The Messiah Secret

Taking that as a given, it would also be obvious that Jesus couldn’t stay in Israel – having a condemned and crucified man walking around would have been unacceptable to the Romans – so He would have had to leave the country. And if He had spent almost half of his life in India, that would have been the obvious place for Him to return to. Which brings us to the ‘Rozabal’.

As Angela states in this novel, in Srinigar there’s a building known as the ‘Rozabal’ – it’s an abbreviation of Rauza Bal, and the word rauza means ‘the tomb of the prophet’ – which contains two tombs. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, and points north-south, in accordance with Muslim custom. The other tomb is aligned east-west, a Jewish custom, and bears the name ‘Yuz Asaf’.

This tomb is also unique in that it bears a carving of a pair of footprints – actually a common custom at the graves of saints – but this carving shows what appear to be the marks of crucifixion, a punishment unknown in India, on the feet. Records show that this tomb dates from at least as early as 112 AD.

According to the Farhang-i-Asafia, an ancient text that describes the history of Persia, the prophet Jesus – who was then known as ‘Hazrat Issa’ – healed a group of lepers, who thereafter were referred to as Asaf, meaning ‘the purified’, because they’d been cured of their disease. Jesus or Issa then acquired the additional name ‘Yus Asaf’, meaning the ‘leader of the healed’.

It’s reasonably certain that this tomb contains the body of Yus Asaf, a man who was also known as Issa, and also probably known as Jesus, and I based this novel upon that supposition. I should emphasize that there’s no evidence the body was removed from this tomb and carried into the high valleys of Ladakh – that is purely a fiction I devised for this book. As far as I know, the body of Yus Asaf – whoever he was – still lies in the grave in Srinigar.

Readers interested in learning more about this aspect of Jesus’s life should refer to Jesus lived in India by Holger Kersten (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-302829-1).

What did Jesus look like? Again as stated in the novel, the current depictions of Him as a tall man of noble bearing with long hair and a beard have no historical basis whatsoever. In the first century AD, the average height of an adult male in Judea was about five feet.

The full description of ‘the King of the Jews’ from the Slavonic copy of Josephus’s Capture of Jerusalem states that He was ‘a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows . . . with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard’. That description is very similar to one found in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which stated he was ‘a man small in size, bald-headed . . . with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed’.

And Jesus was, according to several different accounts, physically quite unattractive. In the Acts of Peter a prophet described Jesus as having ‘no beauty nor comeliness’, and in the Acts of John as ‘a small man and uncomely’. Celsus described Jesus as ‘small and ugly and undistinguished’. Tertullian said that ‘he would not have been spat upon by the Roman soldiers if his face had not been so ugly as to inspire spitting’.

The first depictions of Jesus showed Him as a small man, clean shaven and with short hair. In the sixth century, He was first depicted with long hair and a beard, and He’d grown slightly. By about the eighth century, what’s now the present picture of Jesus had fully emerged. It’s probable that the image on the Turin Shroud, now positively established to be an extremely accomplished medieval forgery, simply served as a reinforcement of the physical appearance of this ‘new’ Jesus.

Finally, I mentioned the ‘Baigdandu anomaly’ in the novel. This is real. Every few generations, a child is born in the village of Baigdandu with red hair and blue eyes. A local legend states that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived in the area looking, oddly enough, for the tomb of Jesus Christ, and eventually settled there, and it’s their genes that cause this aberration. I’m not a geneticist, but I have met a lot of Greeks and most of them have brown eyes and black or very dark brown hair. The idea that the present anomaly could be caused by this particular intermarriage doesn’t seem to me to make sense.

But some of the descriptions of Issa refer to him as fair-haired with blue eyes, and logic suggests that this is a far more likely explanation of this anomaly. So it’s just possible that the bloodline of the man we know as Jesus Christ is still present on Earth after two millennia, and that His genes can still be found among the inhabitants of a tiny mountain village high in one of the remoter parts of the Kashmir.

James Becker