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Jesus never went to India

 
alkin
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12/29/2018 07:19 AM
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Jesus never went to India
It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again.

In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The editor/translator was a Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch.

In fact this book was exposed as a fraud almost immediately by the renowned F. Max Muller. Later, the biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed wrote up a complete account of the events surrounding the publication of Mr Notovitch’s little book.

It would be an absolute delight for me to learn that that Jesus studied Buddhism. And I find enormous value in examining the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity. And, the fact remains there was nothing in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John (and I’d throw Thomas in here, too) does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Sadly, there’s something about us. We hear hoofs pounding along and think zebra instead of a boring old horse. We tend to want something more exotic. And who doesn’t love Tibet? And so, as appears to be the case with such things, the expose is quickly forgotten, but the lie lingers…

All this said and without any expectation that this is going to lay the ghost to rest for once and all, ooce again, I reprint Professor Godspeed’s article on Mr Notovitch and his charming and persistent fraud.

THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

by Edgar Goodspeed


The Wikipedia article on Professor Goodspeed: (1871–1962) was an American theologian and scholar of Greek and the New Testament. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, whose collection of New Testament manuscripts he enriched by his searches. The University’s collection is now named in his honor. He is widely remembered for his translations of the Bible: The New Testament: an American Translation (1923), and (with John Merlin Powis Smith) “The Bible, An American Translation” (1935), the “Goodspeed Bible”. He is also remembered for his translation of the Apocrypha, and that translation was included in The Complete Bible, An American Translation (1939). Finally, Harper & Brothers issued his widely heralded The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation (1950).

In the summer of 1926 the newspapers in this country and abroad announced the discovery in a monastery in Tibet of a lost Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The supposed discovery had, however, taken place nearly forty years before, and been published all over the world in 1894. The romantic story of its finding ran as follows:

In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. His story, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 and passed through several editions that year. It enjoyed the widest publicity. It was translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Three independent American translations were immediately published, two in New York and one in Chicago. The first (of The Life only) was by F. Marion Crawford, who was something of a Sanskrit scholar and had lived in India in his youth. It was published by Macmillan. Another English translation appeared in London in 1895. The book called forth a vigorous controversy, attracting the attention of no less an authority than Professor F. Max Müller of Oxford. It was discussed at length in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and then forgotten, until a New York publisher revived it in 1926, with the result described above.

Notovitch’s account of his discovery of the work is that having been laid up by accident with a broken leg at the Convent of Himis, he prevailed upon the Chief Lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the Life of Issa, which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses “in accordance with the requirements of the narrative.” As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. It begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, and its deliverance by Moses; its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. The divine youth, at thirteen, 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.

He is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend six years among the Brahmins, at Juggernaut, Benares, and other places, studying the Vedas, and teaching all castes alike. The Brahmins oppose him in this, and he denounces them and their sacred books, especially condemning caste and idolatry. When they plan to put him to death, he flees to the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. He goes among the pagans, warning them against idolatry, and teaching a high morality, and then visits Persia and preaches to the Zoroastrians.

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 find no fault in him, and he continues his work for three years, closely watched by Pilate’s spies. He is finally arrested and put to death, not by Jewish influence, but through the hostility of Pilate. His followers were persecuted, but his disciples carried his message out over the world.

The interest of this little book is evidently to fill in the silent years of Jesus’ youth, from the visit to Jerusalem at twelve to the beginning of his ministry at about thirty. It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone, and the question arises, Has the author of Issa obtained them from the same source?

It is also noteworthy that the work describes Jesus’ ministry as three years in length, an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament. Had our author the Gospel of John as well as that of Luke? His emphasis upon the Incarnation shows that he had. Notovitch says that the Life of Issa was written within three or four years after the death of Christ, from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and is hence more likely to bear the stamp of truth than the canonical gospels, which were written many years later. But the departure of the disciples to evangelize the pagan world, which is described in the last verse of the Life, did not take place within three or four years of Jesus’ death. The idea that it did has probably been gained from the Gospel of Matthew, which, taken without the Acts of the Apostles, might suggest that impression. It looks as though the writer of the Life were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew. Other touches point to his acquaintance with Acts and Romans, and it. becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.

But this is only the beginning. The whole cast of the book is vague and elusive. It presents no difficulties, no problems, whereas any really ancient work newly discovered bristles with novelties and obscurities. The message of Jesus is a pallid and colorless morality, amiable and unobjectionable enough, but devoid of the flashes of insight and touches of genius that mark the early gospels.

Historically and morally the book is commonplace. It identifies itself with no recognized type of primitive thought, and it does not strike out one of its own, but shows a superficial acquaintance with the leading New Testament ones, somewhat blurred together. This inaccurate acquaintance with the New Testament also characterizes Notovitch himself, who describes Luke as saying that Jesus “was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” This, he says, “conclusively proves that no one knew where the young man had gone, to so suddenly reappear sixteen years later” (p. 162). But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1 :80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.

On the whole, as an ancient document the Life of Issa is altogether unconvincing. It reads more like a journalistic effort to describe what might have happened if Jesus had visited India and Persia in his youth and what a modern cosmopolite thinks he did and taught in his ministry in Palestine.

The external evidence for the Life is no more impressive. The two large manuscript volumes read to Notovitch by the lama at the Himis Convent were, says Notovitch, “compiled from divers copies written in the Tibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library, and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada two hundred years after Christ. These rolls were placed in a convent standing on Mount Marbour, near Lassa. . . . .” The rolls were written in the Pali tongue. It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it–its place and number in the Himis library–is not in this case to be satisfied. More than this, the Life of Issa does not purport to have been deciphered and translated by a competent scholar. The lama read, the interpreter translated, Notovitch took notes. He could evidently not control either the lama |17 or the interpreter, to make sure of what the Tibetan manuscripts read. And his own notes, taken under these obvious disadvantages, he afterward spent many sleepless nights in classifying, “grouping the verses in conformity with the course of the narrative, and imprinting a character of unity to the entire work.” Of course this is just what a scholar would not have done. He would wish to give the fragments just as the manuscripts had them, unaffected by his own views and tastes.

The Unknown Life attracted the attention of the great Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, who in The Nineteenth Century pointed out that the Life of Issa did not appear in the catalogue of the Tandjur and the Kandjur, the great collections of Tibetan literature. “If we understand M. Notovitch rightly,” says Professor Max Miiller, “this life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India immediately after the Crucifixion.” He goes on to ask how these Jewish merchants happened, among the uncounted millions of India, to meet “the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India, …. and still more how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” He goes on to suggest that the Buddhist monks may have deceived Notovitch. “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sutra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.”
If the monks did not indulge in duping Notovitch, nothing remained, Max Miiller said, but to accuse M. Notovitch of a disgraceful fraud. And as he was writing his article, there came to him from an Englishwoman visiting Tibet a letter that pointed strongly in the latter direction. It was dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29,1894, and read in part:

Yesterday we were at the great Himis monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery up here,–800 lamas. Did you hear of a Russian who could not gain admittance to the monastery in any way, but at last broke his leg outside and was taken in? His object was to copy a Buddhist life of Christ which is there. He says he got it and has published it since in French. There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no life of Christ there at all!

These and other criticisms Notovitch sought to answer in his preface to the London edition. “The truth indeed is,” he remarks, “that the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur. “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title; consequently they could not be found in catalogues of Chinese or Tibetan works.”

With these extraordinary observations the Life of Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, seems to evaporate and vanish away. For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation. This much he has admitted. Even now, a scholar would of course interest himself actively to secure copies and even photographs of the scattered portions which Notovitch says he has assembled. A work which makes such high claims would be well worth an expedition to Tibet, to search out the scattered verses, copy and translate them, and to provide an account of the documents in which they are imbedded.

As it is, Notovitch seems to have taken refuge from his critics in a fog of indefiniteness. In his first preface he speaks of the monastic libraries as “containing a few copies of the manuscript in question,” but now it is of no use to look for the manuscript, he intimates, for there is no manuscript, and he lightly refers serious students of his supposed discovery to “verses scattered through more than one book, without any title.” This is not the method of sober scholarship. And we may observe that Notovitch himself in the thirty-five years that have elapsed since he published the Unknown Life has not taken the obvious and most of us would think the unavoidable steps to substantiate his supposed discovery.

As a possible gesture in that direction we may quote his report in his London preface of a conversation with a Roman Catholic Cardinal, to whom he had mentioned the matter. “I may however add to what I have already said in my introduction as to having learnt from him that the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is no novelty to the Roman Church, this: that the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter, which have been brought to Rome by missionaries from India, China, Egypt and Arabia.” It is a thousand pities that the Cardinal, who had evidently counted the manuscripts, was not more explicit as to their titles, so that someone who could read them might have looked them up in that library. Even if Notovitch could not go back to Tibet to confirm his discovery, as he once boldly proposed to do, he might have reached Rome and found ample confirmation there. But in thirty-five years neither he nor his eight translators nor his nine publishers have been sufficiently interested to apply this very simple test. Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.

Some people have been harsh enough to say that Notovitch never visited Tibet at all. I am not in a position to say this. It is true that the pictures of Tibetan scenes and costumes that appear in some editions of his work he says are from photographs taken by his friend D’Auvergne, who visited Tibet on another occasion. And I have observed that his accounts of Tibetan buildings and practices bear a striking resemblance to some previously published by English travelers. His account of his journey is not without improbability, and I cannot learn that he is recognized among the serious explorers who have visited Tibet. Yet he may have gone there; it would obviously be difficult to control his statement that he did.

Some light is thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June, 1895, by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Professor Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Professor Douglas’ inquiries did at length elicit the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh Hospital.

To that extent Notovitch’s narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the Life of Issa was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch’s book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” The chief lama did not receive from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reports having given him–the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Professor Douglas effected what Max Müller described as his annihilation.

