Robert Keable’s most famous book is Simon Called Peter and I concentrate on that novel in Utterly Immoral. However, he did write a number of other books which are worth reading, including The Great Galilean.

The Great Galilean was written in September and October 1927 and a was very different book from the seven novels Robert Keable had written over the previous seven years. One can't help thinking this was a book he wanted to get written before he died. He was ill when he wrote it and had already been warned that his kidney illness was likely to be terminal. There is no doubt the book would have benefitted from a good edit, but Robert Keable died before he had a chance to properly go over it again.  He dictated the book to his then secretary, James Norman Hall, the co-author of the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy (published 1932-1934).  The fact that Robert Keable spoke, rather than wrote, the words perhaps explains why the book has a more colloquial style than his other non-fiction works. For example, he suggests Jesus ‘would have been a nincompoop if He had not been aware that (sex) was a primary thing in most men’s lives.’ Nincompoop is certainly not a word I have found in any other of his writings.

Over his life Robert Keable completed a complicated religious journey. From an early age he was a devout evangelical and preached in the open as a young teenager. At Cambridge he was influenced by RH Benson and joined the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church. As a missionary in Basutoland, he ran a very high church parish and he considered joining the Roman Catholic church when he resigned as a priest in 1920. By the end of his life he was calling himself an atheist.

He claimed that he wrote The Great Galilean in response to The World Conference on Faith and Order held in Lausanne in August 1927. The conference was intended to bring together most of the churches around the world and agree common ground. Robert Keable suggested the 400 reputedly learned men had unanimously agreed to support a final text that was both reactionary and illiberal.  

In The Great Galilean Robert Keable presents a simple thesis. He claims that there are two versions of Jesus. The Historic Christ who we know very little about, and the Traditional Christ who is a product of the Church and church writings. He argues that the views and teachings associated with Traditional Christ were conceived by St Paul and fashioned over time by the western mind. The Traditional Christ never existed, and the views now claimed by Christians are often alien to what the Historic Christ would have surely believed.   

The book stands or falls on Robert Keable’s assumptions about what the Historic Christ really believed. The Times Literary Supplement commented:

The Great Galilean is a remarkable book, but it is remarkable chiefly for its radical incoherence and for an extra-ordinary sophistication… It is evidently a supreme effort to reconcile (Keable’s) own personal convictions with some ineradicable traces of his former Christianity. It is perfectly sincere but it is perfect humbug.

One man’s humbug is of course another man’s truth and I find its intriguing to see where Robert Keable took issue with the Churches’ teaching. There are three areas in particular.

Firstly, there is the issue of sin. Robert Keable claims the sins that occupied Jesus were hypocrisy, worldliness, intolerance and selfishness. Sins that were social and of the spirit. While the sins that occupied the church, (remembering this was 1927) were impurity, murder, the drinking of alcohol, swearing and the neglect of the Church’s services and ordinances. The church had taken the lead from St Paul who denounced sins that were theological or of the body. Accordingly, Robert Keable wrote:

A man may be a notoriously sharp business man, a hard man, a man in whose home there is neither love between husband and wife nor between master and servants, but he may be an excellent churchman for all that. His minister … will only denounce him from the pulpit if he keeps a mistress or gets drunk in the street.

Secondly there is sex. Robert Keable claims that from the beginning the Church was against sex. Any discussion of Jesus’s conception, the possibility of marriage or even the idea that He might fall in love, was blasphemous. Robert Keable detailed some of the more ‘unbalanced’ ideas of the church. The great churchman who underwent surgery to escape sexual temptation; the sect of Christians who prohibited marriage and sex; the great hermitical and monastic movements who were both celibate and sex-insane – banning hens, let alone women, from Mont Athos; the modern Catholics who see celibacy as a nobler state than marriage and ban priests from marrying; and the Anglican view that a married couple, however loveless, should not divorce. Jesus, Robert Keable claimed, would have taken the common-sense view of sex. He accepted that we do not know Jesus’s attitude to sexual sin but argued we ‘unquestionably have the right to deny to others the right to make of Him a celibate aesthetic’. Continuing with the idea that Jesus would have taken a common-sense approach he makes the case that Jesus would have supported divorce for couples no longer in love, and also supported free love (which he differentiated from promiscuous lust).

Thirdly Robert Keable discussed the political views of the church. He argued a common-sense Jesus would have supported disarmament, writing:

Jesus thought the road to the world’s peace lay in the sinking of all men-of-war and the disbandment of all armies. He was not such a fool as to suppose that so dramatic course might not still leave a predatory nation or two, but He maintained that the suppression of the predatory nation by force was not the way to conquer it. It was rather to suffer and by suffering to convert it.

Similarly, he suggested the way to ‘reform the evil heart of man was not by ever more stringent and meticulous police and ecclesiastical regulations.’ By contrast he suggested the Church supported the European way:

They experimented with theories of nationality and the Balance of Power. Politically, they maintained that the shortest way to peace was to go ever more heavily armed. That the shortest way with robber nations was to crush them ever more bloodily. That the best way to suppress crime was not merely to hang a man for murder but to hang him for stealing a sheep. That the shortest way to suppress promiscuous lust was to ascribe free love to the Devil. That the best way between capital and labour was laissez faire – or let the Devil take the weakest.

The Great Galilean was serialised in The Atlantic Monthly in the Autumn of 1928 and published in England (by Cassell and Co, Ltd) and America (by Little, Brown, and Co.) at the beginning of 1929. It received a surprisingly favourable reception. A short review in the New Britain Herald suggested the book was:

An effort to prove that Jesus, though a mere man, would be a sufficient God if men would accept his teaching instead of St Paul’s. A book to interest laymen and enrage clergymen.

Robert Keable’s knowledge of the scriptures and his obvious intellect ensure his thesis is well argued. A review in the Washington Evening Star pointed out:

Robert Keable is a scholar. It is largely by way of research and learning that this book came into being. Yet it is a simple projection, well within the reach of all. Its great value lies, it seems to me, in its orderly treatment, in its excellent organisation – both elements of simplicity and clarity.

The review ends:

There may be those who will object even without reading the book. There will be those who will draw from it happiness… So, some will read it and some will let it alone. And that is as it should be.