Fifty years ago, Dorothy Sayers cut through stained glass and archaic language to reveal the human Jesus.
“Do you have tapes of Dorlothy Sayers’s Man Born to JL.S be King?” I asked the young man in the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London. He looked blank. “It’s a cycle of 12 plays about the life of Christ,” I explained.
“I think you must be mistaken, ma’am; Dorothy Sayers wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Here are the videos of Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night.”
If only, I thought, this salesman could travel back 50 years when Broadcasting House raged with a controversy about The Man Born to be King. Before she died in 1957, Sayers was well known not only as a writer of mysteries, but also as a Christian essayist, as a translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and as a friend of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. But her plays about the life of Jesus brought her the most fame and infamy during her lifetime.
The Lord Chamberlain of England had to grant special permission to allow the voice of Christ to be broadcast, since stage portrayals of any member of the Trinity had been against British law from Puritan times. Full-page advertisements—”Radio Impersonation of Christ! A Protest”—appeared in newspapers. Thousands wrote complaints to the BBC; Parliament got involved. Newspapers lurched from support (one claimed that it “rekindled our imaginations with a sense of what it meant for the divine to dwell in human flesh”) to condemnation (one renamed it “Crowning Shame”).
The divine in human flesh; this was the heart of the controversy. Sayers believed that she would be truly reverent to “the incarnate Godhead” only by understanding that he was truly human, “subject to the common realities of daily life.”
Sayers knew her portrayal of a human Christ would upset many: “People will be shocked, and rightly. We are prepared for our Lord to be born into the language of the Authorized Version or into stained glass or paint; we are not prepared for him to be incarnate.”
The story of the production of, and the conflict surrounding, these plays highlights two crucial issues for Christians hoping to share the Christian message today. First, people are still shocked by an incarnate Savior eating, walking, breathing, and speaking; this touches the heart of how we are to understand Jesus and how we are to present Christ so that unbelievers and believers are drawn to him.
Another issue flows from the first: Sayers understood that just as God’s creation of the world and his incarnation in Jesus are extraordinary, so the work of Christian artists and workers should be exceptional—done to the best of their ability. The plays that Sayers labored over were superb; they touched Christians and non-Christians with the reality of an incarnate Savior.
The Writing
In 1938 Sayers wrote her first play for radio—a nativity play called “He That Should Come.” In an article that same year, Sayers wrote that at the heart of Christianity is “the Greatest Drama Ever Staged”—that of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Jesus.
It is no wonder, then, that in February 1940, during the darkest moments of World War II, the BBC asked Sayers to write a series of radio plays about the life of Christ. Sayers’s correspondence with the BBC producers shows her grappling with the challenges of the project: How could she give each play its own autonomy, yet build the drama of the whole cycle of 12? What about Judas? “What did that man imagine he was doing?” She despaired over the lack of female voices, complaining that “one can’t help wishing that Christ’s female acquaintances had been a little more varied and respectable. One can’t do much, for children, with the Woman taken in Adultery or the lady who had seven husbands.”
Throughout, Sayers held firmly to two absolute conditions: that she be able to portray Christ as a real human being and that she be free to do her best work as an artist.
Sayers felt that the distance imposed by stained-glass windows and the obscure language of the King James Version left people with the feeling that Jesus had never been a real human being and that the crucifixion of Christ could not happen here. In fact, “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own.… His executioners made vulgar jokes about Him, called Him filthy names, taunted Him, smacked Him in the face, flogged Him with the cat, and hanged Him on the common gibbet—a bloody, dusty, sweaty, and sordid business.”
She wrote to her producer in August 1942: “I have finished the Crucifixion—except for cutting and polishing. It is pretty brutal and full of bad language; but you can’t expect crucified robbers to talk like a Sunday-school class.”
Sayers had to grapple with accents, because accent in England carries strong class connotations. Sayers discussed the difficulties in her introduction to the first play: “We decided that Jesus and His Mother should speak Standard English, but that the ‘multitudes’ should be allowed to ‘speak rough.’ … The question then arose: should the Disciples also speak Standard English (in which case they might, by contrast with the Crowd, sound rather like a Universities’ Mission to the East End); or should Jesus have a monopoly on refined speech, at the risk of appearing among His Disciples and the Crowd like a BBC announcer?”
Sayers toiled to portray Jesus as human; she also wore out a Greek New Testament and consulted experts in theology and history. She drafted and redrafted her plays. She knew that she was called of God “to tell the story to the best of my ability within the medium at my disposal; in short to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not good or true in any other respect.” To Sayers, the adjective Christian meant “outstanding, of the highest possible standard.”
The best work will be Christian work, according to Sayers, because that is what God is like: he created, and it was good. “No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.”
As Sayers worked on the plays, she locked horns with BBC program directors who wanted her to simplify her script. Sayers quit, saying the issue was one of integrity. James Welch, the director of religious broadcasting, pleaded with her, saying the plays were landmarks in religious broadcasting and religious education, but most importantly, “I believe quite simply and bluntly, that in the writing of these plays the spirit of God would have been working in and through you. Nothing matters compared with the practical importance of revealing the character of the Son of God to the younger listeners of this country.”
