with Irish or Northern or City accents were right out. There were homely details of a woman inviting Jesus to dinner after the baptism and remembering him as a boy and young man, or children singing scraps of songs.  We would consider such things normal in our day, and in fact this broadcast seems to our ears too stilted, too residually formal.  The music and sound effects are from another era when such things were less subtle.

But it's good, very good, and I think it will bear reading or listening. I mentioned recently that I had some concern about The Chosen, good as it is,  because people will begin to mix up the scripture with the artistic license.  There is no such danger here, I don't think, though there may have been in its own day.