After a year of scandal, BBC One has found God. The final week of Christ’s life will be dramatised in a £4 million series that rehabilitates Pontius Pilate.

The Passion, a co-production with HBO, the American company behind The Sopranos, will run nightly, in soap-style episodes, across the Easter week next year.

Joseph Mawle, 33, a relative unknown, will play Jesus in the first television attempt to present the greatest story ever told since Robert Powell starred in the 1977 series Jesus Of Nazareth. Written by Frank Deasy, who won an Emmy for the final instalment of Prime Suspect, The Passion will challenge popular assumptions surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is shown as a troubled Roman prefect who is forced to clamp down on insurgents running riot in Jerusalem.

The Resurrection will be depicted in a deliberately ambiguous manner, which may anger Christian groups when the series is shown in the United States.

Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer, told The Times: “The challenge is to rescue the Passion from myth and tell it as an exciting, unfolding story.”

He said that the Resurrection scenes, to be shown on Easter Sunday, would be faithful to the Gospels. But the producers were determined not to “impose our views on the audience”.

Mawle, from Oxford, got his first break appearing in an advertisement for Guinness. Mr Stafford-Clark said: “Joseph has a way of holding your attention on screen. After we saw him, we didn’t consider anyone else.”

The series, shot in Morocco, was the personal passion of Peter Fincham, the BBC One controller who resigned during the row this year over misleading footage of the Queen. It is the highlight of a BBC One winter season, which is strong on drama.

Jay Hunt, director of programmes at Five, was announced this week as Mr Fincham’s replacement but will not take up the post until next year.

DCI Gene Hunt returns in Ashes To Ashes, the sequel to the time-travel police drama, Life On Mars. It is 1981 and Hunt (Philip Glenister) has been transferred to the Met, where he is faced with the Brixton riots and DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), an independent-minded single mother.

Anthony Minghella and Richard Curtis have collaborated on an adaptation of The No. 1 One Ladies’ Detective Agency, the bestselling novel by Alexander McCall Smith.

BBC One will follow the success of its period drama Cranford with another revival of Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Andrew Davies.

Julia Sawalha and Dawn French will star in an adaptation of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford.