Unknown years of Jesus

Jesus followed by disciples, James Tissot, c. 1890

The lost years of Jesus concerns the timespan between Jesus's childhood and the beginning of his ministry as recorded in the New Testament. Following the accounts of Jesus' young life, there is about an 18 years gap in his life story in the gospels. Other than the generic statement that Jesus advanced in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God, the Bible has no other details regarding the gap. While Christian tradition suggests that Jesus simply lived in Galilee during that period, modern scholarship holds that there is no historical information to determine what happened during those years.

Several authors have claimed to have found proof of the existence of manuscripts in India and Tibet that support the belief that Christ was in India during this time in his life. Others cite legends in a number of places in the region that Jesus passed that way in ancient times. The Jesus in India manuscript was first reported in 1894 by Nicolas Notovitch.

Despite various theories, the claims of Jesus traveling to locations such as India have been discredited by modern scholars. Modern scholarship has rejected the travels of Jesus outside Galilee, Judea and closely neighboring areas, with Robert Van Voorst specifically stating that modern scholars have "almost unanimously agreed" that claims of the travels of Jesus to areas such as Tibet or India contain "nothing of value".

Aquarian Gospel of Jesus "Eesa" the Christ

Main article: The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ channeled from "Akashik Records" by Levi H. Dowling, and published in 1908, claims to be the true story of the life of Jesus, including "the 'lost' eighteen years silent in the New Testament."

The narrative follows the young Jesus across India, Tibet, Persia, Assyria, Greece and Egypt.

Jesus in India

Jesus "Eesa" and Buddhism

Gruber and Kersten (1995) have argued that Buddhism appears to have had a substantial influence on the life and teachings of Jesus. They hold that Jesus was influenced by the teachings and practices of Therapeutae, described by the authors as teachers of the Buddhist Theravada school then living in Judaea. They assert that Jesus lived the life of a Buddhist and taught Buddhist ideals to his disciples; their work follows in the footsteps of the Oxford New Testament scholar Barnett Hillman Streeter, who established as early as the 1930s that the moral teaching of the Buddha has four remarkable resemblances to the Sermon on the Mount."

Scholars of perspectives that support the belief make the claim that that Jesus may have been inspired by the Buddhist religion and such scholars argue that the Gospel of Thomas and many Nag Hammadi texts reflect this arguably plausible influence. Books such as The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels and The Original Jesus by Gruber and Kersten discuss these theories.

Saint Issa

In 1887 a Russian war correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India and Tibet. He left Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir to cross the Himalayas to the remote Ladakh region. His diary has descriptions of the dramatic landscape, the sturdiness of the local people and their friendliness. Notovitch claimed that, at the lamasery or monastery of Hemis in Ladakh, he learned of the "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men." Isa is the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam. His story, with a translated text of the "Life of Saint Issa," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ. It was subsequently translated into English, German, Spanish, and Italian.

Notovitch's writings were immediately controversial. The German orientalist Max Müller, who'd never been to India himself, published a letter he'd received from a British colonial officer in India, which purported that the presence of Notovitch in Ladakh was "not documented."

J. Archibald Douglas, then a teacher at the Government College in Agra also visited Hemis monastery in 1895, but claimed that he did not find any evidence that Notovich had even been there. But, there is very little biographical information about Notovitch and a record of his death has never been found. The diary of Dr. Karl Rudolph Marx of the Ladane Charitable Dispensary, a missionary of the Order of the Moravian Brothers, and director of the hospital in Leh, clearly states that he treated Nicolas Notovitch for a severe toothache in November 1887. However, Edgar J. Goodspeed in his book "Famous Biblical Hoaxes" claims that the head abbot of the Hemis community allegedly signed a document that denounced Notovitch as an outright liar.

The corroborating evidence of later visitors to the monastery having yet to appear, Notovich responded to claims that the lama at Hemis had denied that the manuscript existed by explaining that the monks would have seen enquiries about them as evidence of their value to the outside world and of the risk of their being stolen or taken by force. Tibetologists Snellgrove and Skorupski wrote of the monks at Hemis, "They seem convinced that all foreigners steal if they can. There have in fact been quite serious losses of property in recent years." Notovitch also provided the names of several people in the region who could verify his presence there.

In 1922, after initially doubting Notovitch, Swami Abhedananda, a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, and a close acquaintance of Max Müller, journeyed to Tibet, investigated his claim, was shown the manuscript by the lama and with his help translated part of the document, and later championed Notovich's views. Having spoken at Max Müller's funeral, his opposing Müller's assertion that Notovitch's document was a forgery, was no small matter.

A number of authors have taken these accounts and have expanded upon them in their own works. For example, in her book The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus's 17-Year Journey to the East, Elizabeth Clare Prophet cites Buddhist manuscripts that allegedly provide evidence that Jesus traveled to India, Nepal, Ladakh and Tibet. However, she reprints objections and rebuttals of Life of Saint Issa, citing both sides of the controversy in detail. She observes, "The fact that Douglas failed to see a copy of a manuscript was no more decisive proof that it did not exist than Notovitch's claim that it did."