In conclusion Max Müller expressly disclaimed any merit for having shown the Unknown Life to be a mere fiction, as no serious Sanskrit or Pali scholar, and no serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by it.

We may add that students of early Christian literature of course passed it by as of no significance whatever. It made no stir among them. This is not because they are averse to new discoveries. These are of frequent occurrence. But every one of them that is reported must stand the test of literary and textual criticism. To these tests the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, fails to respond.

But it remains an interesting example of a whole series of modern attempts to impose upon the general public crude fictions under the guise of ancient documents lately discovered, and it is worth while to call attention to it because its recent republication in New York was hailed by the press as a new and important discovery.

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alkin  (OP)

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Re: Jesus never went to India
In news that should probably be communicated entirely through emojis, Jesus never lived in India. He didn’t go there in the so-called “missing years”, nor did he go there after the crucifixion to die. Nor was he a Buddhist monk, nor was he schooled by Buddhist monks, nor was he familiar with or interested in any of the major themes of Buddhism. He was a Jewish prophet and teacher, who was born, lived, and died in Israel, teaching exclusively in the Jewish tradition.

The idea that he did live in India is a bit of pseudo-history that is propagated around the bullshit-o-sphere from time to time. It is based on:

Vague similarities between certain themes in the Buddha’s and Jesus’ teachings.
Certain local legends dating from much later.
The first of these is meaningless, as religions and philosophies were always sharing ideas, stories, and so on. We know that there was close contact between India and the west dating from a century or so after the Buddha’s death, so there is nothing surprising about some exchange of ideas. As I have mentioned previously, I think there are three parables in the Gospels that are derived from Buddhist sources. But this is just the normal give and take of ideas, and whether or not it is true is not very significant.

What we can say with certainty is that there is nothing in the Gospels, the letters of Paul, or any other early Christian documents that show any knowledge of any of the teachings that Buddha repeated again and again and again: the four noble truths, the eightfold noble path, the five aggregates, dependent origination, not-self, the six senses, the seven awakening factors, and on and on it goes. The entire content of early Buddhist teaching is absent from Christian texts. It is plainly impossible that any serious student of Buddhism should show no familiarity with any of the central teachings of the Dhamma.

The only reason this idea has been spread is because the ones doing the spreading have no understanding of Buddhism. They think that hearing a couple of ideas in the Gospels that echo some Dhammapada verses constitutes evidence of a serious Buddhist education. But the simple and general ethical ideas that are echoed like this are shared between Buddhism and most other Dhammic religions, and are never regarded by Buddhists as central to their religion. You can easily find just as many, or more, similarities with Socrates or Chuang Tzu—did they go to India, too?

The really significant thing here is that some central religious and ethical values, like the Golden Rule, and the importance of love and forgiveness, are widely shared across different regions, and are espoused by spiritual teachers with no connection. That is something truly momentous, and provides the basis for a shared ethic of love and compassion among all the world’s peoples. This should be emphasized as a spiritual and ethical truth, not drowned in a vat of bullshit.

The second “evidence”, the existence of various local legends, is equally meaningless. There are legends saying that the Buddha went to Sri Lanka, to Burma, to Thailand, to China, to Laos, and I assume, to every other Buddhist country. They’re all wrong: the Buddha never left the Ganges valley. The spread of legends of Jesus needs no further explanation.

The document supposedly found in a Tibetan monastery documenting the stay of a certain “Issa” has never, so far as I know, been subject to proper academic scrutiny. It is quite possible that Issa does refer to Jesus, or maybe it has nothing to do with him. But whatever it is, it not a historic document. Old manuscripts are full of fables and legends. Just because something is found in an old manuscript does not make it true.

Much of the persuasiveness of the idea stems from the apparently profound wisdom and equally profound devotion of the senior lamas who have always believed that Jesus lived in Kashmir—or so it would appear as it was filtered through a 19th century orientalist lens. Sorry to break the sad news to you, but Tibetan Buddhism is full of anti-historical nonsense and fantasy masquerading as fact. No doubt there were some excellent critical scholars and historians among Tibetan Buddhists. But they are not the ones telling these stories.

Accounts of this in the bullshit-o-sphere are in the typically breathless clickbait style, designed to fool people with no knowledge of facts. I won’t link to any, because I don’t want to increase their search rankings.

But they say things like:

When a great Buddhist, or Holy Man (i.e. Lama), dies, wise men consult the stars and other omens and set off — often on extraordinarily long journeys — to find the infant who is the reincarnation of the Lama.

This is supposed to be the origin of the story of the wise men. But it is a purely Tibetan custom that arose over a thousand years after the story of the three wise men. To see this as the origin for a story of a thousand years earlier is a wonderful encapsulation of the fact-free zone of this nonsense.

Articles are full of words like “confirms” or “discovery”, and confident assertions about specifics: Jesus “was loved by everyone”, he had “the intention of perfecting himself”, he was “forced to flee”—and on and on the river of bullshit flows. None of this has any foundation in reality.

Much of what they say is self-evident nonsense, like:

the document which tells the true story of a child named Jesus (i.e. Issa = “son of God”) born in the first century to a poor family in Israel. Jesus was referred to as “the son of God” by the Vedic scholars who tutored him in the sacred Buddhist texts

No, issa doesn’t mean “son of god”. And the Vedic scholars taught him the Buddhist texts! joy

The extravagance of this level of bullshit is very telling. It is a stupid filter. The idea is that anyone with a measure of common sense will roll their eyes and click away, and only the very dumbest will stay, and even share it with all their friends. Why? Because stupid people are more likely to click on stupid ads and buy stupid stuff. Welcome to the wonderful world of online marketing!

Many of these articles try to claim a degree of respectability by citing a BBC documentary by “experts”. (Hint: there are no experts, because no professional historian is wasting their time on this rubbish.) But what exactly does the BBC say about it? I’m not going to waste my time watching a “documentary”, and neither should you, but this article on BBC News about the so-called Jesus tomb in Kashmir is cited in support of the theory 2. What the article actually says is:

according to an eclectic combination of New Age Christians, unorthodox Muslims and fans of the Da Vinci Code, the grave contains the mortal remains of a candidate for the most important visitor of all time to India.

Officially, the tomb is the burial site of Youza Asaph, a medieval Muslim preacher

[Riaz, who lives above the shrine] is witheringly dismissive of the notion that Jesus was buried there.

“It’s a story spread by local shopkeepers, just because some crazy professor said it was Jesus’s tomb. They thought it would be good for business. Tourists would come, after all these years of violence.”

Professional historians tend to laugh out loud when you mention the notion that Jesus might have lived in Kashmir

And for those who scoff, remember that others have argued, just as implausibly, that Jesus came to Britain.

So this is one of the most respectable sources they can cite in their support. Just how stupid do they think you are?

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wake up to this new age bs pushed by some western wierd and some freak indians
BohemianExile

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12/29/2018 07:35 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
"Joseph of Arimathea was quite an enigma! From history we learn that he was previously known as Joseph de Marmore as he lived in Marmorica in Egypt before he moved to Arimathea.1 There is speculation that Joseph of Arimathea, or Joseph of Glastonbury as he later became known, was the uncle of Mary, mother of Jesus. The relationship to Mary made him a Great Uncle of Jesus. From this, we may presume that he was an elderly man at the time of the crucifixion. We have few verifiable details about Joseph except that he was he was quite wealthy. Some claim that Joseph of Arimathea was a merchant in metals and took young Jesus with him on his business trips to England, India, and even to South America."

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“Till shade is gone, till water is gone,
into the Shadow with teeth bared,
screaming defiance with the last breath,
to spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.”
-Aiel Oath

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WoT WoT! Build that RedWall


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alkin  (OP)

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12/29/2018 08:01 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
"Joseph of Arimathea was quite an enigma! From history we learn that he was previously known as Joseph de Marmore as he lived in Marmorica in Egypt before he moved to Arimathea.1 There is speculation that Joseph of Arimathea, or Joseph of Glastonbury as he later became known, was the uncle of Mary, mother of Jesus. The relationship to Mary made him a Great Uncle of Jesus. From this, we may presume that he was an elderly man at the time of the crucifixion. We have few verifiable details about Joseph except that he was he was quite wealthy. Some claim that Joseph of Arimathea was a merchant in metals and took young Jesus with him on his business trips to England, India, and even to South America."

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 Quoting: BohemianExile


"some claim" is proof to you?
FlashBuzzkill

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12/29/2018 08:05 AM

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Re: Jesus never went to India
I had tickets for his show in Tampa back in 31 AD but couldn't rent a donkey and had to scalp my tickets. still bummed about that.
Gen. John B Gordon and Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest were the finest citizen-soldiers birthed in America.
alkin  (OP)

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12/29/2018 08:10 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
if you are a christian and believe in this bs you are staying away from your faith giving to the indians the credibility of Jesus teachings.

the intention behind this crap is make indians superior turning the christian faith a copy and false doctrine. don't fall for this bs.

the teachings of Jesus comes from God not from some indian bum.

Last Edited by alkin on 12/29/2018 08:19 AM
Ozicell

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12/29/2018 08:15 AM

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Re: Jesus never went to India
I have heard of these stories as well but rather than learning from them, maybe He was teaching them!?
That which is - has already been, And what is to be - has already been. Quote: King Solomon.
BohemianExile

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12/29/2018 08:15 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
"Joseph of Arimathea was quite an enigma! From history we learn that he was previously known as Joseph de Marmore as he lived in Marmorica in Egypt before he moved to Arimathea.1 There is speculation that Joseph of Arimathea, or Joseph of Glastonbury as he later became known, was the uncle of Mary, mother of Jesus. The relationship to Mary made him a Great Uncle of Jesus. From this, we may presume that he was an elderly man at the time of the crucifixion. We have few verifiable details about Joseph except that he was he was quite wealthy. Some claim that Joseph of Arimathea was a merchant in metals and took young Jesus with him on his business trips to England, India, and even to South America."

