There is a reason today’s bibles do not tell where Jesus spent most of his life. The bible does acknowledge those well-known 15 years where Jesus was from birth to ages 12, and from ages 30-33. But the bible is silent on where Jesus was for those missing 18 years of his life. If Christians are serious about knowing Jesus and all that he taught, would they want to also learn what he was learning, who he healed, what he taught, and what happened to him in the greater 18 years that Jesus walked among us?
Joseph of Arimathea was a merchant of tin, and a relative of Jesus. From my studies, I think it is possible for Jesus to have traveled with him along the trade routes to India. In her book, Reincarnation The Missing Link In Christianity, Elizabeth Clare Prophet says a biography of the first-century Greek sage and miracle worker, Apollonius of Tyana says that Jesus went to India to study with the Brahmins. This biography records a lengthy discussion between Apollonius and a Hindu sage about transmigration.
By going to India, Jesus would have become acquainted with ideas about reincarnation. “In fact, a passage in one version of the manuscript implies that Jesus taught reincarnation,” Prophet wrote.
I am also referring to a text discovered in 1887 by a Russian writer named Nicolas Notovitch. He was not the only one to discover this text. A Hindu teacher named Swami Abhedananda, in 1922, and in 1925, Nicholas Roerich, a Russian anthropologist and prolific artist came across the same text. Each of the men brought back an independent translation of the text.
“Notovitch found the manuscript in Himis, the largest and best-known monastery in Ladakh. The chief lama read to him in Tibetan from ‘two large bound volumes with leaves yellowed by time.’ The lama said that his copy of the text was written in Tibetan but had been translated from Pali, the language in which Buddhist scriptures were composed, starting in the fifth century B.C. He told Notovitch that the Paliu manuscript had come from India by way of Nepal and that it was in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
“After Gautama Buddha died in the fifth century B.C., his teachings spread north into Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan, where original Buddhist texts were preserved. When the Muslims invaded India in the twelfth century, they destroyed many ancient Buddhist manuscripts. But Tibet has saved many of the teachings that we lost to the rest of the Buddhist world. The Tibetan manuscript at Himis, therefore, could be a legitimate Buddhist text, preserved in Tibet while forgotten in its native country,” Prophet wrote.
Excited by his discovery and wanting to share it with the Church Fathers in Rome, Notovitch shared his findings with an unnamed cardinal who is reported by Notovitch to have said, “no novelty to the Roman Church” and that the Vatican Library possessed “sixty-three complete or incomplete” documents brought back by Christian missionaries concerning the activities of Jesus in the East, from India, China, Egypt, and Arabia, according to Notovitch.
Has your church ever shared this information with you?
The Himis manuscript tells of the travels of Jesus at 13 years old, going to Sind, a region in present-day southeastern Pakistan in the lower Indus River valley, with the object of perfecting himself in the Divine Word and studying the laws of the great Buddhas.
As with the childhood miracles of Jesus, his spiritual power was already manifesting, as was his fame throughout northern Sind. Jesus then travels to Juggernaut where “the white priests of Brahma made him a joyous welcome,” according to Notovich’s The Life of Saint Issa.
Notovitch’s biography of Saint Issa asserts that Jesus Christ spent many of his missing years traversing India. A Crimean Jewish adventurer and explorer of India, Notovitch traveled widely across the East in the late nineteenth century. He claimed to have discovered a biographical document in Hemis Monastery – located in modern-day India. The bold and fantastical claims about Christ attracted attention from scholars of Christianity and the popular media of the time. Spotting inconsistencies in Notovitch’s account, it was only after being confronted with these that he apparently confessed to having fabricated the biography of Jesus Christ. For some years the entire matter was considered a hoax; until the Indian mystic Swami Abhedananda visited the Hemis Monastery where a monk confirmed that Notovitch had stayed some six weeks there, convalescing with a broken leg, whereupon he read the disputed documents concerning Christ.
Jesus being Jesus, he became embroiled in controversy, so much so that the priests decided to kill him for his insisting on teaching the lower caste farmers and merchants, and the Sudra peasants and laborers. Jesus was warned about the plot and fled to the foothills of the Himalayas to the birthplace of Gautama Buddha, who had founded Buddhism more than five hundred years earlier.
The text says that Jesus spent the next six years in Nepal, mastering the Pali language and became “a perfect expositor of the sacred writings” of Buddhism. It is said that sometime between the ages of twenty-seven and twenty-nine, he left the Himalayas and journeyed west, preaching along the way. The text says that Jesus returned to Palestine at the age of twenty-nine and gives a brief description of his three-year ministry.
It is interesting to note that unlike the teaching of modern Christianity, the manuscript blames the Romans rather than the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.
“Scholars today think that this is a more accurate version of events and that the Romans were certainly the ones who made the decision to execute Jesus. This suggests that the writers of the Himis manuscript may have had access to a tradition about Jesus’ life that was independent of the Gospels,” Prophet wrote.
Jesus is a perfect example to follow with dedication and learning the deeper lessons he also learned. He was a life-long learner and shared what he knew.
Learning about Jesus in India, there is another passage from the manuscript quoted by Roerich. While it may not record Jesus’ exact words, it was certainly inspired by him: “Jesus said to them, ‘I came to show human possibilities. What has been crated by me, all men can create. And that which I am, all men will be. These gifts belong to the nations and all lands – for this is the bread and the water of life.'” taken from Prophet quoting Roerich.
Namaste