The Controversy
Having ironed out some of the writing challenges and defended her integrity, Sayers and the BBC faced an attack from a direction where they might have least expected it: Christians.
“Kings of Judea,” the first play, was scheduled for broadcast on December 21, 1941. Ten days before, the BBC held a press conference. Sayers read some dialogue from the plays, and even reporters were shocked. Imagine Saint Matthew, of stained-glass window fame, saying to Philip (who has been cheated in the market): “Fact is, Philip my boy, you’ve been had for a sucker. Let him ring the changes on you proper. You ought to keep your eyes skinned, you did really.” News about the plays splashed across the papers with headlines like the Daily Herald’s “Gansterisms in Bible Play” or the Daily Mail’s“BBC ‘Life of Christ’ Play in US Slang.”
The Lord’s Day Observance Society responded by running full-page protests. Members were outraged by the portrayal of Jesus—“the first time a radio impersonation of Christ has been attempted anywhere in the world”—and by the language—“which means in effect a spoliation of the beautiful language of the Holy Scriptures which have been given by inspiration of the Holy Spirit.” People were encouraged to write to the BBC, which received 8,000 letters, mostly critical.
One J. Henry wrote like this: “Two shocks broke on us this past week. First: The treacherous attack of Japan on the USA. Second: A far greater shock—that the BBC has sanctioned the dramatizing of the life of Christ to be broadcast in this country. Please do your best before it is too late.”
Others suggested that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese because of the broadcast and asked that something be done before Australia fell. Some of the less violent critics wouldn’t mind “modern colloquial English but consider that Americanized slang is intolerable.” Members of Parliament contacted the BBC about the letters from disgruntled citizens they were receiving. One editor of a large newspaper suggested the level of correspondence was unprecedented in its intensity of feeling.
“Kings in Judea,” about the birth of Christ, was performed on its December date, but the fate of the rest of the cycle was put on hold because the next play, “The King’s Herald,” would include the voices of Jesus, John the Baptist, and some disciples.
In an “Appeal to Christian Men and Women,” the Lord’s Day Observance Society asserted that “This Protest goes deeper than mere verbal objections to any slang terms uttered by the Actors. In our submission any stage-acted impersonation of our Divine Lord is blasphemous. A sinful man presuming to impersonate the Sinless One! It detracts from the honour due to the Divine Majesty.”
Sayers wrote to one correspondent that this outrage was a fresh outbreak of the ancient heresy of docetism, which involved a fear of the human body and a certainty that God could not have become truly human.
The outcry from religious leaders was not without precedent. Jesus was vigorously opposed by religious leaders who were threatened by a God who broke the rules and visited his creation clothed in human flesh; The Man Born to Be King was nearly exterminated by the religious establishment. Likewise, the apostle Paul outraged conservative Jews by taking his message to outsiders so that they could hear and understand it; Sayers met opposition from believers who were upset by a message presented in the vernacular.
The Results
The decision—should the rest of the cycle be broadcast?—was handed over to the Central Religious Advisory Committee of the BBC, and they supported broadcasting. When a reporter asked Welch to explain the unanimous support, he answered simply, “Because they had read the plays.” And so the life of Jesus went out over the air. Millions listened to the plays about Jesus’ ministry. The plays for Holy Week were particularly powerful, beginning with “Royal Progress,” “The King’s Supper,” “The Princes of This World,” “King of Sorrows,” and finally, the resurrection play, “The King Comes into His Own.”
Listeners confirmed the success of Sayers’s project. The king wrote expressing his thanks, and so did thousands of the ordinary people for whom Sayers was writing. She told a friend about a neighbor’s response: “A funny old girl in this village stopped me yesterday in the street to say ‘thank you,’ adding that it was ‘… so reverent’—and that she would be quite unhappy when the series came to an end.”
Millions of the British adult population listened as the plays were repeated annually for many years. The play cycle became known as one of this century’s most successful evangelistic tools. Archbishop William Temple called it one of the greatest contributions to the religious life of his era. C. S. Lewis said, “I have re-read it in every Holy Week since it first appeared, and never reread it without being deeply moved.” The archbishop of Canterbury offered Sayers an honorary doctorate because of her work, “in recognition of what I regard as the great value of your work, especially The Man Born to Be King and The Mind of the Maker.”
After hearing the plays broadcast, many wanted to read them. When The Man Born to Be King was published, Sayers could not resist thanking her enemies: “It is moreover irresistibly tempting (though is it kind or Christian?) to mention the Lord’s Day Observance Society and the Protestant Truth Society, who … secured for us a large increase in our adult audience and thus enabled the political and theological issues in the most important part of the story to be treated with more breadth and pungency than might otherwise have seemed justifiable. Their beneficence is none the less real for having been unintentional.”
Like Jesus and his disciples, Sayers was unwilling to make her message either mediocre or “safe.” She could have written plays that would have offended no one, and even members of the Lord’s Day Observance Society could have quietly nodded off by their radios. But Sayers invested her time and talents bringing Jesus as a real person to her listeners.
Are we today encouraging Christian artists to find authentic and arresting ways to reach an audience alienated or dulled by a deficient “Christian” message? God cared enough to visit in human flesh, to speak and act so that ordinary people could hear and understand. And so must we.