Did Jesus Go to India?

No. Notovitch's 1894 Life of Issa was never produced, and the Hemis abbot denied it in writing. The Srinagar tomb's Yuz Asaf is a garbled Arabic name for the Buddha. The closest Buddhist parallels survive only in texts written after the Gospels, which imply Jesus grew up a craftsman in Nazareth.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"One might as well look for the waters of Jordan in the Brahmaputra as for a Life of Christ in Tibet." — F. Max Müller, The Nineteenth Century, 18961

Summary

The claim that Jesus went to India comes in three forms.  None survives a check of its own sources.

  1. Notovitch's "Life of Saint Issa" (1894). The Russian journalist Nicolas Notovitch said that in 1887 a lama at Hemis monastery in Ladakh read him, through an interpreter, a Tibetan life of "Issa," who left Israel at 13, studied with Brahmins and Buddhists, and came home at 29. No manuscript, photograph or shelf mark was ever produced. In 1895 the head lama signed and sealed a statement that "There is no such book in the monastery." The text takes its ages from Luke and its three-year ministry from John, calls Jesus by the Arabic form of his name, and sends him to a temple built nine centuries later. Notovitch's own letters put him near Leh with toothache on 4 November 1887, and his own account of a broken leg and a twenty-day return leaves no room for the visit he describes. Every later visitor who reported the text came after his book and leaned on it; one "Ladakh legend" recorded by Nicholas Roerich comes from an American book of 1907.
  2. The tomb in Srinagar. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, argued from 1898 that Jesus survived the cross, travelled east, and died in Kashmir at 120, and that the shrine of a prophet called Yuz Asaf is his grave. The name Yuz Asaf comes from the Arabic life of the Buddha, in which a misplaced dot turned Budhasaf, bodhisattva, into Yudasaf. The same story became the Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, and the Arabic text already has its hero die "in Kashmir." The oldest readable Kashmiri documents for the shrine are eighteenth-century, describe a prince who renounced the world to meditate, and never name Jesus. The older ones offered are a manuscript nobody can inspect and inscriptions nobody can read.
  3. Buddhist sources of the Gospels. Two likenesses are real and early: the sage Asita at the Buddha's birth beside Simeon at Jesus's, and Mara's temptation beside Satan's. Neither shows which way, if any, a story travelled, and the temptation is built from Deuteronomy. The closest parallels, such as a disciple who sinks when his mind wavers while walking on water, survive only in a Buddhist commentary written down about four centuries after the Gospels. The one proven borrowing between the two religions ran from Buddhism into Christianity, centuries later, and turned the Buddha into a Christian saint.

The Gospels are silent about Jesus between 12 and 30, and that silence is real.  But his home town knew him as "the carpenter" with brothers and sisters among them, and people wondered where he got his learning "having never been educated."  John Meier, whose A Marginal Jew is the most detailed modern historical study of Jesus, concludes that "nothing much happened."

Travel to India was possible in Jesus's day.  Strabo counted 120 ships a year sailing from Egypt to India, and an Indian ascetic burned himself alive at Athens about 20 BC.  Possibility is not the question;  evidence is.  The four tests that sink Notovitch are stated so a reader can turn them on Christian texts.  A nineteenth-century Christian forgery, the Archko Volume, fails them, and its author was suspended by his own church.  Christianity's own India story, the apostle Thomas, is an unproven legend by the same standard.  The Gospels pass the tests of existence and outside witness and are disputed on date, which proves that they are ancient texts that can be examined, not that they are true.

Part 1: Notovitch's "Life of Saint Issa"

What Notovitch claimed

Nicolas Notovitch was a Russian journalist who travelled through Kashmir to Ladakh, the Tibetan-speaking region of far northern India, in the autumn of 1887.2  In 1894 he published La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ in Paris.  It went through at least eight French editions that year, and three separate American translations were registered for copyright in May 1894.2

His preface tells the story in brief.  At Hemis, the great monastery near Leh, the head lama told him that the library held copies of manuscripts about Jesus.  Notovitch left, broke his leg in a fall, and used the accident as "a pretext to return to the monastery."  While recovering he obtained the head lama's consent to have the manuscripts brought from the library, "and, helped by my interpreter, who translated the Tibetan language for me, I noted carefully in my notebook what the lama read to me."3  In the travel narrative the lama explains that every monk who visits Lhasa brings copies home, that "our gonpa ... already possesses a great number," and that among them "are descriptions of the life and acts of the Buddha Issa."3  The originals, he says, are in the Pali language at Lhasa, "but a copy in our language, I mean the Tibetan language, exists here."3  The reading itself came from "two large bound books whose great leaves were of paper yellowed by time," and the text was "in the form of isolated verses, which very often are not connected to one another."3  Notovitch himself arranged them into a narrative.

