The Man Born to Be King

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "The Man Born to Be King" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Man Born to Be King is a radio drama based on the life of Jesus, produced and broadcast by the BBC during the Second World War. It is a play cycle consisting of twelve plays depicting specific periods in Jesus' life, from the events surrounding his birth to his death and resurrection. It was first broadcast by the BBC Home Service on Sunday evenings, beginning on 21 December 1941, with new episodes broadcast at 4-week intervals, ending on 18 October 1942. The series was written by novelist and dramatist Dorothy L. Sayers, and produced by Val Gielgud, with Robert Speaight as Jesus.

The twelve plays in the cycle are:

1. Kings in Judea
2. The King's Herald
3. A Certain Nobleman
4. The Heirs to the Kingdom
5. The Bread of Heaven
6. The Feast of Tabernacles
7. The Light and the Life
8. Royal Progress
9. The King's Supper
10. The Princes of This World
11. King of Sorrows
12. The King Comes to His Own

The project aroused a storm of controversy, even before it was broadcast. Objections arose to the very idea—atheists complained of Christian propaganda, while devout Christians declared that the BBC would be committing blasphemy by allowing the Christ to be impersonated by a human actor—and also to Sayers' approach to the material.^{[citation needed]} Sayers, who felt that the inherent drama of the Gospel story had become muffled by familiarity and a general failure to think of its characters as real people, was determined to give the plays dramatic immediacy, featuring realistic, identifiable characters with human emotions, motivations, and speech-patterns. The decision to have the characters speak in contemporary colloquial English was, by itself, the cause of much disquiet among those more accustomed to Jesus and his followers using the polished and formal words of the King James Bible.^{[citation needed]}

In the event, although it continued to be criticised by conservative Christians—one group going so far as to proclaim the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to be a sign of God's displeasure with the series^[1]—The Man Born to Be King was generally considered a great success, both as drama and as biblical representation. The public reaction to the series is described by J. W. Welch, the Director of Religious Broadcasting B.B.C., in his foreword to the play scripts. These were first published in 1943,^[2] with Sayers' lengthy introduction, illuminating her attitude to the work and the reasoning behind particular aspects of her dramatisation, and with notes and commentary by the author on each of the twelve plays. The book of the scripts was published in its 22nd impression in 1957, and subsequently.