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.

— Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

Christ and Krishna

See also: Jesus myth theory

The Jesus in India idea has been associated with Louis Jacolliot's book La Bible dans l'Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (1869) (The Bible in India, or the Life of Jezeus Christna), but there is no direct connection between his writings and those of writers on the Himmis mauscripts.

Jacolliot compares the accounts of the life of Bhagavan Krishna with that of Jesus Christ in the gospels and concludes that it could not have been a coincidence that the two stories have so many similarities in many of the finer details. He concludes that the account in the gospels is a myth based on the mythology of ancient India. However, Jacolliot is comparing two different periods of history (or mythology) and does not claim that Jesus was in India. He spells "Krishna" as "Christna" and claims that Krishna's disciples gave him the name "Jezeus," a name supposed to mean "pure essence" in Sanskrit, although according to Max Muller it is not even a Sanskrit term at all – "it was simply invented" by Jacoillot.

Bhavishya Maha Purana

Holger Kersten suggests that the most controversial and administered Hindu Bhavishya Maha Purana, in the Pratisargaarvan (19.17-32), a 19th century redaction of a text purporting to tell future events, describes the arrival of Jesus thus:

"One day, Shalivahana, the chief of the Shakas, came to a snowy mountain (assumed to be in the Indian Himalayas). There, in the Land of the Hun (= Ladakh, a part of the Kushan empire), the powerful king saw a handsome man sitting on a mountain, who seemed to promise auspiciousness. His skin was like copper and he wore white garments. The king asked the holy man who he was. The other replied: 'I am called Isaputra (son of God), born of a virgin, minister of the non-believers, relentlessly in search of the truth.'

O king, lend your ear to the religion that I brought unto the non-believers ... Through justice, truth, meditation, and unity of spirit, man will find his way to Isa (God, in Sanskrit) who dwells in the centre of Light, who remains as constant as the sun, and who dissolves all transient things forever. The blissful image of Isa, the giver of happiness, was revealed in the heart; and I was called Isa-Masih (Jesus the Messiah).'"

This conclusion clearly remains controversial at present as there is no universal consensus as to the early date of the Bhavishyat Maha Purana. In fact, the majority of the Puranic writings are dated later than the arrival of Christianity in India, in addition to which, individual texts may actually have been composed after the arrival of Islam. Hence the possibility that this Purana has incorporated unreliable material obtained from late sources should not be excluded.

Ahmadiyya views

See also: Jesus in India (book) and Jesus in Ahmadiyya Islam

According to the Ahmadis, the further sayings of Muhammad mention that Jesus died in Kashmir at the age of one hundred and twenty years. Ahmadis have advocated this view for over 100 years, started by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Muslim and Persian sources purport to trace the sojourn of Jesus, known as Isa, or Yuz Asaf ("leader of the healed") along the old Silk Road to the orient. The books, Christ in Kashmir by Aziz Kashmiri, and Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten, list documents and articles in support of this view. They believe Yuz Asaf to be buried at the Roza Bal shrine in Srinagar, India.

The Urantia Book

Main article: The Urantia Book

The Urantia Book claims to be a revelation of the life of Jesus. It offers a detailed account of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood and provides a comprehensive narrative of later events as recorded in the Gospels. According to the Urantia Book, Jesus never visited India; instead, beginning in his 28th year (AD 22, according to the Urantia book) he travelled with a wealthy merchant from India and the merchant's son. Jesus was invited, on a number of occasions, to visit India by the wealthy Indian merchant, but Jesus declined, citing responsibilities relating to his family in Palestine.

Novels

The "Jesus in India" theme has also been taken up by novelists, in fiction with no pretense of historical accuracy:

• The book The Breath of God (West Hills, 2011), by religious scholar Jeffrey Small, is a suspense novel that follows American graduate student Grant Matthews who journeys to the Himalayas in search of proof that Jesus traveled through India during his lost years. Small, who holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, weaves mystical teachings from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam through the story that transports the reader from the American South to the exotic grandeur of the Taj Mahal in India and cliffside monasteries in Bhutan. Although the majority of the novel takes place in the present day, several chapters tell the story from the perspective of a teenage Jesus as he struggles with culture and teachings so different from his own.

• The book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, is a fictional story of Jesus's adolescence told from the point of view of Jesus's best friend. In it, he travels to India, China, and The Middle East to visit the three wise men, where they in turn teach Jesus one different facet of his later teachings. However in the afterward Moore is specific in mentioning that Buddhism didn't reach China in the lifetime of Jesus. For him to study under a Buddha in Tibet would have been anachronistic.

• Yeshua: A Personal Memoir of the Missing Years of Jesus, by Stan I.S. Law a.k.a. Stanislaw Kapuscinski, is a fictional account of Jesus's journey to India and his preparation there for his later Palestinian mission. Kapuscinski weaves his own philosophy into the story.