In a summary at the end, Notovitch gives the text's origin.  The Tibetan copies are translations of rolls in the library at Lhasa, "brought from India, Nepal and Magadha about the year 200 after Jesus Christ."3  The rolls were in Pali, and they were first written down from "the account of some merchants who came from Judea in the very year of Jesus's death."3  He took photographs on the journey, he says, but "when, back in India, I examined the negatives, they turned out to be all spoiled."3  He closed the preface by inviting the learned societies to send "a scientific expedition" to study the manuscripts on the spot.3

The text itself, The Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men, runs to fourteen chapters of short verses.2  Issa is born in Israel.  "When Issa had reached the age of thirteen, the time when an Israelite must take a wife," he leaves secretly with merchants for India.3  He goes to "Djagguernat, in the country of Orsis, where rest the mortal remains of Viassa-Krichna, and where the white priests of Brahma gave him a joyful welcome," and spends six years there and at Rajagriha and Benares, teaching the low castes against the Brahmins' wishes.3  He studies with Buddhists in the Himalaya and Nepal, rebukes the Zoroastrians in Persia, and "was twenty-nine years old when he arrived in the land of Israel."3  There the story turns:  Pilate, not the Jewish leaders, wants him dead.  Pilate orders his arrest, the Jewish elders who try him find no fault, and Pilate has him executed anyway.33

Max Müller's objections, 1894

The book reached F. Max Müller, the Oxford Sanskritist who edited the Sacred Books of the East.  His article in The Nineteenth Century for October 1894 is notable for how hard it tries to be fair.  He began by granting Notovitch good faith:  "taking it for granted that M. Notovitch is a gentleman and not a liar, we cannot help thinking that the Buddhist monks of Ladakh and Tibet must be wags, who enjoy mystifying inquisitive travellers".4  He then set out why the story could not be true as told.

  1. The catalogues. The Buddhist canon in Tibetan, the Kandjur of "108 large volumes" and the Tandjur of 225, had been catalogued in print, as had the Chinese canon with its 1,662 entries. A Life of Issa "composed in the first century of our era" should be in one of them, and it is not.4
  2. The chain of witnesses. Notovitch's text says it was written from the reports of merchants who reached India soon after the crucifixion. Müller asked how those merchants met "the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India—for India is a large term—and still more, how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate."4
  3. The name. "His name in India is said to have been Issa, very like the Arabic name Isa'l Masih, Jesus, the Messiah, while, strange to say, the name of Pontius Pilate seems to have remained unchanged in its passage from Hebrew to Pali, and from Pali to Tibetan."4 ʿĪsā is the Quranic form of the name. Müller drew the inference himself: "We must remember that part of Tibet was converted to Mohammedanism."4

"Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible," he concluded:  that Jews arriving about AD 35 "should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares," and that the text "should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur."4

Müller printed one more item, which carries less weight than it seems.  It is a letter from an English lady at Leh, dated June 29:  "There is not a single word of truth in the whole story!  There has been no Russian there.  No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg!  There is no Life of Christ there at all!"4  She was a tourist repeating what she was told, the same letter calls the lamas "the dirtiest of a very dirty race," and her claim that no Russian had been there turned out to be too strong.  The article stands without her.

J. Archibald Douglas at Hemis, 1895

The decisive check was made by someone who went.  J. Archibald Douglas, a professor at the Government College in Agra, spent his 1895 summer vacation following Notovitch's route through Kashmir to Ladakh and stayed at Hemis as the head lama's guest.  He noted, dryly, that "I did not find it necessary to break even a little finger, much less a leg, in order to gain admittance".1

Douglas did not begin hostile.  He wrote that Notovitch's "bold reply" to his critics had "somewhat revived" his faith in him.1  He also reported what told in Notovitch's favour.  The head lama remembered "that several European gentlemen visited the monastery in the years 1887 and 1888," and when shown Notovitch's photograph he "might have mistaken him for an 'English sahib'".1  Douglas therefore set aside the lama's earlier denial that any Russian had come.  And he found that "a Russian gentleman named Notovitch was treated by the medical officer of Leh Hospital, Dr. Karl Marks, when suffering not from a broken leg, but from the less romantic but hardly less painful complaint—toothache."1  So Notovitch probably was in Ladakh.

Then Douglas read Notovitch's book to the head lama through an interpreter, Shahmwell Joldan, the retired postmaster of Ladakh, and wrote down the lama's answers to a list of questions.  The lama signed them in Tibetan and sealed them with his official seal at Hemis on 3 June 1895.1  The key answers:

Question 4.  Have you or any of your monks ever shown any Life of Issa to any sahib, and allowed him to copy and translate the same?
Answer 4.  There is no such book in the monastery, and during my term of office no sahib has been allowed to copy or translate any of the manuscripts in the monastery.1

Question 5.  Are you aware of the existence of any book in any of the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet bearing on the life of Issa?
Answer 5.  I have been for forty-two years a Lama, and am well acquainted with all the well-known Buddhist books and manuscripts, and I have never heard of one which mentions the name of Issa, and it is my firm and honest belief that none such exists.1

The lama also denied ever nursing a European with an injured leg, said he had never received the watch, alarm clock and thermometer Notovitch says he gave him ("I do not know what a thermometer is"), and said that "none of the Lamas" had heard Issa's name "save through missionaries and European sources."1  While Douglas was reading Notovitch's book aloud, the lama "burst out with, 'Sun, sun, sun, manna mi dug!' which is Tibetan for, 'Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!'"1

Douglas added two checks of his own.  Notovitch says that on the road from Srinagar he hired a shikari, a Kashmiri hunting guide, "who fulfilled the rôle of interpreter."  Douglas replied that such a man knew a few words of Urdu and English "relating to the necessities of the road, the camp and sport," and that "The Tibetans of Ladakh competent to interpret such a conversation are leading men, certainly not more than three or four in number.  Not one of them has ever seen M. Notovitch".1  And the monastery's hospitality was "for one night";  no European had stayed more than three days in the lama's time, so "the whole story of the broken leg, in so far as it relates to Himis Monastery, is neither more nor less than a fiction."1  His verdict:  "while I have not found one single fact to support his statements, all the weight of evidence goes to disprove them beyond all shadow of doubt."1

