By the late Seventies, Burgess had received a series of TV biblical commissions to write scripts for adaptations of, firstly the Moses story starring Burt Lancaster, and later the New Testament. He was averse to wasting work, so he repurposed his research and writing for these various televisual commissions into novels, and hence his work on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Robert Powell as a blue-eyed Christ, was reworked into the novel Man of Nazareth, which is notably different to the screenplay and perhaps closer to Burgess’s own conception of Jesus.