The various myths, legends and lore – an overview
I must admit I was in two minds before starting on this
trek. Many years ago, I found the Holger Kersten book staring down at me from
one of Gangaram’s top shelves, at their MG Road store. The title ‘Jesus lived
in India’ was arresting and I picked it up. Once I finished speed reading it, it
became clear that there was little to back up the story of the Himalayan
wanderer Nicolas Notovitch. Then there was the Ahmadiyya angle, which was quite
intriguing. Who was Yousef Asaf? Was he just another contemporary mendicant? What
about the Buddhist contributions? I got
hold of many relevant works listed under references, to
checkout how they saw it.
Since I have only a passing interest in the subject, if only
to check out the Indian angle, I will go on to just provide a precis of the
legends, serving as a quick start for those interested in studying the topic in
greater detail. Let me start out by saying that while most of the basic sources
have a foundation on which their theories are built, the story structures that
sprung up over those were very unstable fabrications. They were systematically
taken apart by researchers such as Pappas and Fader, leaving the original base
at Jerusalem, undisturbed.
As an outline, the myths allude to Jesus’s travels during
the so called ‘missing years’ of his youth, in which period he traveled to India,
then to the mountains at Ladakh, spent time at a Buddhist monastery, learning
their philosophy. Returning to Israel, he propagated a version of what he
learnt as the tenements of Christianity. The second myth is based on the
premise that he did not die at the cross, but was brought down, treated with
special ointments, recovered and fled to Kashmir where he lived out his last
years and died.
There is also another angle which I chanced on, where
Cleopatra and/or her son fled from Alexandria, sailing to Malabar. The son
Caesarion grew up and somehow ended up at the Buddhist monastery, became Issa
and traveled back to the Middle East, while other stories are doing rounds that
Jesus was the great grandson of Cleopatra. I did not bother checking that out,
though, Other angles cropped up, involving St Thomas and his connections with
the story. It was all stimulating, so let’s take a look!
The world was somewhat at peace with the established storyline
based on the Epistles of St Paul written 25 years following Jesus’s death and
the New testament written 40 years after, as well as the gospels – which state
(though there is hardly any archeological or hard evidence, as yet) that Jesus a
Jew, with followers, was executed on the orders (aided by the Jewish priests
and Caiaphas) of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign
of the Emperor Tiberius, at Nazareth. Apparently following his father’s trade,
as a carpenter, and spending a number of unrecorded or missing years, he reappears
in his 30’s, gets baptized, starts to preach attracting much public attention
and rises to fame and in public esteem. His ministry is a short span of just
one to three and a half years and its intensity attracted the attention of the
Roman administrators who considering him a trouble maker, arrest him, have him tried
and crucified at Jerusalem.
He was hung between two convicted thieves and, according to
the Gospel of Mark, died some six hours later. According to the Gospel of John,
a soldier pierced his side with a spear to be certain that he had died, when
blood and water appeared from the wound. The soldiers did not break Jesus's
legs, as they did to the two crucified thieves (breaking the legs hastened the
onset of death), as Jesus was dead already. Following Jesus' death, his body
was removed from the cross and buried in a rock-hewn tomb. However, there is
some confusion about this narrative and some question if he died and got resurrected
or if he never died in the first place.
These two unclear aspects in Jesus’s life – firstly Jesus’s
travels during his formative years, his deep philosophical education prior to
return to Nazareth which formed a base for his preaching and secondly his life after
crucifixion form the crux of the two Indian myths. The missing years are the
formative years when he worked as a lay carpenter, the ages between12-29. Or,
did he go on to travel and acquire much knowledge? A preacher to be acceptable
has after all, to be knowledgeable, it does not just come in a flash. The lost
years are the years following his resurrection, or life after being brought
down from the cross (apparently still alive) instead of ascending to the
heavens. None of the scriptures had covered these years well and this narrative
vacuum, they say, resulted in much speculation and the creation of myths. So
much for background.
The next was the connection between Lord Krishna of Hinduism
and Christ. One Louis Jacolliot in 1869 wrote that the entire story of Jesus
was a myth woven around the Bhagavatham or Krishna’s strikingly similar life. Jacolliot
a French barrister, colonial judge, author and lecturer, studied and translated
many Sanskrit and some Tamil scriptures and works to French. During his 2-year
(1867-67) tenure at Pondicherry and the following year as chief justice at
Chendernagor (in Calcutta), he got interested in Hinduism and wrote the works
connecting these religions. He went on to state in his book - The Bible in
India: Hindoo Origin of Hebrew and Christian Revelation that Jesus Christ
was actually Jezeus Christna or Krishna the pure essence. But one should note
that Jacolliot does not connect Jesus or any travel to India, otherwise. Most
academics scoff at his writings, seeing them of no merit and term them pure
fabrications. I will however leave it here and come back to his life, some
other day.