Müller added a postscript.  He had suggested the monks played a joke on Notovitch;  now he apologised to them.  "He was not hoaxed, but he tried to hoax us."1

The case against Douglas's evidence deserves stating.  Everything rests on one abbot's word, put into English by one interpreter, published by a British professor with no reason to like a Russian traveller in a region where Britain and Russia were rivals.  Douglas sent the signed Tibetan papers to Müller, who wrote, "I gladly testify that they entirely agree with the extracts given in the article,"1 but they have never been published in facsimile.  These are fair complaints.  They do not change the balance, because Notovitch's side of the scale is empty:  the abbot's denial is a signed document that can be challenged, while the Life of Issa is a book nobody else has seen.

Notovitch's answer

Notovitch never produced the manuscript, a photograph of it, or its place in the Hemis library.  In the preface to the London edition of 1895 he moved the target.  As Edgar Goodspeed of the University of Chicago quoted it, the verses "are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur.  They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title".2  Goodspeed drew the obvious conclusion:  "For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation."2  The same preface added that a cardinal had told him the Vatican Library held "sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter."  "Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts," Goodspeed wrote in 1931.2

Notovitch's revised French edition of 1900 is his fullest reply.  He complains that an English lady "wrote to Europe that she never saw me there," that a Moravian missionary, "the honourable M. Shaw," repeated the charge and "then honourably retracted," and that Europeans who ask Asian monks direct questions get evasions, while he had won the lama's confidence by tact.55  He says he had nearly finished planning a new journey to Tibet when he was locked in the Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg and exiled without trial.5  That preface answers Müller and "the famous Englishwoman."5  It does not mention Douglas, whose signed interview with the head lama was the evidence that mattered.

What the text itself shows

The Life of Issa carries fingerprints of a writer who knew the New Testament, and of a later India than the first century.

  1. It borrows its frame from the Gospels. Goodspeed noticed that the two ages the story depends on, twelve or thirteen at departure and about thirty at return, come from Luke alone, and that the three-year ministry is "an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament."2 A text written from merchants' reports "in the very year of Jesus's death" should not know the structure of two Gospels written decades later. Goodspeed concluded that "the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible."2
  2. Notovitch misread Luke himself. To prove that nobody knew where Jesus went as a youth, Notovitch quoted Luke: "He remained in the desert until the day when he was to appear before the people of Israel," which "shows only that no one knew where the holy young man had disappeared to, who reappeared suddenly sixteen years later."3 The verse is Luke 1:80, and it is about John the Baptist: "The child was growing and becoming strong in spirit, and was in the desert until the day of his public appearance to Israel."6 Jesus has not yet been born at that point in Luke.2
  3. It uses the Arabic form of Jesus's name, as Müller pointed out (above).
  4. It sends Issa to Jagannath. "Djagguernat, in the country of Orsis" is the temple town of Jagannath at Puri in Orissa, which English writers spelled "Juggernaut." Heinrich von Stietencron, a Heidelberg historian of the cult, writes that the present temple was begun "after the year 1135," and that "there existed no Purusottama or Nilamadhava temple in Puri prior to the 10th century," dating the first one to "949-959 A.D."77 A first-century traveller could not be welcomed by the priests of a temple built nine centuries later. A defender can reply that a translator might use the modern name of a place, as English Bibles say "Ethiopia"; but the text describes a pilgrimage centre with its priests, not merely a location. Stietencron's tenth-century date is one specialist's argument, not a consensus; the present temple's twelfth-century date is not in dispute.
  5. It moves the blame for the crucifixion from the Jewish leaders to Pilate. In the Life of Issa the Jewish elders acquit Issa twice and Pilate kills him anyway.3 Douglas noted the departure from every Gospel, and that the text "practically denies the working of miracles" and the resurrection.1 A miracle-free Jesus killed by Rome was the Jesus of the nineteenth-century liberal lives, and Notovitch says he took his manuscript to Ernest Renan, the author of the most famous of them, who offered to present it to the French Academy.3

A resident scholar gave the local verdict.  A. H. Francke, a Moravian missionary who lived in Ladakh from 1896 and became the leading Western historian of the region, wrote in 1914 that Hemis "was built by king Seng-ge-rnam-rgyal only about 300 years ago," and that the "learned correspondence" about Notovitch's find "proved that Notovitch's extraordinary find was a forgery."8  On his 1909 survey Francke also asked a local official about rumours of Indian manuscripts at Hemis, and the man "emphatically denied the existence of Indian manuscripts at the Hemis monastery."8

Notovitch's own dates

Notovitch's story can also be checked against his own documents.  In the 1900 edition he printed a letter from the governor of Ladakh, dated 4 November 1887, to prove he had really been there:  "I am sorry to find that you are feverish and suffering from toothache. ... Of course you know we have a medical man here, Dr. Marx of the Ladane Charitable Dispensary".  He added, "I was treated, at Leh, by this doctor Karl Marx."5  That fits Douglas's finding exactly, and it shows Notovitch was near Leh in early November.