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 Quoting: BohemianExile


"some claim" is proof to you?
 Quoting: alkin


Hmm, did I say proof? Nope, highlighted the some claim phrase for a reason.

Really, there is a huge lack of supporting evidence for anything around the time of Jesus, almost as if it's intentionally been hidden or destroyed.

If you want hard evidence, look at the metals. There is a lot of discussion and evidence for oxhide copper being mined in America and being shipped to the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Of course Joseph was supposedly a tin miner and you need tin and copper to get bronze, and there is some question as to where the copper in Britain came from.



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“Till shade is gone, till water is gone,
into the Shadow with teeth bared,
screaming defiance with the last breath,
to spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.”
-Aiel Oath

Let the Dragon ride again on the Winds of Time
WoT WoT! Build that RedWall


Loose Lips Don't Sink Ships ~ Qanons DEW
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 08:17 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
I never understood the resistance to this concept, because it doesn't invalidate anything in the Bible, and accounts for the "missing years".

The theory goes that as Jesus's homeland is on the Silk Road, the major trade route between India and China, of course he would have encountered the gurus traveling around between such places, so it's feasible he might have been curious and gone off to their source to find out if that's what he was going to teach.

Now, there are two sources of Jesus in India mythology:

- a questionable explorer's account of the texts in some temple, Nicola Notovich.
- The Indian religious institutions, which claim Jesus was a bit of a trouble maker, not respecting the Caste system.

Side note, somewhere in Pakistan there is a tomb that the locals swear is Mary mother of Jesus's tomb, from having passed away on some second trip to india.

Now there's no space in the bible for a second trip to india prior to the Cross event, so, that's not very useful.

Anyway anyone with an open mind could watch this doc, and decide for themselves how they feel about this whole thing:

BohemianExile

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12/29/2018 08:22 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
if you are a christian and believe in this bs you are staying away from your faith giving to the indians the credibility of Jesus teachings.

the intention behind this crap is make indians superior turning the christian faith a copy and false doctrine. don't fall for this bs.

the teachings of Jesus comes from God not from some indian bum.
 Quoting: alkin


Well, Thomas is credited with indeed travelling to India and dying there by the Encyclopaedia, no less.

"St. Thomas, (born, probably Galilee—died 53 CE, Madras, India; Western feast day December 21, feast day in Roman and Syrian Catholic churches July 3, in the Greek church October 6), one of the Twelve Apostles. His name in Aramaic (Teʾoma) and Greek (Didymos) means “twin”; John 11:16 identifies him as “Thomas, called the Twin.” He is called Judas Thomas (i.e., Judas the Twin) by the Syrians.

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“Till shade is gone, till water is gone,
into the Shadow with teeth bared,
screaming defiance with the last breath,
to spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.”
-Aiel Oath

Let the Dragon ride again on the Winds of Time
WoT WoT! Build that RedWall


Loose Lips Don't Sink Ships ~ Qanons DEW
What is Aleppo

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12/29/2018 08:34 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
At what point will people realize that the character of Jesus is a metaphor for the SUN — “the Light of the World” who was “born” on December 25 — coincidentally the very day the SUN is “born” after the three days of the winter solstice?

Isn’t it also interesting that Jesus started his ministry at 30, and the SUN starts its “ministry” to the zodiac constellations at 30 degrees (30 degrees x 12 constellations = 360 degrees)? The SUN enters each house of the zodiac at 30 degrees.

Last Edited by What is Aleppo on 12/29/2018 08:37 AM
Apollo astronauts could not have passed through Van Allen’s Belt; Van Allen wore suspenders.

Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

“No puppet. No puppet. YOU’RE the puppet.”
Frumpelstiltskin

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12/29/2018 08:41 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
He was real, but he went to Egypt, not India. The Zeitgeist sun metaphor thing is bogus, but you can't speak any sense to those fanatics. They're worse than the Bible-thumpers who think every word is truth and was written ("inspired", they say) by God himself.
--'-,{@
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 08:44 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
He was real, but he went to Egypt, not India. The Zeitgeist sun metaphor thing is bogus, but you can't speak any sense to those fanatics. They're worse than the Bible-thumpers who think every word is truth and was written ("inspired", they say) by God himself.
 Quoting: Frumpelstiltskin


Yes, he was in a mystical order that preserved ancient gnosis, from Egypt (Thoth), before that Krishna, and before that Lao-Tzu. All the major religions spring from oriental mysticism, the essence of which is lost in the profane evolution of civilizations, as it has degraded into Judiasm and Christianity and their perverted derivatives. The truth is still in the scriptures though.
alkin  (OP)

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12/29/2018 08:46 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
He was real, but he went to Egypt, not India. The Zeitgeist sun metaphor thing is bogus, but you can't speak any sense to those fanatics. They're worse than the Bible-thumpers who think every word is truth and was written ("inspired", they say) by God himself.
 Quoting: Frumpelstiltskin


this is another hoax that comes from juices haters. the intent on this is justify Jesus miracles calling him a wizard.
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 08:48 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
Why would a trained Fakir need to go back where he came from?


this is another hoax that comes from juices haters. the intent on this is justify Jesus miracles calling him a wizard.
 Quoting: alkin


He can't just electroshock Lazarus, he has to use magic now?
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 08:51 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
this is another hoax that comes from juices haters. the intent on this is justify Jesus miracles calling him a wizard.
 Quoting: alkin


According to the version in the Gospel of Matthew, Peter walked on the water towards Jesus, but he became afraid and began to sink, so Jesus rescued him.

AKA, Jesus was teaching his Disciples much more than what the public speeches and parables in the bible discuss:

(Mark 4:10-12)

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
What is Aleppo

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Re: Jesus never went to India
The story of “Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead” is a metaphorical story about initiation into the ancient mysteries of which Jesus was a master.. Lazarus was “raised” from the “dead” just as initiates are today. With the lion’s grip. I wonder if they gave him the third degree. ;)
Apollo astronauts could not have passed through Van Allen’s Belt; Van Allen wore suspenders.

Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

“No puppet. No puppet. YOU’RE the puppet.”
What is Aleppo

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12/29/2018 08:58 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
He was real, but he went to Egypt, not India. The Zeitgeist sun metaphor thing is bogus, but you can't speak any sense to those fanatics. They're worse than the Bible-thumpers who think every word is truth and was written ("inspired", they say) by God himself.
 Quoting: Frumpelstiltskin


You don’t need to watch or read anything but the New Testament itself to understand the metaphor.

Last Edited by What is Aleppo on 12/29/2018 08:59 AM
Apollo astronauts could not have passed through Van Allen’s Belt; Van Allen wore suspenders.

Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

“No puppet. No puppet. YOU’RE the puppet.”
What is Aleppo

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12/29/2018 09:03 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
Veiled allegory for those with the eyes to see.

Fisher of men = age of Pisces — the fish.

The reason for the relentless attack on Christianity in our society these days is because the age of Pisces is coming to an end. The SUN is preparing to move into the next house of the zodiac — Aquarius. Christianity will not be predominant in the new age. It might seem improbable at the moment, but it’s the way of things. To fight against time is futile. The next age will reveal its own unique wisdom via the Shemsu Hor.

The Catholic Church has been the institution of the age of Pisces. It won’t be for the next age, which is rapidly approaching; hence all the bad press and turmoil and lack of faith and numbers attending church dropping dramatically. It’s the systematic dismemberment of the Church as its Age comes to a close; just as it was assembled to begin the current age.

It’s all about the stars, the heavens. As above, so below.

Last Edited by What is Aleppo on 12/29/2018 09:12 AM
Apollo astronauts could not have passed through Van Allen’s Belt; Van Allen wore suspenders.

Joanie Loves Tchotchke.

“No puppet. No puppet. YOU’RE the puppet.”
hiddeninplainsite

12/29/2018 09:14 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
So if world renowned scholar Marty Mcfly exposed your post as a fraud does that make it so?

Research can be done nowadays to prove or disprove just about any subject. All the researcher has to do is ignore information contrary to his intended goal.

The fact is Jesus did study in India as well as Egypt. In India he studied the Vedas and the Avesta in Hinduism and also studied Buddhism. Accounts were written in the Akashic Records otherwise known as the Book Of Life or Book of God's Remembrance.
Yuga Sage (The Red Pill)

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12/29/2018 09:15 AM

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Re: Jesus never went to India
It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again.

In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The editor/translator was a Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch.

In fact this book was exposed as a fraud almost immediately by the renowned F. Max Muller. Later, the biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed wrote up a complete account of the events surrounding the publication of Mr Notovitch’s little book.

It would be an absolute delight for me to learn that that Jesus studied Buddhism. And I find enormous value in examining the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity. And, the fact remains there was nothing in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John (and I’d throw Thomas in here, too) does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Sadly, there’s something about us. We hear hoofs pounding along and think zebra instead of a boring old horse. We tend to want something more exotic. And who doesn’t love Tibet? And so, as appears to be the case with such things, the expose is quickly forgotten, but the lie lingers…

All this said and without any expectation that this is going to lay the ghost to rest for once and all, ooce again, I reprint Professor Godspeed’s article on Mr Notovitch and his charming and persistent fraud.

THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

by Edgar Goodspeed


The Wikipedia article on Professor Goodspeed: (1871–1962) was an American theologian and scholar of Greek and the New Testament. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, whose collection of New Testament manuscripts he enriched by his searches. The University’s collection is now named in his honor. He is widely remembered for his translations of the Bible: The New Testament: an American Translation (1923), and (with John Merlin Powis Smith) “The Bible, An American Translation” (1935), the “Goodspeed Bible”. He is also remembered for his translation of the Apocrypha, and that translation was included in The Complete Bible, An American Translation (1939). Finally, Harper & Brothers issued his widely heralded The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation (1950).