There may have been others, but we now come to Nicolas Notovitch.
Shulim or Nikolai Aleksandrovich Notovitch was a Crimean Jewish adventurer living
in Paris, who claimed to be a Russian aristocrat, spy and journalist. After
breaking his leg in India during a trip in 1887 and while recovering from it at
the Hemis monastery in Ladakh, Notovitch learned of the Tibetan manuscript
covering the Life of Saint Issa. He went back to write a book in 1894 in which
he claimed that during his unknown years, Jesus left Galilee for India and
studied with Buddhists and Hindus there, before returning to Judea.
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| Hemis Monastery |
According to his accounts, he was shown two big volumes in
cardboard covers, with leaves yellowed by the lapse of time” which was in
Tibetan and a translation of an original document written in Pali which detailed
the travels and studies of a prophet or messiah called Issa in India,
recognizably the Jesus of the Gospels. Notovitch had his Nepali guide make a
quick translation of its contents.
Notovitch explains - One day, while visiting a Buddhist
convent on my route, I learned from a chief lama, that there existed in the
archives of Lhassa, very ancient memoirs relating to the life of Jesus Christ
and the occidental nations, and that certain great monasteries possessed old
copies and translations of those chronicles. An unfortunate fall, causing the
breaking of a leg, furnished me with an absolutely unexpected pretext for
returning to the monastery, where I received surgical attention. I took
advantage of my short sojourn among the lamas to obtain the consent of their
chief that they should bring to me, from their library, the manuscripts
relating to Jesus Christ, and, assisted by my interpreter, who translated for
me the Thibetan language, transferred carefully to my notebook what the lama
read to me.
He continues, stating that he returned to Europe, consulted
many experts and the clergy who tried to dissuade him from publishing his
fantastic discovery. Eventually he put it all down into a book, but waited till
a philosopher consultant M Renan was dead, before publishing. In summary the
story as he records it, goes thus…
After a long journey, perhaps through the well frequented
spice trails, in caravan to Sindh, Jesus settled in Sindh and began to frequent
the temples of the Jains, the link religion between Hinduism and Buddhism and
presumed to have originated 7 centuries before Christ. Jesus or Issa as he was
known while in India, continues his journeys to Puri Jaganath in Orissa where
he spends 6 years studying Sanskrit, and thence many subjects such as
Philosophy, medicine and math. While there he observes the caste system and
many objectionable ways being followed in India, and started to preach to the
lowest classes, the Sudras. He did not quite consider the Vedas divine, and
preached that the people should only bow to one god and not the Hindu
apparitions. Quoting Notovtich, Issa denied the Trimurti and the incarnation
of Para-Brahma in Vishnu, Siva, and other gods; "for," said he:
"The eternal Judge, the eternal Spirit, constitutes the only and
indivisible soul of the universe, and it is this soul alone which creates,
contains and vivifies all… and this tone continues on in many verses.
It appears that the priests of Puri decided to finish Issa
off, but warned by the Sudras, he fled to the mountains and having acquired
some skill with Pali, started to learn the Sutras for another six years. Thus,
after another six years with the Buddhists, where he discovered monotheism, he
remembers his fatherland struggling under Roman rule and decides to start back on
his long trek back, preaching what he had learnt, along the way. In Persian,
the Zoroastrians became upset, and cast him away hoping he would be devoured by
wild beasts, but he continued on without incident, to Israel, where things were
in a state of despair, for the Romans had subjugated the population.
The records purportedly discovered by Notovitch are supposed
to have stated all the above in a verse form, completed by the monks after they
learnt about his fate since leaving Tibet and his greatness (See link attached).
How did that information and details of his preaching in
Israel reach the scribes at Nepal? Notovitch mentions that Issa was not a
popular figure when he left, but when the monks heard later of his fame in
Palestine, they complied the information to create a continuous narrative.
Notovitch’s accounts were quickly rebuffed by theologians
and academics, he was accused of being an American atheist, and proved to be a
fraud. Notovitch slipped out from public view, but the line has been cast and
to date there are many people who perused the tale and its antecedents. Notovitch
wrote some other books, was jailed in Siberia for a while and spent out his
life and royalties living a rich social life.
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| N Notovitch |
What were the reasons in casting this away as a fraud? A
detailed analysis is provided by Fader. The situation itself presents a
problem, a very feverish Notovitch with a broken leg and a local guide meet the
monks who narrate the verses and the guide loosely translates the verses for Notovitch
to jot down. He rearranges them and gets it printed many years later, and
centuries later, when Abhedananda visits the same Hemis monastery, comes up
with the exact same English translation and wording! When many others including
Holger Kersten visited Hemis, they were told no such scrolls existed. So to
date nobody has photographed or really seen the volumes of Issa’s story, and so
it is a pure fabrication.