His 1894 book says that after the visit he set off for India, broke his leg near another monastery, had himself carried to Hemis, was able to travel again on "the third day," and then made "twenty days of a slow journey, full of intolerable sufferings," in a litter back to Srinagar.33  Add those up from 4 November:  at least a day to fall and be carried back to Hemis, two days there, twenty on the road.  He could not have reached Srinagar before about 27 November.  The German historian Norbert Klatt, who reconstructed Notovitch's life from Russian, French and British records, reports that a French engineer in Srinagar, A. Favre, who had hired porters for him, wrote in 1896 that Notovitch arrived back on 15 November, in good health, three days after writing that he had broken his leg and smashed his jaw falling into a ravine.9  Favre's article has not been read for this article, so this point rests on Klatt.  But Notovitch's own twenty days in a litter leave no room for the Hemis detour on any reckoning that ends in mid-November.

Klatt adds that the great masked festival Notovitch describes at Hemis falls in June or early July, not November.9  Francke confirms that the Hemis dances are "performed here in June," though other monasteries hold theirs in winter.8  Notovitch's lama, however, says "We have several similar festivals in the year,"3 so this point alone is not decisive.

The later witnesses

Every later report of the Issa text comes after Notovitch's book, and each leans on it.

  1. Swami Abhedananda (1922). A monk of the Ramakrishna Order, Abhedananda visited Hemis in 1922 and described it in a Bengali travel book first published in 1929. By its own account he "read the book when he was in America," and went "in order to verify the descriptions." A lama took a manuscript off the shelf, said it was a copy of a Pali original kept near Lhasa, and said it "consisted of 14 chapters and 224 verses"; with the lama's help part of it was translated.10 He was not an independent witness, and he needed the lama to translate for him. His book has Notovitch nursed at the monastery for "about a month and a half," where Notovitch himself says three days.10 And the verses it prints, by the admission of his most enthusiastic English editor, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, "almost exactly parallels Notovitch's Life of Saint Issa through chapter 5, verse 4," followed by excerpts "corresponding to scattered verses of The Life of Saint Issa."10 The Hemis chapter refers to Abhedananda in the third person, and Prophet herself says the book "was not entirely revised by Abhedananda."10 His disciple Swami Prajnananda later said, "There are no scrolls. They have been removed, by whom we do not know."10
  2. Nicholas Roerich (1925). The Russian painter recorded Issa legends in Ladakh in Altai-Himalaya (1929). He knew Notovitch's book and said that "The local people know nothing of any published book but they know the legend."11 He never claims to have seen a manuscript. Much of what he records follows Notovitch; even Prophet says it is "in many places nearly the same as Notovitch's Life of Saint Issa."10 Another part, which he calls "Another version," is an American book: "Near Lhasa was a temple of teaching with a wealth of manuscripts. Jesus was to acquaint himself with them. Meng-ste, a great sage of all the East, was in this temple."11 That is Levi Dowling's Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, copyrighted in 1907 by a former Sunday-school worker who believed he could read the past in the "Akashic Records":2 "In Lassa of Tibet there was a master's temple, rich in manuscripts of ancient lore ... Now, Meng-ste, greatest sage of all the farther East, was in this temple of Tibet."12 Meng-ste is Dowling's invention; Goodspeed thought the name echoed the Chinese sage Mencius.2 A "local legend" that contains a character invented in California less than twenty years earlier did not come from the first century. Goodspeed had already noted that Dowling's India chapters "remind us of Notovitch's 'Unknown Life of Jesus Christ,' with which Dr. Dowling was probably acquainted."2
  3. Elisabeth Caspari (1939). Prophet reports, from Caspari's recollection decades later, that the Hemis librarian brought out three manuscripts and told Caspari's companion, "These books say your Jesus was here." Prophet's own comment is candid: "unfortunately we do not know what the books said. They were written in Tibetan and neither of the two women asked for a translation."10

Notovitch said he had read the text through an interpreter, had lost his photographs, and could not say where the verses were.  Abhedananda saw a book he needed translated and printed verses that follow Notovitch.  Roerich heard legends that include Dowling's invented sage.  Caspari was shown books whose contents nobody recorded.  In more than 130 years no one has produced a page.

Part 2: The tomb in Srinagar

The Ahmadiyya position, in its own words

The second "Jesus in India" story is the opposite of Notovitch's.  It does not put Jesus in India before his ministry.  It puts him there after the cross.

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) of Qadian in the Punjab founded the Ahmadiyya movement and claimed to be the promised Messiah.  His book Masih Hindustan Mein, Jesus in India, was written in Urdu in 1899.  He states his thesis at the start:  "I shall prove in this book that Jesus, the Messiah, may peace be on him, did not die on the cross, nor did he go up to the heavens;  nor should the hope be entertained that he would ever again come down to the earth from the heavens.  On the contrary, the fact of the matter is that he died at the age of 120 years at Srinagar, Kashmir, where his tomb is still to be found in the Khanyar quarter."13  On his reading, Jesus survived crucifixion in a swoon, was treated with an ointment, and travelled east because "the divine object underlying his mission was indeed to meet the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in different parts of India."13

In an earlier book, Raaz-e-Haqiqat (1898), Ahmad had already named the tomb.  A site plan in it is captioned:  "This is the tomb of Isa, peace be upon him, who is also known by the names Yasu, Jesus and Yuz Asaf.  According to the testimony of the elders of Kashmir, the tomb has existed in Mohalla Khanyar, Srinagar for nearly 1900 years."14  He explained the name as a slip of the tongue:  Jesus "passed away in Srinagar and was buried in Mohalla Khanyar, but due to general mispronunciation, became known by the name Yuz Asaf Nabi," Yuz Asaf the prophet.14  His conclusion was firm:  "it has been proven without a shadow of doubt that the grave of Yuz Asaf, situated in Mohalla Khanyar, Srinagar, is in actuality the grave of Jesus".14