Television

A documentary titled Mysteries of the Bible refers to the Hemis manuscript and similar accounts as "wild stories of Jesus travelling to India to study with Eastern mystics." The documentary repeats the account of J. Archibald Douglas and the lama's denial of the manuscript's existence, without mentioning the corroborating evidence of Swami Abhedananda and Nicolas Roerich.

As proof that Jesus was in Galilee during that time, one scholar presents the Biblical quotation, "Is not this the carpenter (carpenter's son)" as proof that he was well known to the local people. He adds that Jesus "went walkabout, he went out on tour." Another scholar states that "any historian worth his salt" will go "with the earliest evidence, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." "You can envision the family spending many years building houses, building furniture ... that's the family business." The film continues, "He may not have been just a carpenter either, it is possible that he went [to the sea of Galilee] to fish. If he did, he would most likely have run into a group of fishermen." "It makes sense to presume ... [that Joseph died] and Jesus would have had to ... do the appropriate things as a son, namely ..." "By studying stories agreed on to be true, a clearer, albeit hypothesized, portrait of Christ's life can emerge."

Rejection by modern scholarship

Modern scholarship has firmly rejected any travels by Jesus to India, Tibet or surrounding areas as without historical basis:

• Robert Van Voorst states that modern scholarship has "almost unanimously agreed" that claims of the travels of Jesus to Tibet, Kashmir or India contain "nothing of value".
• Marcus Borg states that the suggestions that an adult Jesus traveled to Egypt or India and came into contact with Buddhism are "without historical foundation".
• John Dominic Crossan states that none of the theories presented about the travels of Jesus to fill the gap between his early life and the start of his ministry have been supported by modern scholarship.
• Leslie Houlden states that although modern parallels between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha have been drawn, these comparisons emerged after missionary contacts in the 19th century and there is no historically reliable evidence of contacts between Buddhism and Jesus.
• Paula Fredriksen states that no serious scholarly work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism.

Jesus in Britain

There is an Arthurian legend that Jesus travelled to Britain during his lost years. During the late 12th century, Joseph of Arimathea became connected with the Arthurian cycle, appearing in them as the first keeper of the Holy Grail. This idea first appears in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, in which Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesus and sends it with his followers to Britain. This theme is elaborated upon in Boron's sequels and in subsequent Arthurian works penned by others. Later retellings of the story contend that Joseph of Arimathea himself travelled to Britain and became the first Christian bishop in the Isles.

William Blake's poem And did those feet in ancient time was inspired by the story of Jesus travelling to Britain. Glyn S. Lewis in Did Jesus Come to Britain? (2008) recounts the legends that Jesus visited Britain with his great-uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph was supposedly a tin merchant and took Jesus under his care when his mother Mary was widowed.

Gordon Strachan wrote Jesus the Master Builder: Druid Mysteries and the Dawn of Christianity (1998), which was the basis of the documentary titled And Did Those Feet (2009). Strachan believed Jesus may have travelled to Britain to study with the Druids.

Jesus in the American continent

See also: White Gods

L. Taylor Hansen wrote the book He Walked the Americas in 1963. In the book drawing from Native American legends, folklore and mythology discussed that a "White Prophet" had visited many different parts of America.

Mormons believe that the "White Prophet" was Jesus Christ.

Some Mormon scholars believe that Quetzalcoatl, who they describe as a White, bearded God who came from the sky and promised to return, was actually Jesus Christ, in contrast with the Mesoamerican interpretation of their feathered serpent deity. Latter-day Saint President John Taylor wrote: "The story of the life of the Mexican divinity, Quetzalcoatl, closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being. But the history of the former has been handed down to us through an impure Lamanitish source. "

This idea was adapted by science fiction author and Mormon Orson Scott Card in his story America.

Mormonism

According to the Book of Mormon, Jesus visited the American natives after his resurrection. The book of Third Nephi, from verse 10 tells:

"10. Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world. (...) 12. And it came to pass that when Jesus had spoken these words the whole multitude fell to the earth; for they remembered that it had been prophesied among them that Christ should show himself unto them after his ascension into heaven. (...) 14. Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that ye may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world."

See also

• Life of Jesus in the New Testament

Further reading

• Fida Hassnain. Search For The Historical Jesus. Down-to-Earth Books, 2006. ISBN 1-878115-17-0
• Suzanne Olsson. Jesus in Kashmir, The Lost Tomb. Booksurge, 2012. ISBN 1-4196-1175-5
• Kersten, Holger. Jesus Lived in India. London: Element, 1986. ISBN 0-906540-90-9
• Lewis, Glyn S. Did Jesus Come to Britain? East Sussex, Clairview, 2008. ISBN 978-1-905570-15-7
• Potter, Charles. Lost Years of Jesus Revealed., Fawcett, 1985. ISBN 0-449-13039-8
• Rolland McCleary. Signs for a Messiah: The First and Last Evidence for Jesus. Christchurch: Hazard Press, Christchurch, 2003. ISBN 978-1-877270-37-6
• Shawn Haigins. The Rozabal Line. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4303-2754-7.
• Prophet, Elizabeth Clare. The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus's 17-Year Journey to the East. Gardiner, Mont.: Summit University Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-916766-87-0.