The Old West Downs Society

The Life of Jesus aka The Unholy Gospel

In 1944 Kenneth Tindall completed a most remarkable work. It was a book describing in detail the Life of Jesus. It takes all the stories from the actual gospel, and puts them together in such a way that various apparently unrelated facts become obviously and strongly related. In other words he has provided the links between the various episodes and parables.

It was his own family who gave the book the alternate name of “The Unholy Gospel”. It is in fact very holy indeed.

There are 24 chapters, some of them perhaps rather long for a single reading, but, taken day by day, KBT could get through the book in a single term of weekdays. Those of us who were privileged to hear his readings from it will know how gripping he made the tale become, and how much we looked forward to the next session.

It is possible that religious purists will not agree with the approach, but the fact is that it did make us interested in the story of the life of Christ, and it did make us into much better Christians than we would have been otherwise.

As he finished each chapter he had it typed up by the School Secretary, during the School holidays. Thus there was a top copy and two flimsies. For some reason the top copy disappeared some years ago. I believe it was sent to someone for reading with a view to publication. In order for the OWD Society to set it up in print the entire document had to be scanned in from these flimsies, some of which went back to the 1920s and all of which had been much thumbed, having been used for reading not only to West Downs but also to the Gaskell’s school in North Wales, as well. To make matters worse the flimsies were foolscap in size. They were photocopied reduced, and then the scanning done from the resulting A4 sheet.

Archives Secretary