Three things should be said for this position before it is tested.  First, it concedes what the Gospels, Tacitus and Josephus agree on:  Jesus was crucified under Pilate.  It is the one Muslim reading of Quran 4:157 that can be argued with ordinary historical evidence, a point made in this site's article Did Jesus Die on the Cross?, which also weighs the swoon itself;  the medical question is the subject of The Swoon Theory.  Second, it is a minority view, not "the Muslim view":  the historian of the Quran Gabriel Said Reynolds notes that the teaching that Jesus escaped death "has become a sort of shibboleth of orthodoxy, as the rejection of this teaching is one of the accusations made against the Ahmadiyya movement."15  Third, it contradicts Notovitch.  Ahmad's Jesus learned nothing from India before his ministry;  he went there afterward.  The two most famous "Jesus in India" stories cannot both be true, and both appeared in the same decade.

Ahmad's evidence from outside scripture began with an ointment.  "It is a medical preparation known as the 'Ointment of Jesus' [Marham-i-Isa] and is found recorded in hundreds of medical books," he wrote, and he claimed that "in the days of Jesus, the Messiah, shortly after the crucifixion, a pharmacopoeia was compiled in Latin" recording that it was made "for the treatment of the wounds of Jesus."13  His list of sources names no such Latin book, only a "Roman Qarabadin ... compiled about the time of Jesus" and translated into Arabic under the caliph al-Mamun;13 no copy is identified.  The identifiable books on his list are medieval.  The earliest are the Hawi of al-Razi, whose death is dated between 903 and 923, and the encyclopedias of ʿAli ibn al-ʿAbbas al-Majusi, written for a ruler who reigned 949–982, and of Avicenna, who died in 1036–37.161616  An ointment named after Jesus in tenth- and eleventh-century medicine is a fact about medieval medicine.  It comes nearly nine centuries too late to witness wounds treated in AD 30 or 33.

Where the name Yuz Asaf comes from

The local tradition about the shrine, as the British explorer and official Francis Younghusband recorded it in 1909, is that "There resided in Kashmir some 1900 years ago a saint of the name of Yus Asaf, who preached in parables and used many of the same parables as Christ used, as, for instance, the parable of the sower."17  Younghusband added that "the theory of this founder of the Quadiani sect is that Yus Asaf and Jesus are one and the same person."17

The name Yuz Asaf has been traced step by step, and it belongs to the Buddha.

  1. The Buddha, before his awakening, is a bodhisattva, a buddha-to-be. A life of the Buddha passed into Arabic as the Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf, probably through the Manichaeans of Central Asia, who studied "the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha" where their religion replaced Buddhism.18 Budhasaf is bodhisattva.
  2. In Arabic script the letters b and y have the same shape and differ only in the dots below them. David Marshall Lang, a lecturer in Georgian at the University of London who translated the Georgian version of the legend, explained in 1957 "how confusion of diacritical markings in Arabic turned Budhasaf (Bodhisattva) into Yudasaf and even Yuzasaf."18
  3. From Yudasaf came the Georgian Iodasaph, the Greek Ioasaph, and the Latin Josaphat. Christianised first in Georgian and then in Greek, the Buddha's life became the medieval romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, about an Indian prince whose father "tries by all means in his power to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world" until a hermit converts him.19 Its Loeb editors wrote in 1914 that the Roman Martyrology of Pope Sixtus V lists "the holy saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India" under 27 November: "Thus Buddha takes his place as a Christian saint, for Joasaph is a corruption of the title Bodhisatta."20 Max Müller had argued the same in 1870: "No one, I believe, can read these two stories without feeling convinced that one was borrowed from the other".19

The Arabic story already ends in Kashmir.  Lang quotes the close of the Bombay edition of the Book of Balauhar and Budhasaf:  "And he (Budhasaf) reached Kashmir (i.e., Kusinara), and this was the most remote place in which he ministered, and there the end of his life overtook him."  Before dying he hands his teaching to a disciple named Ababid, whom Lang identifies as Ananda, the Buddha's attendant.18  Kusinara is where Buddhist tradition says the Buddha died;  the Arabic text turned it into Kashmir.  The Kashmir legend, Lang notes, gives Yuz Asaf a disciple called Ba'bid, "the Ababid of 'Balauhar and Budhasaf', the Ananda of Buddhist tradition."  The same death scene appears in the tenth-century Shia scholar Ibn Babawayh, "where the Buddha's name occurs as Yudhasaf," and "turns up practically verbatim among the lore on the Kashmir Yus Asaf."  Even the parable of the sower is in the earliest Arabic versions, which are not Christian.18  Lang's verdict on the sources usually quoted for the tomb:  "they have no possible bearing on the life of Christ, but are simply a reflection of the Muslim story of Gautama Buddha as transmitted in the Arabic 'Book of Balauhar and Budhasaf', the prototype of the Christian Barlaam and Josaphat legend."18

The Ahmadiyya case leans on the same text.  Khwaja Nazir Ahmad's Jesus in Heaven on Earth (1952), the fullest Ahmadiyya presentation of the evidence, quotes Ibn Babawayh's Kamal al-Din for Yuz Asaf's death in Kashmir, and translates the disciple's name as "Ba'bad (Thomas)."21  Ibn Babawayh's book is the earliest securely dated Arabic version of the Buddha legend.18  The best ancient witness the Ahmadiyya case has for a prophet Yuz Asaf dying in Kashmir is a story about the Buddha.