In the summer of 1926 the newspapers in this country and abroad announced the discovery in a monastery in Tibet of a lost Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The supposed discovery had, however, taken place nearly forty years before, and been published all over the world in 1894. The romantic story of its finding ran as follows:

In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. His story, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 and passed through several editions that year. It enjoyed the widest publicity. It was translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Three independent American translations were immediately published, two in New York and one in Chicago. The first (of The Life only) was by F. Marion Crawford, who was something of a Sanskrit scholar and had lived in India in his youth. It was published by Macmillan. Another English translation appeared in London in 1895. The book called forth a vigorous controversy, attracting the attention of no less an authority than Professor F. Max Müller of Oxford. It was discussed at length in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and then forgotten, until a New York publisher revived it in 1926, with the result described above.

Notovitch’s account of his discovery of the work is that having been laid up by accident with a broken leg at the Convent of Himis, he prevailed upon the Chief Lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the Life of Issa, which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses “in accordance with the requirements of the narrative.” As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. It begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, and its deliverance by Moses; its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. The divine youth, at thirteen, 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.

He is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend six years among the Brahmins, at Juggernaut, Benares, and other places, studying the Vedas, and teaching all castes alike. The Brahmins oppose him in this, and he denounces them and their sacred books, especially condemning caste and idolatry. When they plan to put him to death, he flees to the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. He goes among the pagans, warning them against idolatry, and teaching a high morality, and then visits Persia and preaches to the Zoroastrians.

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 find no fault in him, and he continues his work for three years, closely watched by Pilate’s spies. He is finally arrested and put to death, not by Jewish influence, but through the hostility of Pilate. His followers were persecuted, but his disciples carried his message out over the world.

The interest of this little book is evidently to fill in the silent years of Jesus’ youth, from the visit to Jerusalem at twelve to the beginning of his ministry at about thirty. It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone, and the question arises, Has the author of Issa obtained them from the same source?

It is also noteworthy that the work describes Jesus’ ministry as three years in length, an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament. Had our author the Gospel of John as well as that of Luke? His emphasis upon the Incarnation shows that he had. Notovitch says that the Life of Issa was written within three or four years after the death of Christ, from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and is hence more likely to bear the stamp of truth than the canonical gospels, which were written many years later. But the departure of the disciples to evangelize the pagan world, which is described in the last verse of the Life, did not take place within three or four years of Jesus’ death. The idea that it did has probably been gained from the Gospel of Matthew, which, taken without the Acts of the Apostles, might suggest that impression. It looks as though the writer of the Life were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew. Other touches point to his acquaintance with Acts and Romans, and it. becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.

But this is only the beginning. The whole cast of the book is vague and elusive. It presents no difficulties, no problems, whereas any really ancient work newly discovered bristles with novelties and obscurities. The message of Jesus is a pallid and colorless morality, amiable and unobjectionable enough, but devoid of the flashes of insight and touches of genius that mark the early gospels.

Historically and morally the book is commonplace. It identifies itself with no recognized type of primitive thought, and it does not strike out one of its own, but shows a superficial acquaintance with the leading New Testament ones, somewhat blurred together. This inaccurate acquaintance with the New Testament also characterizes Notovitch himself, who describes Luke as saying that Jesus “was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” This, he says, “conclusively proves that no one knew where the young man had gone, to so suddenly reappear sixteen years later” (p. 162). But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1 :80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.

On the whole, as an ancient document the Life of Issa is altogether unconvincing. It reads more like a journalistic effort to describe what might have happened if Jesus had visited India and Persia in his youth and what a modern cosmopolite thinks he did and taught in his ministry in Palestine.

The external evidence for the Life is no more impressive. The two large manuscript volumes read to Notovitch by the lama at the Himis Convent were, says Notovitch, “compiled from divers copies written in the Tibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library, and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada two hundred years after Christ. These rolls were placed in a convent standing on Mount Marbour, near Lassa. . . . .” The rolls were written in the Pali tongue. It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it–its place and number in the Himis library–is not in this case to be satisfied. More than this, the Life of Issa does not purport to have been deciphered and translated by a competent scholar. The lama read, the interpreter translated, Notovitch took notes. He could evidently not control either the lama |17 or the interpreter, to make sure of what the Tibetan manuscripts read. And his own notes, taken under these obvious disadvantages, he afterward spent many sleepless nights in classifying, “grouping the verses in conformity with the course of the narrative, and imprinting a character of unity to the entire work.” Of course this is just what a scholar would not have done. He would wish to give the fragments just as the manuscripts had them, unaffected by his own views and tastes.

The Unknown Life attracted the attention of the great Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, who in The Nineteenth Century pointed out that the Life of Issa did not appear in the catalogue of the Tandjur and the Kandjur, the great collections of Tibetan literature. “If we understand M. Notovitch rightly,” says Professor Max Miiller, “this life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India immediately after the Crucifixion.” He goes on to ask how these Jewish merchants happened, among the uncounted millions of India, to meet “the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India, …. and still more how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” He goes on to suggest that the Buddhist monks may have deceived Notovitch. “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sutra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.”
If the monks did not indulge in duping Notovitch, nothing remained, Max Miiller said, but to accuse M. Notovitch of a disgraceful fraud. And as he was writing his article, there came to him from an Englishwoman visiting Tibet a letter that pointed strongly in the latter direction. It was dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29,1894, and read in part:

Yesterday we were at the great Himis monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery up here,–800 lamas. Did you hear of a Russian who could not gain admittance to the monastery in any way, but at last broke his leg outside and was taken in? His object was to copy a Buddhist life of Christ which is there. He says he got it and has published it since in French. There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no life of Christ there at all!

These and other criticisms Notovitch sought to answer in his preface to the London edition. “The truth indeed is,” he remarks, “that the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur. “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title; consequently they could not be found in catalogues of Chinese or Tibetan works.”

With these extraordinary observations the Life of Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, seems to evaporate and vanish away. For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation. This much he has admitted. Even now, a scholar would of course interest himself actively to secure copies and even photographs of the scattered portions which Notovitch says he has assembled. A work which makes such high claims would be well worth an expedition to Tibet, to search out the scattered verses, copy and translate them, and to provide an account of the documents in which they are imbedded.

As it is, Notovitch seems to have taken refuge from his critics in a fog of indefiniteness. In his first preface he speaks of the monastic libraries as “containing a few copies of the manuscript in question,” but now it is of no use to look for the manuscript, he intimates, for there is no manuscript, and he lightly refers serious students of his supposed discovery to “verses scattered through more than one book, without any title.” This is not the method of sober scholarship. And we may observe that Notovitch himself in the thirty-five years that have elapsed since he published the Unknown Life has not taken the obvious and most of us would think the unavoidable steps to substantiate his supposed discovery.

As a possible gesture in that direction we may quote his report in his London preface of a conversation with a Roman Catholic Cardinal, to whom he had mentioned the matter. “I may however add to what I have already said in my introduction as to having learnt from him that the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is no novelty to the Roman Church, this: that the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter, which have been brought to Rome by missionaries from India, China, Egypt and Arabia.” It is a thousand pities that the Cardinal, who had evidently counted the manuscripts, was not more explicit as to their titles, so that someone who could read them might have looked them up in that library. Even if Notovitch could not go back to Tibet to confirm his discovery, as he once boldly proposed to do, he might have reached Rome and found ample confirmation there. But in thirty-five years neither he nor his eight translators nor his nine publishers have been sufficiently interested to apply this very simple test. Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.

Some people have been harsh enough to say that Notovitch never visited Tibet at all. I am not in a position to say this. It is true that the pictures of Tibetan scenes and costumes that appear in some editions of his work he says are from photographs taken by his friend D’Auvergne, who visited Tibet on another occasion. And I have observed that his accounts of Tibetan buildings and practices bear a striking resemblance to some previously published by English travelers. His account of his journey is not without improbability, and I cannot learn that he is recognized among the serious explorers who have visited Tibet. Yet he may have gone there; it would obviously be difficult to control his statement that he did.

Some light is thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June, 1895, by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Professor Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Professor Douglas’ inquiries did at length elicit the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh Hospital.

To that extent Notovitch’s narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the Life of Issa was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch’s book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” The chief lama did not receive from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reports having given him–the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Professor Douglas effected what Max Müller described as his annihilation.

In conclusion Max Müller expressly disclaimed any merit for having shown the Unknown Life to be a mere fiction, as no serious Sanskrit or Pali scholar, and no serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by it.

We may add that students of early Christian literature of course passed it by as of no significance whatever. It made no stir among them. This is not because they are averse to new discoveries. These are of frequent occurrence. But every one of them that is reported must stand the test of literary and textual criticism. To these tests the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, fails to respond.

But it remains an interesting example of a whole series of modern attempts to impose upon the general public crude fictions under the guise of ancient documents lately discovered, and it is worth while to call attention to it because its recent republication in New York was hailed by the press as a new and important discovery.

[link to www.patheos.com (secure)]
 Quoting: alkin


Oh yeah, quoting a wikipedia author, LOL.

Jesus did study with the hindoos and/or the buddhists. The miracles he is reported to have been able to perform align perfectly with those miracles an enlightened yogi discovers along his path and the acquired ability to manipulate matter.
Jesus is a Yogi!!

Whether that is proven by citing this book or that book or that source is beyond us.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Forget the red or the blue pill. Take the Gold Elixir.

“How can there be a God, when there is nothing but God.” - Laozi


“Naturalness is called the Way. The Way has no name or form; it is just essence, just the primal spirit.” - The Secret of the Golden Flower.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 16990338
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12/29/2018 09:15 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again.

In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The editor/translator was a Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch.

In fact this book was exposed as a fraud almost immediately by the renowned F. Max Muller. Later, the biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed wrote up a complete account of the events surrounding the publication of Mr Notovitch’s little book.

