November in North Africa. It is 28 degrees, the sky is a perfect cloudless blue. And Jesus, who’s sitting right in front of me, is about to turn water into wine. No, I’m not hallucinating, but simply watching the filming of the Marriage Feast of Cana on location near the Atlas Mountains.

It’s the second shoot by Big Book Media, a company set up by Hannah Leader, a Christian media lawyer and film producer. Her aim? To capture on film each reading in the Church’s three-year lectionary cycle — and then to film, for evangelical churches that favour “theme-based” services instead, all the Bible passages not in the lectionary. There will be a children’s version too, for use in Sunday School (called The 3 Wise Camels) with a voiceover by Diana-Louise Jordan.

The idea is that vicars needing a film clip to enliven their Sunday preaching can either download the clips from a website, or subscribe for a monthly lectionary film clip on DVD.

“When you preach and are trying to bring a scene to life, often you will begin by scene-setting,” says the Rev Trevor Critchlow, the London-based vicar who is theological adviser to Big Book Media. “Many hear the words but it is not moving them in the same way that seeing a picture or dramatisation of the Gospel does.”

Leader is blunter: “I had a feeling that for 50 per cent of the congregation the words of the Gospel are floating over their heads,” she says.

The bulk of the £800,000-£1 million budget comes from her share in the profit from the sale of Capitol, the film company that co-produced Gosford Park. When Leader and her two business partners sold Capitol three and a half years ago, she thought of fulfilling a longheld dream to train as a priest — “but I was 47, a woman and divorced and I thought this was a better use of the skills I had already.”

The catalyst was finding Critchlow, Leader’s vicar at St Paul’s Wembley Park, struggling to find a clip in Jesus of Nazareth to illustrate his next sermon: “He said ‘Why don’t these things have an index?’ I said ‘I think I can do better than that’.”

That was 18 months ago, and filming in Morocco began — in 48 degree heat — last July. Since then Big Book has filmed the entire Nativity story plus all the readings up to the fifth Sunday in Lent. Each sequence is meticulously planned beforehand, so that the crew can take maximum advantage of the light in the Ouarzazate desert, an area known for its plethora of film sets as Morocco’s Hollywood.

Leader, who has studied Ancient Greek and Hebrew (she is taking a theology degree), says authenticity is important. Sequences in Jerusalem, for instance, will be filmed in Ait Benhaddou, a village made from the mud-brick and straw houses popularised by the Jews who fled Jerusalem for Morocco in the 1st century AD.

“Hannah’s brief was to make the viewer feel they were in 1st-century Judea,” says the director, David Batty, who had been in the middle of filming Christianity, a History for Channel 4 when he was first contacted by Leader.

Though he has produced several documentaries about Jesus, Batty finds the Bible a unique challenge: “It is an incredibly difficult book to adapt for screen because there are endless scenes that last for about one line but if you don’t do them they stick out like a sore thumb.”

He is keen to move away from traditional “static” depictions of the Messiah. So in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus begins to preach on a rock but then weaves His way through the crowd: “I’ve always felt He must have worked the crowd like a politician: He sees a blind man, He bounces off that, He sees some blokes arguing, He bounces off that,” says Batty.