The Kashmiri documents

Nazir Ahmad's book gathers every Kashmiri document the Ahmadiyya case uses, and it is the place to test them.  Three things stand out.

The datable documents are eighteenth-century, and none names Jesus.  The earliest that can be read today is the Waqiat-i-Kashmir of Khwaja Muhammad Azam Didamari, completed in AH 1148.  It reports what "is well known amongst the people of the locality," that a prophet "who had come to Kashmir in ancient times" lies beside the grave of a Muslim saint in Khanyar.21  The next is a decree of five Muslim judges of Srinagar dated 11 Jumada al-Thani AH 1184, settling a dispute over who could collect the offerings at "the holy shrine of Yuz Asaf Prophet."  It describes him this way:  "He was a prince by descent and had given up all worldly affairs and was a law-giver.  He used to devote himself to the prayer of God, day and night;  and used to spend most of his time alone in meditation."21  A prince who renounced the world and meditated alone is the Buddha of the Bilawhar legend, not the son of a Galilean carpenter.  Neither document names Jesus.  The identification of Yuz Asaf with Jesus is Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's, made in 1898.1417

The Ahmadiyya dates are miscalculated.  Nazir Ahmad converts AH 1148 to "1729 C.E." and AH 1184 to "1766 C.E."2121  Both are wrong in the same way:  he added about 581 years, as if Islamic years were as long as solar ones.  The Islamic calendar is lunar, and its year is about 354 days, so the correct dates are AD 1735–36 for Didamari and AD 1770 for the decree.22  The error does not help or hurt the case much, but it shows the documents have not been handled with care.

The early witnesses cannot be inspected.  Two older sources are offered, and both fail the first test that sank Notovitch.  The first is a Persian history attributed to Mulla Nadiri, said to date from the early fifteenth century, which places Yuz Asaf's arrival "from (Bait-ul-Muqaddas) the Holy Land" in the reign of a Kashmiri king.  Nazir Ahmad says he saw it before 1947:  "The book, when I saw it, was moth-eaten and the first and last few pages were unfortunately missing.  I had the relevant folio photographed, but before I could complete my negotiations for the purchase of the MSS. I had to leave Srinagar on account of the Partition of India."21  No one has produced the manuscript since.  The second is a pair of inscriptions on the temple on Takht-i-Sulaiman in Srinagar, one reading "At this time Yuz Asaf proclaimed his prophethood," the other "He is Jesus, Prophet of the Children of Israel."  Nazir Ahmad concedes that these two "were mutilated.  They are still visible but cannot be read intelligibly," and that their text comes from Mulla Nadiri.21  A text known only from a manuscript nobody can examine, carved on stones nobody can read, is exactly the kind of evidence this article declines to accept from Notovitch.

Even if the Nadiri manuscript were found and dated to the 1400s, it would stand about 1,380 years after the crucifixion.  The written trail for the shrine begins seventeen centuries after Jesus, describes a meditating prince, and only became Jesus in 1898.

Later champions, and a Hindu prophecy

The tomb reached Western readers through Robert Graves and Joshua Podro's Jesus in Rome (1957), whose sources Lang examined in the postscript quoted above, and through Holger Kersten's Jesus Lived in India (German 1983), which this article could not obtain in a lawful copy and does not assess.  The most-cited Kashmiri promoter is Fida Hassnain, who had been, in his words, "Director of State Archives, which maintained repositories at Jammu, Srinagar and Leh."23  His A Search for the Historical Jesus (1994) states as fact that "The work by Mulla Nadiri, written in 1420, deals with the ministry of Jesus in Kashmir."23  On the page before, Hassnain says he never saw it.  The manuscript was held by the son of the shrine's chief caretaker, who "avoided the issue for years" and "would not show me the manuscript of the history written by Mulla Nadiri," Hassnain believed because the family claimed descent from Yuz Asaf and feared what Muslims would think.23  The claim that a fifteenth-century history names Jesus in Kashmir rests, in its two main sources, on one folio photographed in 1947 and a manuscript its promoter was refused.

Writers on the tomb also cite the Bhavishya Purana, a Sanskrit text in which a king named Shalivahana meets a fair-skinned holy man in the Himalaya.  In Nazir Ahmad's translation the man says he is "Yusashaphat (Yuz Asaf), and had been born of a woman," and that his religion is "love, truth and purity of heart and for this I am called Isa Masih."  Nazir Ahmad reports that the book "is said to have been written in 3191 Laukika era (115 C.E.)," and that it "was printed, for the first time, in Bombay" in 1910.21  The passage is in the part of the Purana called the Pratisargaparvan.  Ludo Rocher's standard survey of the Puranas quotes the Indian scholar R. C. Hazra on that part:  "It narrates stories about Adam, Noah, Yakuta and others, and speaks about Taimurlang, Nadir Shah and Akbar with their decendants. ... It even knows the British rule in India and names Calcutta and the Parliament."  Hazra concluded that it "is practically a new work," and the German Sanskritist Theodor Aufrecht called the printed Bhavishya a "literary fraud."24  A text that knows Tamerlane, Akbar and the British Parliament cannot be a second-century witness to Jesus.

Part 3: Did the Gospels borrow from Buddhism?

