Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini was a filmmaker (specializing in the grotesque and the subversive), poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, painter, actor, and public intellectual, as well as both a Catholic and a Marxist, and—finally—a murder victim. Despite clearly being a man of action, even Pasolini couldn’t do it all, and having written a screenplay for a film about St. Paul, the project fell by the wayside and remained unrealized at the time of the director’s demise (in 1975).

The poetic, revolutionary text has now been translated into English for the first time, and will here be read by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, among others. Philosopher Alain Badiou, who wrote the translation’s preface, notes of the project: “Pasolini’s wager is that the truth of which St. Paul is the divided bearer, the sacrificed militant, can make sense in the world of today, thus providing the latent universality of his thought.”