For the season …

… Touchstone Archives: The Greatest Drama Ever. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… some of the objections can be better understood and may seem less comical if we note how much has changed since the plays were first broadcast roughly three-quarters of a century ago. Sayers notes in her Introduction that British law at the time prohibited "the representation on the stage of any Person of the Holy Trinity"—and this, in turn, encouraged listeners to think of Jesus in ways that could scarcely do justice to his genuine humanity. Therefore, while observing within Christian sacred art "a dialectic" that emphasizes sometimes the incarnation of the eternal Word in Jesus, and other times the "scandal of particularity" in Jesus the first-century Jew, her plays tilt in the latter direction, toward a kind of realistic narrative. Jesus is, quite simply, the man born to be king.