It would be an absolute delight for me to learn that that Jesus studied Buddhism. And I find enormous value in examining the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity. And, the fact remains there was nothing in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John (and I’d throw Thomas in here, too) does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Sadly, there’s something about us. We hear hoofs pounding along and think zebra instead of a boring old horse. We tend to want something more exotic. And who doesn’t love Tibet? And so, as appears to be the case with such things, the expose is quickly forgotten, but the lie lingers…

All this said and without any expectation that this is going to lay the ghost to rest for once and all, ooce again, I reprint Professor Godspeed’s article on Mr Notovitch and his charming and persistent fraud.

THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

by Edgar Goodspeed


The Wikipedia article on Professor Goodspeed: (1871–1962) was an American theologian and scholar of Greek and the New Testament. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, whose collection of New Testament manuscripts he enriched by his searches. The University’s collection is now named in his honor. He is widely remembered for his translations of the Bible: The New Testament: an American Translation (1923), and (with John Merlin Powis Smith) “The Bible, An American Translation” (1935), the “Goodspeed Bible”. He is also remembered for his translation of the Apocrypha, and that translation was included in The Complete Bible, An American Translation (1939). Finally, Harper & Brothers issued his widely heralded The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation (1950).

In the summer of 1926 the newspapers in this country and abroad announced the discovery in a monastery in Tibet of a lost Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The supposed discovery had, however, taken place nearly forty years before, and been published all over the world in 1894. The romantic story of its finding ran as follows:

In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. His story, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 and passed through several editions that year. It enjoyed the widest publicity. It was translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Three independent American translations were immediately published, two in New York and one in Chicago. The first (of The Life only) was by F. Marion Crawford, who was something of a Sanskrit scholar and had lived in India in his youth. It was published by Macmillan. Another English translation appeared in London in 1895. The book called forth a vigorous controversy, attracting the attention of no less an authority than Professor F. Max Müller of Oxford. It was discussed at length in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and then forgotten, until a New York publisher revived it in 1926, with the result described above.

Notovitch’s account of his discovery of the work is that having been laid up by accident with a broken leg at the Convent of Himis, he prevailed upon the Chief Lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the Life of Issa, which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses “in accordance with the requirements of the narrative.” As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. It begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, and its deliverance by Moses; its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. The divine youth, at thirteen, 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.

He is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend six years among the Brahmins, at Juggernaut, Benares, and other places, studying the Vedas, and teaching all castes alike. The Brahmins oppose him in this, and he denounces them and their sacred books, especially condemning caste and idolatry. When they plan to put him to death, he flees to the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. He goes among the pagans, warning them against idolatry, and teaching a high morality, and then visits Persia and preaches to the Zoroastrians.

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 find no fault in him, and he continues his work for three years, closely watched by Pilate’s spies. He is finally arrested and put to death, not by Jewish influence, but through the hostility of Pilate. His followers were persecuted, but his disciples carried his message out over the world.

The interest of this little book is evidently to fill in the silent years of Jesus’ youth, from the visit to Jerusalem at twelve to the beginning of his ministry at about thirty. It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone, and the question arises, Has the author of Issa obtained them from the same source?

It is also noteworthy that the work describes Jesus’ ministry as three years in length, an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament. Had our author the Gospel of John as well as that of Luke? His emphasis upon the Incarnation shows that he had. Notovitch says that the Life of Issa was written within three or four years after the death of Christ, from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and is hence more likely to bear the stamp of truth than the canonical gospels, which were written many years later. But the departure of the disciples to evangelize the pagan world, which is described in the last verse of the Life, did not take place within three or four years of Jesus’ death. The idea that it did has probably been gained from the Gospel of Matthew, which, taken without the Acts of the Apostles, might suggest that impression. It looks as though the writer of the Life were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew. Other touches point to his acquaintance with Acts and Romans, and it. becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.

But this is only the beginning. The whole cast of the book is vague and elusive. It presents no difficulties, no problems, whereas any really ancient work newly discovered bristles with novelties and obscurities. The message of Jesus is a pallid and colorless morality, amiable and unobjectionable enough, but devoid of the flashes of insight and touches of genius that mark the early gospels.

Historically and morally the book is commonplace. It identifies itself with no recognized type of primitive thought, and it does not strike out one of its own, but shows a superficial acquaintance with the leading New Testament ones, somewhat blurred together. This inaccurate acquaintance with the New Testament also characterizes Notovitch himself, who describes Luke as saying that Jesus “was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” This, he says, “conclusively proves that no one knew where the young man had gone, to so suddenly reappear sixteen years later” (p. 162). But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1 :80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.

On the whole, as an ancient document the Life of Issa is altogether unconvincing. It reads more like a journalistic effort to describe what might have happened if Jesus had visited India and Persia in his youth and what a modern cosmopolite thinks he did and taught in his ministry in Palestine.

The external evidence for the Life is no more impressive. The two large manuscript volumes read to Notovitch by the lama at the Himis Convent were, says Notovitch, “compiled from divers copies written in the Tibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library, and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada two hundred years after Christ. These rolls were placed in a convent standing on Mount Marbour, near Lassa. . . . .” The rolls were written in the Pali tongue. It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it–its place and number in the Himis library–is not in this case to be satisfied. More than this, the Life of Issa does not purport to have been deciphered and translated by a competent scholar. The lama read, the interpreter translated, Notovitch took notes. He could evidently not control either the lama |17 or the interpreter, to make sure of what the Tibetan manuscripts read. And his own notes, taken under these obvious disadvantages, he afterward spent many sleepless nights in classifying, “grouping the verses in conformity with the course of the narrative, and imprinting a character of unity to the entire work.” Of course this is just what a scholar would not have done. He would wish to give the fragments just as the manuscripts had them, unaffected by his own views and tastes.

The Unknown Life attracted the attention of the great Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, who in The Nineteenth Century pointed out that the Life of Issa did not appear in the catalogue of the Tandjur and the Kandjur, the great collections of Tibetan literature. “If we understand M. Notovitch rightly,” says Professor Max Miiller, “this life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India immediately after the Crucifixion.” He goes on to ask how these Jewish merchants happened, among the uncounted millions of India, to meet “the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India, …. and still more how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” He goes on to suggest that the Buddhist monks may have deceived Notovitch. “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sutra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.”
If the monks did not indulge in duping Notovitch, nothing remained, Max Miiller said, but to accuse M. Notovitch of a disgraceful fraud. And as he was writing his article, there came to him from an Englishwoman visiting Tibet a letter that pointed strongly in the latter direction. It was dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29,1894, and read in part:

Yesterday we were at the great Himis monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery up here,–800 lamas. Did you hear of a Russian who could not gain admittance to the monastery in any way, but at last broke his leg outside and was taken in? His object was to copy a Buddhist life of Christ which is there. He says he got it and has published it since in French. There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no life of Christ there at all!

These and other criticisms Notovitch sought to answer in his preface to the London edition. “The truth indeed is,” he remarks, “that the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur. “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title; consequently they could not be found in catalogues of Chinese or Tibetan works.”

With these extraordinary observations the Life of Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, seems to evaporate and vanish away. For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation. This much he has admitted. Even now, a scholar would of course interest himself actively to secure copies and even photographs of the scattered portions which Notovitch says he has assembled. A work which makes such high claims would be well worth an expedition to Tibet, to search out the scattered verses, copy and translate them, and to provide an account of the documents in which they are imbedded.

As it is, Notovitch seems to have taken refuge from his critics in a fog of indefiniteness. In his first preface he speaks of the monastic libraries as “containing a few copies of the manuscript in question,” but now it is of no use to look for the manuscript, he intimates, for there is no manuscript, and he lightly refers serious students of his supposed discovery to “verses scattered through more than one book, without any title.” This is not the method of sober scholarship. And we may observe that Notovitch himself in the thirty-five years that have elapsed since he published the Unknown Life has not taken the obvious and most of us would think the unavoidable steps to substantiate his supposed discovery.

As a possible gesture in that direction we may quote his report in his London preface of a conversation with a Roman Catholic Cardinal, to whom he had mentioned the matter. “I may however add to what I have already said in my introduction as to having learnt from him that the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is no novelty to the Roman Church, this: that the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter, which have been brought to Rome by missionaries from India, China, Egypt and Arabia.” It is a thousand pities that the Cardinal, who had evidently counted the manuscripts, was not more explicit as to their titles, so that someone who could read them might have looked them up in that library. Even if Notovitch could not go back to Tibet to confirm his discovery, as he once boldly proposed to do, he might have reached Rome and found ample confirmation there. But in thirty-five years neither he nor his eight translators nor his nine publishers have been sufficiently interested to apply this very simple test. Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.

Some people have been harsh enough to say that Notovitch never visited Tibet at all. I am not in a position to say this. It is true that the pictures of Tibetan scenes and costumes that appear in some editions of his work he says are from photographs taken by his friend D’Auvergne, who visited Tibet on another occasion. And I have observed that his accounts of Tibetan buildings and practices bear a striking resemblance to some previously published by English travelers. His account of his journey is not without improbability, and I cannot learn that he is recognized among the serious explorers who have visited Tibet. Yet he may have gone there; it would obviously be difficult to control his statement that he did.

Some light is thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June, 1895, by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Professor Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Professor Douglas’ inquiries did at length elicit the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh Hospital.

To that extent Notovitch’s narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the Life of Issa was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch’s book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” The chief lama did not receive from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reports having given him–the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Professor Douglas effected what Max Müller described as his annihilation.

In conclusion Max Müller expressly disclaimed any merit for having shown the Unknown Life to be a mere fiction, as no serious Sanskrit or Pali scholar, and no serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by it.

We may add that students of early Christian literature of course passed it by as of no significance whatever. It made no stir among them. This is not because they are averse to new discoveries. These are of frequent occurrence. But every one of them that is reported must stand the test of literary and textual criticism. To these tests the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, fails to respond.

