When I talked to Tibetan Lamas and monks regarding manuscripts talking about Jesus in India as Saint Issa they said such documents exist. However, I think the real problem might have come from the Catholic Church and Protestant churches who don't want this kind of information actually getting out.
Here is the problem as I see it. Tibet is one of the few countries that wasn't completely wiped out at one point or another between 900 AD and the 20th century. So, all other records of Jesus outside of Israel and Rome likely would have been destroyed if you study history like "The burning of Alexandria and it's greatest library in the world and the Sacking of Buddhist India by the Moghuls just to name to of many incidents.
So, without Constantine's mother and Constantine, likely Christianity would have stayed a very repressed religion where people were put in jail or just killed for being Christians. However, Constantine and Helana changed all that and at least in the Roman empire Christians prospered after that.
What I'm saying is for at least 200 years after Christ it was a death sentence most places if you were open about being a Christian even though during this time the Church became and stayed very repressive towards women and put Down Mary Magdalene who was actually not a prostitute but instead a very wealthy business woman who was a patron of Jesus.
Nicolas Notovitch
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(Redirected from Life of Saint Issa)
Nicolas Notovitch
Notovitch is known for his 1894 book claiming that during his unknown years, Jesus left Galilee for India and studied with Buddhists and Hindus there before returning to Judea.[4][5][6] Notovitch's claim was based on a document he said he had seen at the Hemis Monastery while he stayed there, but later confessed to having fabricated his evidence.[7][8]
Some modern scholars view Notovitch's accounts of the travels of Jesus to India as a hoax which includes major inconsistencies.[8][9][10][11]
Notovitch also wrote some political books on the role of Russia in war.[12][13]
Contents
Life of Saint Issa
Outline of the book
Notovitch claimed that he broke his leg in India and while recovering from it at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh, he learned of the "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men" – Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam. Notovitch's story, with the text of the "Life," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ. It was translated into English,[5] German, Spanish, and Italian.
Hemis Monastery in 2006
The "Life of Issa" begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, its deliverance by Moses, its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. At the age of thirteen the divine youth, rather than take a wife, leaves his home to wander with a caravan of merchants to India (Sindh), to study the laws of the great Buddhas. Issa is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend time among the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. Issa spent six years studying and teaching at Jaganath, Rajagriha, and other holy cities. At twenty-nine, Issa returns to his own country and begins to preach. He visits Jerusalem, where Pilate is apprehensive about him. The Jewish leaders, however, are also apprehensive about his teachings yet he continues his work for three years. He is finally arrested and put to death for blasphemy, for claiming to be the son of God. His followers are persecuted, but his disciples carry his message to the world.
Allegations of forgery and claimed confession
Notovitch's book gained significant controversy as soon as it was published - historian Max Müller expressed incredulity at the accounts presented and suggested that either Notovitch was the victim of a practical joke, or had fabricated the evidence.[14][15] Müller said: "Taking it for granted that M. Notovitch is a gentleman and not a liar, we cannot help thinking that the Buddhist monks of Ladakh and Tibet must be wags, who enjoy mystifying inquisitive travelers, and that M. Notovitch fell far too easy a victim to their jokes."[7]
Hemis monastery, Ladakh in 1949
J. Archibald Douglas who was a professor of English and History at the Government College in Agra India then visited the Hemis monastery to interview the head lama who had corresponded with Müller and the lama again stated that Notovitch had never been there and no such documents existed.[16] Wilhelm Schneemelcher states that Notovich's accounts were soon exposed as fabrications, and that to date no one has even had a glimpse at the manuscripts Notovitch claims to have had.[8] Notovich at first responded to claims to defend himself.[17] But once his story had been re-examined by historians, Notovitch is said to have confessed to having fabricated the evidence.[7]
Bart D. Ehrman, a controversial Bible scholar and historian famous for his best sellers, says that "Today there is not a single recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter. The entire story was invented by Notovitch, who earned a good deal of money and a substantial amount of notoriety for his hoax."[9]
However, others deny that Notovich ever accepted the accusations against him - that his account was a forgery, etc.
