The Messiah Secret

According to these ancient records, Issa was born in Israel, and arrived in India when he was about fourteen years old in company with a group of merchants. For the next fifteen years or so, he travelled throughout the sub-continent, including a six-year stint in Nepal, learning the tenets of Buddhism and acquiring a reputation as a preacher and a prophet. He then returned home to Israel to try to combat the oppression of the Jewish people. These texts, Notovitch was told, were part of a collection of ancient Tibetan writings compiled in Pali, an old Indian language, during the first two centuries AD.

The parallels between the lives of Issa and Jesus were obvious, and on his return to Europe Notovitch attempted to publicize his discovery, but every Church official, including one at the Vatican, warned him in the strongest possible terms not to try to publish anything about this strange story. And the power of the Church at the end of the nineteenth century was sufficient to ensure that when Notovitch did finally manage to publish La Vie Inconnue de Jésus Christ in 1895, not only was the work essentially ignored, but Notovitch himself was arrested in St Petersburg and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and accused of ‘literary activity dangerous to the state and to society’. He was exiled without trial to Siberia, but was allowed to return in 1897. His ultimate fate remains unknown, though he probably lived until about 1916.

Various attempts have been made to debunk Notovitch’s claims since then, but without success. An impartial look at the evidence suggests that he really did visit Ladakh and the Hemis Gompa monastery – the basis of at least one of the debunking attempts was that he was simply never there – and other, later, travellers to the area have been told similar stories of books held at Hemis Gompa that contained accounts of the life of Jesus in India.

It’s an interesting story, but without sight of the original documents held at the monastery it’s unproven. But there is other evidence that suggests Jesus and Issa might have been one and the same person.

First, when Jesus reappears in Judea as an adult, He’s clearly already an accomplished prophet, which suggests He had to have learned His trade somewhere.

Second, there are a lot of similarities between what Jesus is supposed to have preached and the Buddhist religion, so if India is where He went for His formative years, it’s at least possible that when He returned to Judea He was essentially a Buddhist. For example, both religions cite exactly the same story of the poor widow giving two coins – all she has – at a religious gathering, and this tiny gift being fêted by the presiding priest as being more valuable than all the other contributions. As Buddhism was founded about 460 BC, it’s almost possible to argue that Christianity is essentially simply a Buddhist sect, the religious message being carried to Judea by Jesus, which then became enshrined in the Christian religion.

The third piece of circumstantial evidence is that when the first Christian missionaries arrived in Ladakh, they discovered that the local people were already very familiar with the story of Jesus/Issa, and they were carrying and using rosaries.

And what happened after Jesus’s crucifixion? The accepted story of the death of Jesus is perhaps the most contentious part of His life, because it simply doesn’t make sense for a whole list of reasons, far too many to fully discuss here. But one of the most obvious anomalies was that Jesus apparently died within about three or four hours of being crucified, and his body was then taken down from the cross.

The whole point about crucifixion was that it was intended to be a slow, lingering and very public form of execution. That was why the Romans used it – to frighten and intimidate their subject peoples. Victims could survive for as long as four or five days on the cross if their legs weren’t broken to hasten their deaths. And the bodies of victims were never removed from the cross after death. Again, for the purposes of intimidation, they were left there to rot, and guards were routinely posted at sites of crucifixions to ensure that relatives didn’t manage to steal the bodies for secret burial after death.

If the whole episode wasn’t purely apocryphal – a crucifiction, in fact – and the execution did take place as described in the Bible, there had to have been collusion between the Roman authorities and the Jewish people, because nothing else makes sense. The strong implication is that Jesus was alive when he was taken down from the cross, and that, of course, provides the easiest and most logical explanation for the Resurrection – there simply wasn’t one.