But it remains an interesting example of a whole series of modern attempts to impose upon the general public crude fictions under the guise of ancient documents lately discovered, and it is worth while to call attention to it because its recent republication in New York was hailed by the press as a new and important discovery.

[link to www.patheos.com (secure)]
 Quoting: alkin


he didnt

but he did show up in NA
alkin  (OP)

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Re: Jesus never went to India
The story of “Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead” is a metaphorical story about initiation into the ancient mysteries of which Jesus was a master.. Lazarus was “raised” from the “dead” just as initiates are today. With the lion’s grip. I wonder if they gave him the third degree. ;)
 Quoting: What is Aleppo


15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

rev 22, 15


The power of Jesus comes from God not from some luciferian cult.

because of this wisdom and knowledge internet norm today people can't believe anymore in God power and teachings. there is always some excuse to believe in a mystic stuff.

the teaching is pure and simple how Jesus taught: love God, your neighbor and be saint according to the law. to reach this love santiness degree you need humiliate yourself in a way that should be almost impossible to me and you. that is the only way to Power of God work in a broken human vessel filled with sin like me and you. only a few that reach this degree and mainly in our world today: this is rare, very rare.

i'm not a wisdom guy or something like that but that is the way that i can see it.

you don't need a mystic way to do God miracle, you just need act as God want. the things are simple, very simple.
macssam

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12/29/2018 09:22 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
1.- India did not exist back then
2.- how would you know - were you there
3.- who cares
4.- what does it change



It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again.

In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The editor/translator was a Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch.

In fact this book was exposed as a fraud almost immediately by the renowned F. Max Muller. Later, the biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed wrote up a complete account of the events surrounding the publication of Mr Notovitch’s little book.

It would be an absolute delight for me to learn that that Jesus studied Buddhism. And I find enormous value in examining the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity. And, the fact remains there was nothing in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John (and I’d throw Thomas in here, too) does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Sadly, there’s something about us. We hear hoofs pounding along and think zebra instead of a boring old horse. We tend to want something more exotic. And who doesn’t love Tibet? And so, as appears to be the case with such things, the expose is quickly forgotten, but the lie lingers…

All this said and without any expectation that this is going to lay the ghost to rest for once and all, ooce again, I reprint Professor Godspeed’s article on Mr Notovitch and his charming and persistent fraud.

THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

by Edgar Goodspeed


The Wikipedia article on Professor Goodspeed: (1871–1962) was an American theologian and scholar of Greek and the New Testament. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, whose collection of New Testament manuscripts he enriched by his searches. The University’s collection is now named in his honor. He is widely remembered for his translations of the Bible: The New Testament: an American Translation (1923), and (with John Merlin Powis Smith) “The Bible, An American Translation” (1935), the “Goodspeed Bible”. He is also remembered for his translation of the Apocrypha, and that translation was included in The Complete Bible, An American Translation (1939). Finally, Harper & Brothers issued his widely heralded The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation (1950).

In the summer of 1926 the newspapers in this country and abroad announced the discovery in a monastery in Tibet of a lost Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The supposed discovery had, however, taken place nearly forty years before, and been published all over the world in 1894. The romantic story of its finding ran as follows:

In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. His story, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 and passed through several editions that year. It enjoyed the widest publicity. It was translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Three independent American translations were immediately published, two in New York and one in Chicago. The first (of The Life only) was by F. Marion Crawford, who was something of a Sanskrit scholar and had lived in India in his youth. It was published by Macmillan. Another English translation appeared in London in 1895. The book called forth a vigorous controversy, attracting the attention of no less an authority than Professor F. Max Müller of Oxford. It was discussed at length in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and then forgotten, until a New York publisher revived it in 1926, with the result described above.

Notovitch’s account of his discovery of the work is that having been laid up by accident with a broken leg at the Convent of Himis, he prevailed upon the Chief Lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the Life of Issa, which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses “in accordance with the requirements of the narrative.” As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. It begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, and its deliverance by Moses; its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. The divine youth, at thirteen, 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.

He is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend six years among the Brahmins, at Juggernaut, Benares, and other places, studying the Vedas, and teaching all castes alike. The Brahmins oppose him in this, and he denounces them and their sacred books, especially condemning caste and idolatry. When they plan to put him to death, he flees to the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. He goes among the pagans, warning them against idolatry, and teaching a high morality, and then visits Persia and preaches to the Zoroastrians.

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 find no fault in him, and he continues his work for three years, closely watched by Pilate’s spies. He is finally arrested and put to death, not by Jewish influence, but through the hostility of Pilate. His followers were persecuted, but his disciples carried his message out over the world.

The interest of this little book is evidently to fill in the silent years of Jesus’ youth, from the visit to Jerusalem at twelve to the beginning of his ministry at about thirty. It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone, and the question arises, Has the author of Issa obtained them from the same source?

It is also noteworthy that the work describes Jesus’ ministry as three years in length, an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament. Had our author the Gospel of John as well as that of Luke? His emphasis upon the Incarnation shows that he had. Notovitch says that the Life of Issa was written within three or four years after the death of Christ, from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and is hence more likely to bear the stamp of truth than the canonical gospels, which were written many years later. But the departure of the disciples to evangelize the pagan world, which is described in the last verse of the Life, did not take place within three or four years of Jesus’ death. The idea that it did has probably been gained from the Gospel of Matthew, which, taken without the Acts of the Apostles, might suggest that impression. It looks as though the writer of the Life were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew. Other touches point to his acquaintance with Acts and Romans, and it. becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.

But this is only the beginning. The whole cast of the book is vague and elusive. It presents no difficulties, no problems, whereas any really ancient work newly discovered bristles with novelties and obscurities. The message of Jesus is a pallid and colorless morality, amiable and unobjectionable enough, but devoid of the flashes of insight and touches of genius that mark the early gospels.

Historically and morally the book is commonplace. It identifies itself with no recognized type of primitive thought, and it does not strike out one of its own, but shows a superficial acquaintance with the leading New Testament ones, somewhat blurred together. This inaccurate acquaintance with the New Testament also characterizes Notovitch himself, who describes Luke as saying that Jesus “was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” This, he says, “conclusively proves that no one knew where the young man had gone, to so suddenly reappear sixteen years later” (p. 162). But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1 :80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.

On the whole, as an ancient document the Life of Issa is altogether unconvincing. It reads more like a journalistic effort to describe what might have happened if Jesus had visited India and Persia in his youth and what a modern cosmopolite thinks he did and taught in his ministry in Palestine.

The external evidence for the Life is no more impressive. The two large manuscript volumes read to Notovitch by the lama at the Himis Convent were, says Notovitch, “compiled from divers copies written in the Tibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library, and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada two hundred years after Christ. These rolls were placed in a convent standing on Mount Marbour, near Lassa. . . . .” The rolls were written in the Pali tongue. It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it–its place and number in the Himis library–is not in this case to be satisfied. More than this, the Life of Issa does not purport to have been deciphered and translated by a competent scholar. The lama read, the interpreter translated, Notovitch took notes. He could evidently not control either the lama |17 or the interpreter, to make sure of what the Tibetan manuscripts read. And his own notes, taken under these obvious disadvantages, he afterward spent many sleepless nights in classifying, “grouping the verses in conformity with the course of the narrative, and imprinting a character of unity to the entire work.” Of course this is just what a scholar would not have done. He would wish to give the fragments just as the manuscripts had them, unaffected by his own views and tastes.

The Unknown Life attracted the attention of the great Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, who in The Nineteenth Century pointed out that the Life of Issa did not appear in the catalogue of the Tandjur and the Kandjur, the great collections of Tibetan literature. “If we understand M. Notovitch rightly,” says Professor Max Miiller, “this life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India immediately after the Crucifixion.” He goes on to ask how these Jewish merchants happened, among the uncounted millions of India, to meet “the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India, …. and still more how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” He goes on to suggest that the Buddhist monks may have deceived Notovitch. “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sutra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.”
If the monks did not indulge in duping Notovitch, nothing remained, Max Miiller said, but to accuse M. Notovitch of a disgraceful fraud. And as he was writing his article, there came to him from an Englishwoman visiting Tibet a letter that pointed strongly in the latter direction. It was dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29,1894, and read in part:

Yesterday we were at the great Himis monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery up here,–800 lamas. Did you hear of a Russian who could not gain admittance to the monastery in any way, but at last broke his leg outside and was taken in? His object was to copy a Buddhist life of Christ which is there. He says he got it and has published it since in French. There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no life of Christ there at all!

These and other criticisms Notovitch sought to answer in his preface to the London edition. “The truth indeed is,” he remarks, “that the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur. “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title; consequently they could not be found in catalogues of Chinese or Tibetan works.”

With these extraordinary observations the Life of Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, seems to evaporate and vanish away. For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation. This much he has admitted. Even now, a scholar would of course interest himself actively to secure copies and even photographs of the scattered portions which Notovitch says he has assembled. A work which makes such high claims would be well worth an expedition to Tibet, to search out the scattered verses, copy and translate them, and to provide an account of the documents in which they are imbedded.

As it is, Notovitch seems to have taken refuge from his critics in a fog of indefiniteness. In his first preface he speaks of the monastic libraries as “containing a few copies of the manuscript in question,” but now it is of no use to look for the manuscript, he intimates, for there is no manuscript, and he lightly refers serious students of his supposed discovery to “verses scattered through more than one book, without any title.” This is not the method of sober scholarship. And we may observe that Notovitch himself in the thirty-five years that have elapsed since he published the Unknown Life has not taken the obvious and most of us would think the unavoidable steps to substantiate his supposed discovery.