"Notovitch reponded publicly by announcing his existence, along with the names of people he met on his travels in Kashmir and Ladakh. . . . He also offered to return to Tibet in company of recognized orientalists to verify the authenticity of the verses contained in his compilation. In the French journal La Paix, he affirmed his belief in the Orthodox Church, and advised his detractors to restrict themselves to the simple issue of the existence of the Buddhist scrolls at Hemis."[18]Although he was not impressed with his story, Sir Francis Younghusband recalls his meeting with Nicolas Notovitch near Skardu, not long after Notovitch had left Hemis monastery.[19]
Corroboration in India
Although Notovitch had been discredited in Europe, Swami Abhedananda, a contemporary and colleague of Swami Vivekananda, visited the Himis monastery in 1922 to confirm the reports of Notovich that he had heard the previous year in the USA. The lamas at the monastery confirmed to him that Notovich was indeed brought to the monastery with a broken leg and he was nursed there for a month and a half. They also told him that the manuscript on Jesus Christ was shown to Notovich and contents interpreted so that he could translate them into Russian.[20]The original manuscript was said to be in Pali in the monastery of Marbour near Lhasa. The manuscript preserved at Himis was in Tibetan. Swami Abhedananda himself was shown the manuscript, which had 14 chapters containing 223 couplets (slokas). The Swami got some portions of the manuscript translated with the help of a lama, about 40 verses appearing in the Swami's travelogue.[21]
The lamas told Swami that Jesus Christ came secretly to Kashmir after his resurrection and lived in a monastery surrounded by many disciples. The original manuscript in Pali was prepared "three or four years" after Christ's death, on the basis of reports by local Tibetans and the accounts from wandering merchants regarding his crucifixion.[22]
After his return to Bengal, the Swami asked his assistant Bhairab Chaitanya to prepare a manuscript of the travelogue based on the notes he had taken. The manuscript was published serially in Visvavani, a monthly publication of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Samiti, in 1927 and subsequently published in a book form in Bengali. The fifth edition of the book in English was published in 1987, which also contains as an Appendix, an English translation of Notovich's Life of Saint Issa translated from French.[23]
However, after Abhedananda's death, one of his disciples admitted that when he went to the monastery to ask about the documents he was told that they had disappeared.[24]
Other authors' references
In 1899 Mirza Ghulam Ahmad wrote Jesus in India (published in 1908) and claimed that Jesus had traveled to India after surviving crucifixion, but specifically disagreed with Notovitch that Jesus had gone to India before crucifixion.[25][26]Other authors have taken these themes and incorporated it into their own works. For example, in her book "The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus' 17-Year Journey to the East", Elizabeth Clare Prophet asserts that Buddhist manuscripts provide evidence that Jesus traveled to India, Nepal, Ladakh and Tibet.[27] In his book Jesus Lived in India, German author Holger Kersten promoted the ideas of Nicolas Notovich and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Gerald O'Collins classified Kersten's work as the repackaging of the same stories.[28] In his 2002 comedic novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, absurdist author Christopher Moore parodies the notion that between the ages of 15 and 30, Jesus traveled to Tibet to study Buddhism in a monastery (after first having traveled to Afghanistan), then to India to study Hinduism.
Other writings
In 1906 Notovitch published a book in Russian and French, pleading for Russia's entry into the Triple Entente with France and England. It is entitled in French: La Russie et l'alliance anglaise: étude historique et politique.[12] He also wrote biographies of Tsar Nicolas II and Alexander III.[29] He had also written L'Europe à la veille de la guerre[13]References
- Nicolas Notovitch, L'empereur Nicolas II et la politique russe, Paris : P. Ollendorff, 1895.
Bibliography
- Chaitanya, Brahmachari Bhairab (1987) [first published in Bengali in 1929]. Swami Abhedananda's Journey into Kashmir and Tibet. Rendered into English by Ansupati Daspupta and Kunja Bihari Kundi. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math. ISBN 0874816432.
- Hooper, Richard (2012). Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and Lao Tzu. ISBN 1571746803.
Further reading
- Douglas, J. Archibald (1896). "The Chief Lama of Himis on the Alleged 'Unknown Life of Christ". Nineteenth Century 39: 667–678.
- H. Louis Fader, The Issa Tale That Will Not Die: Nicholas Notovich and His Fraudulent Gospel (University Press of America, 2003). ISBN 978-0-7618-2657-6
- Müller, Max (1894). "The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India". Nineteenth Century 36: 515.
- Angelo Paratico, The Karma Killers New York, 2009. This is a novel based on Notovitch story, set in modern times with flashbacks to the time of Jesus and to WWII. Most of it is based in Hong Kong and Tibet. It was first printed in Italy under the title Gli Assassini del Karma, Rome 2003.
External links
- Works by Nicolas Notovitch at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Nicolas Notovitch at Internet Archive
- Works by Nicolas Notovitch at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ, Internet Archive
- The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ by Nicolas Notovitch, audio book, YouTube.
- Robert M. Price, Jesus in Tibet - A Modern Myth
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- Nicolas Notovitch (redirect from Life of Saint Issa)
- Nicolas Notovitch (redirect from Life of Saint Issa)
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