The Messiah Secret

•   Jesus was born on 25 December. If there really were shepherds tending their flocks in the fields when Jesus was born, as the Gospel of Luke claims, then the month was most likely to have been June. That was the first month of the year when sheep were allowed into the fields to graze on the remains of the wheat harvest. In fact, the date of 25 December was almost certainly chosen by the early Church as the major Christian festival because it was important to subdue all other religions, including paganism, and one of the most important pagan celebrations was the festival of the Unvanquished Sun, held every year on 25 December. It is known that the ‘new’ festival was established by the fourth century AD, because in AD 334 the 25 December first appeared in a Roman calendar as Christ’s date of birth.

•   His name was Jesus Christ. The name ‘Jesus’ is actually a British invention. His original Hebrew name was ‘Yehoshua’, which later became ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Joshua’. The name ‘Yehoshua’ was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as ‘Iesvs’ or ‘Iesous’, which was then changed to ‘Jesus’ in English. In those early days, people didn’t actually have a second or family name. Instead, Jesus would have been known as ‘Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub’, or ‘Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob’. He would certainly never have been known as ‘Jesus Christ’ while He was alive. Jesus was believed by some people to have been the Messiah, which in Hebrew means ‘the anointed one’. The oil used for such an anointing is called ‘khrisma’ in Greek, and so an anointed person is called ‘Khristos’, which was translated into ‘Christus’ in Latin and then became ‘Christ’ in English. And being anointed was not a special privilege reserved for the Messiah – all sorts of people were anointed, including kings, high priests, prophets and even people suffering from some forms of sickness.

•   Jesus lived in Nazareth. In fact, it’s almost certain that Nazareth didn’t exist as a settlement when Jesus was alive, and ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is actually a mistranslation of an Old Testament passage by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew. The name ‘Iesous Nazarene’ or ‘Nazareneus’ means that Jesus was a Nazarene, not that he came from a place called Nazareth. If the writer had meant that he did come from Nazareth, the correct word would have been either ‘Nazarethenos’ or ‘Nazarethaios’. A ‘Nazarene’ was an ascetic, a holy person who spent a lot of time praying, and who lived simply with no or few possessions. They were an important sect in northern Palestine, and may also have been known as ‘Mandaeans’.

There’s also a large gap in the story of the life of Jesus Christ that the Christian Church never mentions. His birth is talked about, then His appearance at the Temple at the age of twelve or thirteen, His ministry and of course His death and apparent Resurrection, but where was Jesus between the ages of about thirteen and thirty?

There’s evidence that Christ spent quite a lot of His early life outside Judea, and it appears quite possible that He actually lived in India for at least a part of this time. Such travels were not unknown in the first century AD. What later became known as the Silk Road or Silk Route was already well established, and there was frequent two-way traffic between the countries around the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as China.

In the winter of 1887, a man named Nicolai Notovitch was travelling through India as a correspondent for the Russian journal Novaya Vremiya. In November he was in the Kashmir region, near Ladakh, when he fell from his horse and suffered a broken leg. His bearers carried him to the Hemis Gompa monastery for medical treatment. While he was there, Notovitch was told a story that astonished him.

He was slightly puzzled that he’d been given such excellent treatment by the residents of the monastery, and was told by one of the lamas that, as a European, they considered him to essentially share their faith, to almost be a Buddhist. Notovitch objected that he was a Christian, not a Buddhist, but the lama told him that the greatest of all the Buddhist prophets, a man named Issa, was also the founder of the Christian religion. The head lama produced two bound volumes of loose leaves, from which he read the story of Issa to Notovitch, who took notes and recorded as much as he could.