Mar­tin Scors­ese and Paul Schrad­er are mak­ing a series about Christianity

Life­long col­lab­o­ra­tors Mar­tin Scors­ese and Paul Schrad­er have plen­ty in com­mon: an endur­ing ado­ra­tion for the cin­e­ma, shared expe­ri­ences in the hard-liv­ing 1970s and ​’80s, and most impor­tant­ly, devout­ly Chris­t­ian upbringings.

Schrader’s back­ground may be in hard­line Mid­west­ern Calvin­ism while Scors­ese was raised to be a good Roman Catholic boy, but judg­ing from the films they’ve made togeth­er and sep­a­rate­ly, they see eye to eye on the big top­ics of guilt, penance, and redemption.

So it’s all too apro­pos that for their first joint effort in over twen­ty years, they’ll be turn­ing to the Lord. In a sense… The duo are set to team up to for a mul­ti-year stream­ing series called The Apos­tles and Apoc­rypha, mak­ing ref­er­ence to the less­er-adapt­ed excised sec­tion of the Bible.

In an inter­view with The New York­er, Schrad­er spilled the beans that he and Mar­ty – the dynam­ic duo that brought us Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, Bring­ing Out the Dead, and most per­ti­nent­ly, The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ – are work­ing with Net­flix on a ​“three-year” series that will drama­tise the ori­gins of one of the planet’s dom­i­nant reli­gions. And like their most con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture, in which they dared to por­tray Jesus Christ as a fal­li­ble man, it’s sure to ruf­fle some feath­ers among dog­mat­ic types.

As Schrad­er explains: “…peo­ple sort of know the New Tes­ta­ment, but nobody knows the Apoc­rypha. And back in the first cen­tu­ry, there was no New Tes­ta­ment, there’s just these sto­ries. And some were true, and some weren’t, and some were forg­eries.” In oth­er words, they’re tak­ing the word of the Bible as less than absolute, an unre­li­ably nar­rat­ed sto­ry not so far from, say, Jor­dan Belfort’s self-aggran­diz­ing voiceover in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Both Scors­ese and Schrad­er are cur­rent­ly in the thick of pro­duc­tion on their respec­tive next films, so it’s like­ly to be a good long while until they blow the lid off this whole divin­i­ty thing. But for both men, this sounds like an ambi­tious and per­son­al late-career under­tak­ing, guar­an­teed to pro­duce at the very least fas­ci­nat­ing results, illu­mi­nat­ing to the career of either man.