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.