Now we come to the second part of the story, which is the
story of his second coming to India, this time to Kashmir, after escaping from
death at the cross. The sect called the Ahamadis believe that Christ believed
dead at the cross, was brought down and nursed back to life with various spices
and herbs. In 1890 Ghulam Ahmed published “Jesus in India’. Ahmed who acquired
the tale from divine inspiration, that Jesus journeyed again East to India,
looking for the ten lost tribes of Israel, to preach to and live amongst them and
finally reached Kashmir, where he died at an old age. His tomb and shrine can
be found at the Khanyar quarter, the Rozabal shrine.
A later Ahmadiyya scholar, Al-Haj Nazir Ahmed condensed all
this in his ‘Jesus in Heaven on Earth’. According to the Ahamadi’s the ten lost
tribes settled in the region of Assareth (now the Hazara district) and the
present days Afghanis and Kashmiris are descendants of these tribes and haver
customs similar to the Jews. Interestingly per the Ahamadis, Jesus had brought
along his mother Mary and his twin brother Judas Thomas (Didymus), traveling
along to Syria, thence Urfa in Tukey, then Nisbis (Madgonia) which is when one
King Gondaphares (Gopadatta)of India requested the king of Nisbis for a builder
who could build him a Roman style palace. Jesus deputes his brother Thomas to
take care of that since he was a skilled mason and carpenter, and he completed
the work in 6 months, at Taxila. All this is dated to 48-49AD.
Jesus by now sporting the alias Yusuf Asaf, leaves Nisbis
and travels East, spent some time in Persia, then moved to Afghanistan and
preached at Ghazni and Jalalabad. Here Jesus meets his brother Thomas again and
they decide to travel farther. At Murree, Mary passes on and is buried at Pindi
point, a tomb which was venerated for a long time. Jesus continued on, arriving
Kashmir in 60AD and lived there (Yusumarg) as a preacher until his demise
around 110AD. is not clear when Yusuf Asaf passed away in Srinagar, but he is
recorded as living in 78 (so aged 85 as Jesus was born in 7BC). His last
instructions asked Thomas his disciple and brother to continue his missionary
work. Now we come to some mentions of Jesus’s travels from Srinagar to visit
the Bani Israelites in Malabar and Ceylon! There are mentions of a Solomon
temple atop Mt Solomon in Srinagar and at a location called Aishmquam, it
appears the Rams of god and Jesus’s staff were preserved.
Thomas (Ba’bad) as instructed, decides to go preaching and
goes to Taxila and journeys South East, but could not find any ship to Malabar
for there is a war in South India. He therefore sails on to Socotra, and
preaches in Abyssinia briefly. From there he finds passage to sails on to Malabar,
lands in Cranganore where he pauses (the story well known to the Malayali
Christians) to create a new community and establishes the seven churches and a
substantial following. He continues on to Mylapore where he preaches, tries to
convert a local queen Tertia and gets murdered for doing that.
So much for the second part of the story, but Ghulam Ahmad,
the founder of the sect maintains that Jesus came to India only after his
crucifixion and that Buddhism was influenced by Christian works and not the
other way around. There is also a confusion in these narratives as to who was
responsible for his death – Jewish priests or the Roman governor Pilate, and
some feel that the Jewish traders cast the blame on Pilate, thus coloring the
Buddhist account of Issa.
The tomb of Yusuf Asaf (Shazada Nabi or Hazrat Isa) is
called Rozabal or prophet’s tomb where a smell of musk used to emanate from the
tomb for many centuries, until an untoward incident stopped it. The descendants
or the Mir family are legal owners of this private property. Behind the tomb
are footprints on a stone, showing crucifixion wounds. The place is a popular
stop for many visitors, religious or otherwise, these days and actually home to
multiple tombs, with Yousef Asaf’s tomb being in the lower crypt and aligned
East-West in the Jewish tradition.
Faber Kaiser’s supporting work is also taken apart by
critics such as Fader, since he refers to obscure witnesses to the scrolls such
as Lady Merrick who turned out to be an ordinary traveler who never witnessed
anything but only alluded to the existence of some scrolls. Ahmad Shah and A
Douglas who visited Hemis in 1894-95 found monks who had never heard of any
scrolls or Issa, damming the Notovitch book’s credibility. Holger Kresten visited
Hemis in 1979, found no scrolls, but after discussions with one F Hassnain in
Kashmir, propounded the double trip to India notion.