The channels were real

The third form of the claim needs no journey by Jesus at all.  It says the stories in the Gospels came from Buddhist texts, carried west by traders and missionaries.  The starting point should be granted.  Contact between India and the Mediterranean was real before and during Jesus's lifetime.

  1. The Indian emperor Ashoka, in the mid-third century BC, recorded in his Rock Edict XIII that his teaching had reached "the Yona king named Antiyoka" and four other Greek kings beyond him, Ptolemy of Egypt among them.25
  2. The geographer Strabo learned in the 20s BC that "as many as one hundred and twenty vessels were sailing from Myos Hormos to India," where once only a few had gone.26 Pliny says a ship with the monsoon wind could reach the Indian port of Muziris "in forty days."27
  3. An Indian embassy reached Augustus about 20 BC. With it came an Indian ascetic who burned himself alive at Athens. Strabo gives his epitaph: "Here lies Zarmanochegas, an Indian from Bargosa, who immortalised himself in accordance with the ancestral customs of Indians."28 Cassius Dio tells the same story and calls him Zarmarus, "being of the caste of sages."29

So Buddhist stories could have reached Palestine.  A Galilean could have reached India, too:  the great-circle distance from Nazareth to Srinagar is about 3,650 km, five months on foot.30  The question is not whether contact was possible.  It is whether the Gospel texts show that it happened.

The case for borrowing, in its own words

The modern case began with the German scholar Rudolf Seydel in 1882.  He set fifty Gospel passages against Buddhist ones and proposed a lost source:  "We suspect this third source in a poetic-apocalyptic gospel of the earliest time," which had taken its Christian material and stretched it "into the frame of the Buddhist gospel type."31  He did not think Luke himself had read Indian texts:  "Luke himself is by no means the Christian poet who used the Indian models."31

The American scholar Albert J. Edmunds compared the Pali canon with the Gospels at length in Buddhist and Christian Gospels (1902;  fourth edition 1908–09).  He was more careful than his followers.  He set himself a rule:  "our principle should be to regard nothing as borrowed unless proven by express reference, by identity of text or sequence of narrative, accompanied with demonstrable intercourse."32  He still thought one of the "many" writers Luke mentions in his preface "may have been an Aramaic poetical Gospel, now lost, which had drawn materials from the Buddha-legend," but he called any such loans "by no means of fundamental importance."3232

The strongest scholarly advocate was the Indologist Richard Garbe.  In Indien und das Christentum, written at Tübingen in 1914, he dismissed most proposed parallels and kept four:  "I turn now to those cases—four in number—in which after long consideration I have become convinced that Buddhist influence in the Gospel stories cannot be denied."  They are the aged sage at the birth, the temptation, Peter walking on the water, and the feeding of the multitude.33

Popular writers went much further.  Elmar Gruber and Holger Kersten, in The Original Jesus (1995), combine the borrowing thesis with the Kashmir tomb:  "There is much evidence to show that Jesus himself, after surviving the crucifixion, took the land route to India."34  Christian Lindtner went furthest of all, claiming that "A careful comparison, word by word, sentence by sentence, shows that the Christian Gospels are Pirate-copies of the Buddhist Gospels," and that "Names are slightly changed for the source has to be kept secret."35  Lindtner names no manuscript a reader could check.

The verdicts of the specialists who weighed the whole list run the other way.  The British Pali scholar Edward J. Thomas summed up in 1927:  "Seydel's fifty instances are reduced by van den Bergh to nine.  In proportion to the investigator's direct knowledge of the Buddhist sources the number seems to decrease. ... Garbe assumes direct borrowing in four cases ... Charpentier considers Simeon the only unobjectionable example.  Other scholars reject all connexion."  He judged the theory that the canonical Gospels used Buddhist legends to be one "that breaks down in every one of its supposed proofs."36  J. Duncan M. Derrett, who taught Hindu law at the University of London and in retirement searched Buddhist texts for parallels with Greek, Jewish and Christian ones, was open to borrowing in both directions.  He wrote of Lindtner's thesis that "Indian readers take kindly to the idea that Christian texts owed something to Indian originals, but few Western Buddhologists have been convinced."37

The test: how old is each Buddhist text?

A parallel can show borrowing only if the source is older than the borrower.  Many Buddhist texts were written down centuries after the events they describe, as The Historical Buddha and the Early Texts shows:  the Pali canon was put in writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BC, and its commentaries are later still.  So each famous parallel has to be dated separately.  The table gives the Buddhist text each one comes from and the date a named specialist gives it.

Parallel Gospel Buddhist text Date of the Buddhist text Verdict
An aged holy man greets the newborn and foretells his greatness Simeon, Luke 2:25–35 Asita, Nalaka Sutta, Sutta Nipata 679–698 Disputed. Edmunds, Garbe and Winternitz: old. Thomas: "clearly late" A real likeness of type. Direction unproven
Temptation by the evil one before the ministry Matthew 4:1–11, Luke 4:1–13 Mara's temptation, Padhana Sutta, Sutta Nipata 425–449 Old: one of the early ballads Winternitz calls "precious remnants" A real likeness of motif. The Gospel version is built from Deuteronomy
A disciple walks on water and sinks when his mind wavers Peter, Matthew 14:28–31 Introduction to Jataka 190 The prose commentary, about AD 400–500 The closest parallel, and attested four centuries after Matthew
A crowd fed from very little Mark 6:35–44 and parallels Introduction to Jataka 78 The same fifth-century commentary Weak. The Gospel story has an Old Testament model
A rich father and his lost son Luke 15:11–32 Lotus Sutra, chapter 4 Core first or second century AD; oldest surviving Chinese translation 286 Different point. No borrowing by Luke possible on Thomas's dating
A poor woman gives two coins Mark 12:41–44 Kumaralata's Kalpanamanditika, tale 22 Second half of the second century AD Later than Mark. A girl, not a widow, rewarded with a throne
A miraculous conception Matthew 1, Luke 1 Maya's dream of a white elephant, Nidanakatha Fifth century AD Not a virgin birth; the oldest texts say nothing unusual

