The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story, the prose fiction offspring of The Apostle, was published in 1916, enjoying immediate critical acclaim. The resounding success of the novel helped convince Moore that he had produced ‘the only prose epic in the English language’, and ensured that it would never end up on the author's list of books best forgotten: the writings of ‘Amico Moorini’. Understandably, he liked to attribute the popularity of his book to its literary qualities, though he must also have been aware that much of the attention it received stemmed from its controversial subject matter. A month or so after the novel's publication, he wrote to W. K. Magee: ‘Everybody is irritated with me for having written The Brook Kerith, and the issue of all the talk has been a large sale.’ Moore is referring here to the raging controversy that the novel provoked, which filled a great number of column inches in the letter pages of the Westminster Gazette and the Daily Express. What these indignant, often furious, attacks on The Brook Kerith confirm is that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, fictionalizing the life of Christ still had the potential to shock the reading public. It must also be said, however, that with this particular work Moore had dared to tread where other writers of biblical fiction had not. While rewritings of the Gospels had hitherto narrated events from the altitude of an omniscient narrator, or from the firstperson perspective of an anonymous disciple, Moore relates the story of failed Messiahship partly from Christ's own viewpoint. It is not surprising, then, that The Brook Kerith outraged some of its more devout readers, used to rather more moderate imaginative reconstructions of their Saviour. One reviewer writing in the Manchester Guardian, while extolling the artistic virtues of the novel, nonetheless concludes that, of all the legends circulated about Jesus, Moore's is ‘the most offending’, and Lord Alfred Douglas tried – and failed – to bring a charge of blasphemy against the author.