Kashmiri informs us (he has used a good bit of reasoning
from Kaiser’s book), quoting also many other sources, that Kashmir, where a number
of biblical place names and Hebrew words can still be evidenced, is actually
Kashir (Hebrew for Halal) and that the Kashmiri pandits, descendants of
Kashyapa are the Bani Israel or immigrants from Israel. He also states that the
boatmen of Srinagar are descendants of Noah (Noah is buried at Tanda)! He
provides more detail on Moses’s tomb located at Booth-Bandipura, and goes on to
claim the Aryans were actually the Bani Israel. The Kashmiri language
originated not from Sanskrit, but from Hebrew (Ibrani), mixed with Syrian and to
lend credence, gives a large number of examples. He also points out that
Kashmiri temple architecture is reminiscent of ancient Babylon and Jerusalem.
These are the reasons why Kashmir, according to him, was always known as the
“Paradise on Earth”.
Nicholas Roerich visited Hemis with his son George in 1925
and stated - In Hemis indeed lies an old Tibetan translation from the
manuscript, written in Pali and preserved in a well-known monastery near Lhasa.
But no additional proof was provided by him. The books by Elizabeth and Suzanne
are mentioned for completeness of available resources, but I could not find the
energy to peruse them in detail, especially the latter, to be quite frank, for
the story was taking me nowhere.
As expected, there is much debate on if the Ahmadi claims
hold any water. The Paul Pappas study goes over it in detail and after debating
it, states that the Ahamadis were selective in their use of original scriptures
to create a new storyline and points out to the major issue with them is
Ahmed’s harping on sex being a carnal sin, right through. There are other issues
with Ahmadi claims that King Solomon flew to Kashmir, the construction of the
Temple of Solomon, and the issue of Moses being buried at Mt Niltoop (Nebo) in
Kashmir, so also his brother Haroon. But these myths and legends continue to be
believed by some, right or wrong.
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| Roza bal tomb |
The story of the Ahmadiyya or Ahmadi sect started by Mirza
Ghulam Muhammad in 1889, is quite sad. They are considered heretical by
orthodox Muslims because they consider Ghulam Muhammad to be their prophet and
not Muhammed. The Ahmadis insist that Ahmed was not a "law-giving"
prophet and his job was only to propagate the laws enunciated by Islam's
Prophet Mohammad. After independence, they moved their headquarters to Pakistan
but were a persecuted community and termed officially as non-Muslims following
which they moved their HQ to London, now ministering about 10 million Ahmadis
worldwide from London.
Now what did the fledgling post-independence Indian
government have anything to do with all this? The national archives present an
interesting tale. One AK Gupta petitioned Pt Nehru for assistance to obtain
copies of the Pali manuscripts at Hemis - Ladakh and asked for the matter to be
checked with the Dalia Lama who had arrived in India. When reminded by the Dept of Education and the PMO,
President etc, the ad hoc committee of Indology considered the whole matter to
be ‘not serious’ enough for study, but they thought it a good idea to check
with Dr Roerich (since his father had visited Hemis to check the matter out).
After many failed attempts in eliciting a response from Dr Roerich, the J&K
state minister Kushok Bakula confirmed in 1958 that no such manuscripts existed
at Leh and Hemis Gumpas. The department of education & scientific affairs
opined that a large article in Blitz which triggered all this should be given
no credence. Why Svetoslav Roerich remained silent is not known, for his
brother George also visited the Hemis monastery with their father in 1925 and
had alluded to the existence of the scrolls.
The arguments and counter arguments continue, though
infrequently these days, with nothing left at Tibet by way of Issa’s evidence,
after the Chinese cleansing. The tomb of Yusus Asaf is still there, but no real
evidence connects Yusuf Asaf to Jesus. So, did Jesus wander around the world
during the missing years or did he just work on as a carpenter in his own
hometown during the missing years? Did he acquire his profound knowledge or was
it suddenly revelated to him? Did he die at the cross or many decades later, in
Kashmir?
I have briefly retold the myths and legends, but I will
offer no opinion as I am in no way qualified to do that. The books listed under
references provide all the detail. As the idiom goes, Each to his own.
References
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - Nicolas Notovitch
The Issa tale that will not die – H Louis Fader
Jesus tomb in India – Paul C Pappas
Jesus Lived in India – Holger Kresten
Christ in Kashmir – Aziz Kashmiri
Jesus died in Kashmir – Faber Kaiser
Lost years of Jesus - Elizabeth Clare Prophet
Jesus in Kashmir – Suzanne Olsson
Journey into Kashmir & Tibet – Abhedananda
Pics – Hemis &
others – Wikimedia
