In Hollywood's early days, it was considered irreverent to portray the character of Jesus directly on screen. He was usually personified only by an off-screen voice, or perhaps with a hand coming into shot. Even as recently as MGM's "Ben Hur" in 1959, the face of the actor playing Jesus was rarely seen.

There were compelling artistic reasons for such a decision, quite apart from any questions of reverence. Everyone has a different conception of the way Jesus looked, or how He sounded when He spoke. How could one actor ever live up to so many different expectations? How could an actor — any actor — evoke not only the humanity of Jesus, but also His divinity?

In the extraordinary new radio drama series, "The Luke Reports," we will indeed meet the character of Jesus. "The Luke Reports" also features such characters as the Apostle Paul, Mary's cousin Elizabeth, Luke himself, and even the angel Gabriel!

Clearly, finding the right actors to portray such significant characters was not going to be a simple process. The production team at Focus on the Family RadioTheatre® listened to a great many voices, and held auditions and detailed readings with a number of Britain's leading actors and actresses, before selecting the magnificent cast assembled for the recording sessions.

Several of the cast were themselves believing Christians, representing a number of different denominations. Some were Jewish. Others had no personal faith commitment. But all the cast members felt genuine sympathy with the project, and found real excitement in working with such important material.

As one leading actor said during the sessions, "Somehow it's easy to forget that these characters were real people — flesh and blood. So as an actor, it's my job to make my character real again... believable and human, not just a distant figure from history. The words of the Bible can be very familiar. But in performance, our challenge is to make them sound fresh and new once more."