As a possible gesture in that direction we may quote his report in his London preface of a conversation with a Roman Catholic Cardinal, to whom he had mentioned the matter. “I may however add to what I have already said in my introduction as to having learnt from him that the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is no novelty to the Roman Church, this: that the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter, which have been brought to Rome by missionaries from India, China, Egypt and Arabia.” It is a thousand pities that the Cardinal, who had evidently counted the manuscripts, was not more explicit as to their titles, so that someone who could read them might have looked them up in that library. Even if Notovitch could not go back to Tibet to confirm his discovery, as he once boldly proposed to do, he might have reached Rome and found ample confirmation there. But in thirty-five years neither he nor his eight translators nor his nine publishers have been sufficiently interested to apply this very simple test. Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.

Some people have been harsh enough to say that Notovitch never visited Tibet at all. I am not in a position to say this. It is true that the pictures of Tibetan scenes and costumes that appear in some editions of his work he says are from photographs taken by his friend D’Auvergne, who visited Tibet on another occasion. And I have observed that his accounts of Tibetan buildings and practices bear a striking resemblance to some previously published by English travelers. His account of his journey is not without improbability, and I cannot learn that he is recognized among the serious explorers who have visited Tibet. Yet he may have gone there; it would obviously be difficult to control his statement that he did.

Some light is thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June, 1895, by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Professor Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Professor Douglas’ inquiries did at length elicit the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh Hospital.

To that extent Notovitch’s narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the Life of Issa was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch’s book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” The chief lama did not receive from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reports having given him–the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Professor Douglas effected what Max Müller described as his annihilation.

In conclusion Max Müller expressly disclaimed any merit for having shown the Unknown Life to be a mere fiction, as no serious Sanskrit or Pali scholar, and no serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by it.

We may add that students of early Christian literature of course passed it by as of no significance whatever. It made no stir among them. This is not because they are averse to new discoveries. These are of frequent occurrence. But every one of them that is reported must stand the test of literary and textual criticism. To these tests the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, fails to respond.

But it remains an interesting example of a whole series of modern attempts to impose upon the general public crude fictions under the guise of ancient documents lately discovered, and it is worth while to call attention to it because its recent republication in New York was hailed by the press as a new and important discovery.

[link to www.patheos.com (secure)]
 Quoting: alkin

macssam
hiddeninplainsite

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Re: Jesus never went to India
if you are a christian and believe in this bs you are staying away from your faith giving to the indians the credibility of Jesus teachings.

the intention behind this crap is make indians superior turning the christian faith a copy and false doctrine. don't fall for this bs.

the teachings of Jesus comes from God not from some indian bum.
 Quoting: alkin


You are claiming opinions not facts.

How do you think Jesus was able to do the miracles he performed? He would have to have had knowledge of the etheric body and the chakras. This is the how he was able to heal the sick, it is called reiki. If you want to learn the truth you must become like a child in your understanding. If you assume you know everything then there is nothing more for you to learn.
Yuga Sage (The Red Pill)

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Re: Jesus never went to India
if you are a christian and believe in this bs you are staying away from your faith giving to the indians the credibility of Jesus teachings.

the intention behind this crap is make indians superior turning the christian faith a copy and false doctrine. don't fall for this bs.

the teachings of Jesus comes from God not from some indian bum.
 Quoting: alkin


As you just claimed: your “faith” in Christianity and what they teach of Jesus. It is only faith. There is no evidence of what the church teaches of Jesus either, only citing their own books.

Remember this: the church only teaches what they want to you in order to control you. Religion=Restriction

Wake up OP to your own disillusion and what uou “believe” to be right about Jesus. Face it, NO body knows about those 12 years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Forget the red or the blue pill. Take the Gold Elixir.

“How can there be a God, when there is nothing but God.” - Laozi


“Naturalness is called the Way. The Way has no name or form; it is just essence, just the primal spirit.” - The Secret of the Golden Flower.
Ozicell

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12/29/2018 09:46 AM

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Re: Jesus never went to India
The story of “Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead” is a metaphorical story about initiation into the ancient mysteries of which Jesus was a master.. Lazarus was “raised” from the “dead” just as initiates are today. With the lion’s grip. I wonder if they gave him the third degree. ;)
 Quoting: What is Aleppo


15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

rev 22, 15


The power of Jesus comes from God not from some luciferian cult.

because of this wisdom and knowledge internet norm today people can't believe anymore in God power and teachings. there is always some excuse to believe in a mystic stuff.

the teaching is pure and simple how Jesus taught: love God, your neighbor and be saint according to the law. to reach this love santiness degree you need humiliate yourself in a way that should be almost impossible to me and you. that is the only way to Power of God work in a broken human vessel filled with sin like me and you. only a few that reach this degree and mainly in our world today: this is rare, very rare.

i'm not a wisdom guy or something like that but that is the way that i can see it.

you don't need a mystic way to do God miracle, you just need act as God want. the things are simple, very simple.
 Quoting: alkin

I believe that you correct OP - the teachings of Jesus not only ARE simple, but they MUST also BE simple! He often spoke about how we should become like children. WHY Because they are simple and not complicated!

He chastised the scribes and the Pharisees because they took a simple teaching, made it complicated, and almost impossible to follow.

Remember that He said, narrow is the gate that leads to salvation and broad is the way that leads to destruction?

Narrow equates to simple!
Broad equates to complicated!

So what is this simplistic teaching?

Love God with your WHOLE being!
Love your neighbor as yourself!

Both OT teachings.

And Ne added one more!

Love each other as I have Loved you!

I have no problem with the idea of Him going to India but I believe that He would have been the teacher there and NOT the student!
That which is - has already been, And what is to be - has already been. Quote: King Solomon.
alkin  (OP)

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12/29/2018 09:46 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
As you just claimed: your “faith” in Christianity and what they teach of Jesus. It is only faith. There is no evidence of what the church teaches of Jesus either, only citing their own books.

Remember this: the church only teaches what they want to you in order to control you. Religion=Restriction

Wake up OP to your own disillusion and what uou “believe” to be right about Jesus. Face it, NO body knows about those 12 years.
 Quoting: Yuga Sage (The Red Pill)


The tradition of the Church give to us a good history and knowledge enough to understand our Faith.


How do you think Jesus was able to do the miracles he performed? He would have to have had knowledge of the etheric body and the chakras. This is the how he was able to heal the sick, it is called reiki. If you want to learn the truth you must become like a child in your understanding. If you assume you know everything then there is nothing more for you to learn.
 Quoting: hiddeninplainsite


after thousands of years Church has thousands of miracle proofs from people that don't even know or believe in chakras. The main diference is: Are you want to believe in God or in your limited knowledge base? Sure, you can believe only in yourself and do miracles, even the science can proof today that we can do some. But nothing compares to the God glory and power.
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 09:49 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
That right, but Lord Jesus was not the only Master, he was also the greatest teacher, he was with us from the beginning even beyond Atlantis as teacher of righteous and the law of One (God).

A great master make many masters, and a great teacher make many teachers. We all with in Spirit encase in soul or not had been Master(s) in many reincarnations in physical plane.

The denser the dimensions, the harder it is to remember of who you are from the beginning.


Which brings us to one of our greatest teachers, the man called Jesus. Even those who did not make him a god have recognized the greatness of his teachings. Teachings which have been largely distorted.

Was Jesus one of these “HEBs”—highly evolved beings?

Do you think he was highly evolved?

Yes. As was the Buddha, Lord Krishna, Moses, Babaji, Sai Baba, and Paramahansa Yogananda, for that matter.

Indeed. And many others you have not mentioned.

Well, in Book 2 You “hinted” that Jesus and these other teachers may have come from “outer space,” that they may have been visitors here, sharing with us the teachings and wisdoms of highly evolved beings. So it’s time to let the other shoe fall. Was Jesus a “spaceman”?

You are all “spacemen.”

What does that mean?

You are not natives of this planet you now call home.

<1% Conversations With God, Vol 3

Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my ministers would certainly strive so that I would not be handed over to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence." - John 18:36
GSB/LTD

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12/29/2018 09:54 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India
It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again.

In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The editor/translator was a Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch.

In fact this book was exposed as a fraud almost immediately by the renowned F. Max Muller. Later, the biblical scholar Edgar Goodspeed wrote up a complete account of the events surrounding the publication of Mr Notovitch’s little book.

It would be an absolute delight for me to learn that that Jesus studied Buddhism. And I find enormous value in examining the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity. And, the fact remains there was nothing in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John (and I’d throw Thomas in here, too) does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Sadly, there’s something about us. We hear hoofs pounding along and think zebra instead of a boring old horse. We tend to want something more exotic. And who doesn’t love Tibet? And so, as appears to be the case with such things, the expose is quickly forgotten, but the lie lingers…

All this said and without any expectation that this is going to lay the ghost to rest for once and all, ooce again, I reprint Professor Godspeed’s article on Mr Notovitch and his charming and persistent fraud.

THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST

by Edgar Goodspeed


The Wikipedia article on Professor Goodspeed: (1871–1962) was an American theologian and scholar of Greek and the New Testament. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, whose collection of New Testament manuscripts he enriched by his searches. The University’s collection is now named in his honor. He is widely remembered for his translations of the Bible: The New Testament: an American Translation (1923), and (with John Merlin Powis Smith) “The Bible, An American Translation” (1935), the “Goodspeed Bible”. He is also remembered for his translation of the Apocrypha, and that translation was included in The Complete Bible, An American Translation (1939). Finally, Harper & Brothers issued his widely heralded The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation (1950).

In the summer of 1926 the newspapers in this country and abroad announced the discovery in a monastery in Tibet of a lost Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. The supposed discovery had, however, taken place nearly forty years before, and been published all over the world in 1894. The romantic story of its finding ran as follows:

In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men. His story, with the text of the Life, was published in French in 1894 and passed through several editions that year. It enjoyed the widest publicity. It was translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Three independent American translations were immediately published, two in New York and one in Chicago. The first (of The Life only) was by F. Marion Crawford, who was something of a Sanskrit scholar and had lived in India in his youth. It was published by Macmillan. Another English translation appeared in London in 1895. The book called forth a vigorous controversy, attracting the attention of no less an authority than Professor F. Max Müller of Oxford. It was discussed at length in the pages of The Nineteenth Century, and then forgotten, until a New York publisher revived it in 1926, with the result described above.

