THE MAN BORN TO BE KING.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 271, 1 September 1944, Page 5

THE MAN BORN TO BE KING.

Sir,-H. H. Fountain and J. E. Dixon want to know why I do not believe and why I say that "The Man Born to be King" is not true. The books of the New Testament are full of supernaturalism, and they did not reach their present form until hundreds of years after the death of Christ. Most of the books are composite, with many interpretations and straight-out additions; some are pure religious fiction like John’s gospel, Acts, 2nd Thessalonians, and 2nd Peter, with the result that they are nearly all contradictory, and require a special method of analysis to sort out the different documents used. Here is one reason for not © accepting the gospels. In the Synoptics Jesus relates wonderful happenings that will take place: they shall see the Son of Man coming with power and great glory to set up the Kingdom of God on earth. Jesus admits that He does not

know the day, only the Father oknows that, but He makes the definite ‘promise that all this will happen during the generation they were living in (say 33 years) and that even some of them that were listening to Him would be alive when it happened. Was Jesus a false Prophet? Now as to history and chronology. The New Testament is not history: we are dealing with tradition, and the chronology of the gospels is out from four to ten years, where we can check it. I never referred to discrepancies but mentioned contradictions, and I now cite the stories of the Nativity and Infancy of Jesus as told in Matthew and Luke, along with the two genealogies. Mat. thew makes the birth in at least 4 B.C, by including Herod the Great in his story, and Luke makes the birth 6-7 A.D. by mentioning the census taken by | Quirinius. John complicates matters by the indirect statement that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. Both these stories are a clear case of very late addition and must have been added after John’s gospel was written. I wonder why Dorothy Sayers did not take Matthew Chap. 24 for the basis of a radio play; there are wonderful matter, wonderful situations, climax and anti-climax. Would it be because she knew what I have described above? Dorothy Sayers deliberately set out to shock her listeners, but I seem to have shocked two of them far more with a simple letter than she with twelve radio plays,

ARGOSY

(Te Awamutu).

a6. = ™~ TP eT (This correspondence is now closed.)

AN AUTHOR’S ROYALTIES. Sir,-Your correspondent K. Annabell in commenting on .the plays, The Man Born to be King, wonders what Dorothy Sayers does with the Toyalties from these plays, whose theme was not her creation. Here is an answer, by Dorothy Sayers herself, which she gives in The Mind of the Maker: "It is true that he (the artist), like everybody else, derives remuneration from his work (though not, strictly speaking, profit in the financial sense of the word, since what he invests in his work is not money but time and skill, whose ,returns cannot be calculated in percentages). The remuneration is frequently beyond the amount necessary to ‘enable him to go on working. What is remarkable about him is the way in which he commonly employs the escape-from-work which the extra remuneration allows him. If he is genuinely an artist, you will find him using his escape-from-work in order to do what he calls ‘my own work’, and nine times out of ten, this means the same work (i.e, the exercise of his art) that he does for money. The peculiar charm of his escape is that he is relieved, not from the: work but from the money. His holidays are all busman’s holidays." :

XYZ

(Wellington),