Notovitch’s account of his discovery of the work is that having been laid up by accident with a broken leg at the Convent of Himis, he prevailed upon the Chief Lama, who had told him of the existence of the work, to read to him, through an interpreter, the somewhat detached verses of the Tibetan version of the Life of Issa, which was said to have been translated from the Pali. Notovitch says that he himself afterward grouped the verses “in accordance with the requirements of the narrative.” As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters. It begins with an account of Israel in Egypt, and its deliverance by Moses; its neglect of religion, and its conquest by the Romans. Then follows an account of the Incarnation. The divine youth, at thirteen, 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.

He is welcomed by the Jains, but leaves them to spend six years among the Brahmins, at Juggernaut, Benares, and other places, studying the Vedas, and teaching all castes alike. The Brahmins oppose him in this, and he denounces them and their sacred books, especially condemning caste and idolatry. When they plan to put him to death, he flees to the Buddhists, and spends six years among them, learning Pali and mastering their religious texts. He goes among the pagans, warning them against idolatry, and teaching a high morality, and then visits Persia and preaches to the Zoroastrians.

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 find no fault in him, and he continues his work for three years, closely watched by Pilate’s spies. He is finally arrested and put to death, not by Jewish influence, but through the hostility of Pilate. His followers were persecuted, but his disciples carried his message out over the world.

The interest of this little book is evidently to fill in the silent years of Jesus’ youth, from the visit to Jerusalem at twelve to the beginning of his ministry at about thirty. It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone, and the question arises, Has the author of Issa obtained them from the same source?

It is also noteworthy that the work describes Jesus’ ministry as three years in length, an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament. Had our author the Gospel of John as well as that of Luke? His emphasis upon the Incarnation shows that he had. Notovitch says that the Life of Issa was written within three or four years after the death of Christ, from the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and is hence more likely to bear the stamp of truth than the canonical gospels, which were written many years later. But the departure of the disciples to evangelize the pagan world, which is described in the last verse of the Life, did not take place within three or four years of Jesus’ death. The idea that it did has probably been gained from the Gospel of Matthew, which, taken without the Acts of the Apostles, might suggest that impression. It looks as though the writer of the Life were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew. Other touches point to his acquaintance with Acts and Romans, and it. becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.

But this is only the beginning. The whole cast of the book is vague and elusive. It presents no difficulties, no problems, whereas any really ancient work newly discovered bristles with novelties and obscurities. The message of Jesus is a pallid and colorless morality, amiable and unobjectionable enough, but devoid of the flashes of insight and touches of genius that mark the early gospels.

Historically and morally the book is commonplace. It identifies itself with no recognized type of primitive thought, and it does not strike out one of its own, but shows a superficial acquaintance with the leading New Testament ones, somewhat blurred together. This inaccurate acquaintance with the New Testament also characterizes Notovitch himself, who describes Luke as saying that Jesus “was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” This, he says, “conclusively proves that no one knew where the young man had gone, to so suddenly reappear sixteen years later” (p. 162). But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1 :80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.

On the whole, as an ancient document the Life of Issa is altogether unconvincing. It reads more like a journalistic effort to describe what might have happened if Jesus had visited India and Persia in his youth and what a modern cosmopolite thinks he did and taught in his ministry in Palestine.

The external evidence for the Life is no more impressive. The two large manuscript volumes read to Notovitch by the lama at the Himis Convent were, says Notovitch, “compiled from divers copies written in the Tibetan tongue, translated from rolls belonging to the Lassa library, and brought from India, Nepal, and Maghada two hundred years after Christ. These rolls were placed in a convent standing on Mount Marbour, near Lassa. . . . .” The rolls were written in the Pali tongue. It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it–its place and number in the Himis library–is not in this case to be satisfied. More than this, the Life of Issa does not purport to have been deciphered and translated by a competent scholar. The lama read, the interpreter translated, Notovitch took notes. He could evidently not control either the lama |17 or the interpreter, to make sure of what the Tibetan manuscripts read. And his own notes, taken under these obvious disadvantages, he afterward spent many sleepless nights in classifying, “grouping the verses in conformity with the course of the narrative, and imprinting a character of unity to the entire work.” Of course this is just what a scholar would not have done. He would wish to give the fragments just as the manuscripts had them, unaffected by his own views and tastes.

The Unknown Life attracted the attention of the great Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, who in The Nineteenth Century pointed out that the Life of Issa did not appear in the catalogue of the Tandjur and the Kandjur, the great collections of Tibetan literature. “If we understand M. Notovitch rightly,” says Professor Max Miiller, “this life of Christ was taken down from the mouths of some Jewish merchants who came to India immediately after the Crucifixion.” He goes on to ask how these Jewish merchants happened, among the uncounted millions of India, to meet “the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India, …. and still more how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” He goes on to suggest that the Buddhist monks may have deceived Notovitch. “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sutra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.”
If the monks did not indulge in duping Notovitch, nothing remained, Max Miiller said, but to accuse M. Notovitch of a disgraceful fraud. And as he was writing his article, there came to him from an Englishwoman visiting Tibet a letter that pointed strongly in the latter direction. It was dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29,1894, and read in part:

Yesterday we were at the great Himis monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery up here,–800 lamas. Did you hear of a Russian who could not gain admittance to the monastery in any way, but at last broke his leg outside and was taken in? His object was to copy a Buddhist life of Christ which is there. He says he got it and has published it since in French. There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no life of Christ there at all!

These and other criticisms Notovitch sought to answer in his preface to the London edition. “The truth indeed is,” he remarks, “that the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur. “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title; consequently they could not be found in catalogues of Chinese or Tibetan works.”

With these extraordinary observations the Life of Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, seems to evaporate and vanish away. For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation. This much he has admitted. Even now, a scholar would of course interest himself actively to secure copies and even photographs of the scattered portions which Notovitch says he has assembled. A work which makes such high claims would be well worth an expedition to Tibet, to search out the scattered verses, copy and translate them, and to provide an account of the documents in which they are imbedded.

As it is, Notovitch seems to have taken refuge from his critics in a fog of indefiniteness. In his first preface he speaks of the monastic libraries as “containing a few copies of the manuscript in question,” but now it is of no use to look for the manuscript, he intimates, for there is no manuscript, and he lightly refers serious students of his supposed discovery to “verses scattered through more than one book, without any title.” This is not the method of sober scholarship. And we may observe that Notovitch himself in the thirty-five years that have elapsed since he published the Unknown Life has not taken the obvious and most of us would think the unavoidable steps to substantiate his supposed discovery.

As a possible gesture in that direction we may quote his report in his London preface of a conversation with a Roman Catholic Cardinal, to whom he had mentioned the matter. “I may however add to what I have already said in my introduction as to having learnt from him that the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is no novelty to the Roman Church, this: that the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter, which have been brought to Rome by missionaries from India, China, Egypt and Arabia.” It is a thousand pities that the Cardinal, who had evidently counted the manuscripts, was not more explicit as to their titles, so that someone who could read them might have looked them up in that library. Even if Notovitch could not go back to Tibet to confirm his discovery, as he once boldly proposed to do, he might have reached Rome and found ample confirmation there. But in thirty-five years neither he nor his eight translators nor his nine publishers have been sufficiently interested to apply this very simple test. Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.

Some people have been harsh enough to say that Notovitch never visited Tibet at all. I am not in a position to say this. It is true that the pictures of Tibetan scenes and costumes that appear in some editions of his work he says are from photographs taken by his friend D’Auvergne, who visited Tibet on another occasion. And I have observed that his accounts of Tibetan buildings and practices bear a striking resemblance to some previously published by English travelers. His account of his journey is not without improbability, and I cannot learn that he is recognized among the serious explorers who have visited Tibet. Yet he may have gone there; it would obviously be difficult to control his statement that he did.

Some light is thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June, 1895, by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Professor Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Professor Douglas’ inquiries did at length elicit the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh Hospital.

To that extent Notovitch’s narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the Life of Issa was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch’s book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, “Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!” The chief lama did not receive from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reports having given him–the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Professor Douglas effected what Max Müller described as his annihilation.

In conclusion Max Müller expressly disclaimed any merit for having shown the Unknown Life to be a mere fiction, as no serious Sanskrit or Pali scholar, and no serious student of Buddhism, was taken in by it.

We may add that students of early Christian literature of course passed it by as of no significance whatever. It made no stir among them. This is not because they are averse to new discoveries. These are of frequent occurrence. But every one of them that is reported must stand the test of literary and textual criticism. To these tests the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, fails to respond.

But it remains an interesting example of a whole series of modern attempts to impose upon the general public crude fictions under the guise of ancient documents lately discovered, and it is worth while to call attention to it because its recent republication in New York was hailed by the press as a new and important discovery.

[link to www.patheos.com (secure)]
 Quoting: alkin


OP: multiple walls of text do NOT an argument make. In fact, if you have to go to such lengths to prove your statements, then you have already lost your case.

And your audience.

I can provide text which states -very convincingly- that Jesus was nothing more than an itinerant magician whose "miracles" were nothing more than clever tricks played upon a very gullible bunch of ignorant peasants... but that doesn't make that scenario true, either!

Last Edited by GSB/LTD on 12/29/2018 09:57 AM
Anonymous Coward
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12/29/2018 09:59 AM
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Re: Jesus never went to India

You don’t need to watch or read anything but the New Testament itself to understand the metaphor.
 Quoting: Frumpelstiltskin


You can get the truth of God off the back of a cereal box too but why skateboard across country when you have a car?

Unless you really really like skateboarding.





GLP