Each row in more detail:

  1. Asita and Simeon. In the Sutta Nipata, the sage Asita sees the infant Buddha, foretells his awakening, and weeps because "My life here will shortly be at an end ... I shall not hear the Dhamma of the incomparable one."38 In Luke, Simeon, promised that he would not die before seeing the Messiah, takes the child and says, "Now you are releasing your servant, Master, according to your word, in peace."6 The likeness is real, and Moriz Winternitz, the historian of Indian literature, called it "one of the most striking Buddhist parallels to the Gospels," and reported Ernst Windisch's judgment that it was "not absolutely proved that the Simeon of St. Luke owes his existence to the Asita of the Buddhist legend."39 The date of the sutta is disputed. Edmunds held that the Sutta Nipata "was already old at the time of Christ"; its first European editor, Viggo Fausbøll, thought parts of it later than Christ and the Asita story "borrowed from the Gospel of Luke"; Thomas called it "clearly late" and said "there is nothing to prove that it is as early as the pre-Christian era."3236 An old man blessing a newborn hero and foreseeing his own death is also a scene any storyteller might invent. The fair verdict is a real likeness with no proven direction.
  2. The temptation. The Padhana Sutta has Mara urge the fasting Buddha to give up his striving.38 The motif of a holy man tested by the evil one before his mission is real in both. But the Gospel temptation has its own Jewish frame: Jesus fasts forty days, as Moses and Elijah did, and answers each temptation with a verse from Deuteronomy 6–8, the chapters about Israel's forty years of testing in the wilderness. His first answer is Deuteronomy 8:3: "Man shall not live by bread alone."6 Garbe, drawing on three early Pali texts, made his best case here; but a story whose every answer comes from the Hebrew Bible does not need a Buddhist source.
  3. Walking on water. This is the parallel Garbe found most compelling, because in both stories the walker sinks when his attention fails: "It seems impossible to account for this most remarkable coincidence in any other way than by a loan."33 In the Jataka, a lay disciple crosses a river on foot while thinking of the Buddha, "but there he noticed the waves. Then his ecstasy subsided, and his feet began to sink."40 In Matthew, Peter "saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out."6 The problem is the date. Garbe himself conceded that "the Buddhist story is not in the Jataka itself but in the introduction to it," part of the prose commentary "whose composition brings us down to the fifth century A. D."33 Thomas was blunter: "The story cannot be proved to be pre-Christian, but the idea certainly is ... There is no likelihood of its being old, as these introductions appear to be often the invention of the commentator."36 Winternitz wrote that "we have no clue for a definite determination of the date of the Jataka commentary."39 Garbe also argued that walking on water "is entirely foreign to Judaism";33 it is not, since Job says God "treads on the waves of the sea" and a psalm says of God, "Your way was through the sea."6 The same standard Christians are held to applies here: a story first written down some four centuries after Matthew cannot be assumed to be older than Matthew. If anything was borrowed, it could have run either way.
  4. The loaves. The Jataka 78 introduction tells of five hundred monks and the Buddha fed from one cake, after which "still there seemed no end to the cakes."40 It belongs to the same late commentary.36 Garbe counted it among the striking parallels because in both stories food is left over; in the Jataka the surplus cakes are thrown away "in a cave not far from the gateway."4033 The Gospel story already has a model in Israel's scripture: Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves, "and they ate and had some left over."6
  5. The lost son. The Lotus Sutra's parable of a rich father searching for "the son he had lost fifty years ago" is a real likeness to Luke 15.41 But its point is different. The father does not run to meet his son. He has him hired to clear a heap of dirt and keeps him at it "during twenty years" before revealing who he is.41 The sutra explains its own parable: the disciples are the son, and the dirt is "the numerous inferior laws" the Buddha first set them to work on.41 Luke's father runs to his son while he is "still far off."6 Winternitz placed "the nucleus of the work as far back as the first century A.D."; Thomas put it "not earlier than the second century A.D.," and concluded that "there is no question of borrowing by the Evangelist."3639
  6. The two coins. In Kumaralata's collection a girl gives the monks "two copper pieces, which she had found on the rubbish heap," and is made a queen.42 Heinrich Lüders dated Kumaralata to "the second half of the second century A.D."42 The text is a century after Mark, its giver is not a widow, and its point is her reward. If one borrowed, Mark is the older.
  7. The birth. The Nidanakatha tells how the future Buddha, "who had become a superb white elephant," "gently struck her right side, and seemed to enter her womb" while the queen Maya slept.43 Thomas said that "The oldest accounts of Buddha's ancestry appear to presuppose nothing abnormal about his birth," and of the later legend: "This is not properly a virgin birth."36 Claims that Krishna or other gods were born of virgins belong to The Pagan Copycat Thesis.

The one proven borrowing ran the other way

One case of borrowing between Buddhism and Christianity is not in doubt, because the trail of names survives at every step:  the life of the Buddha became the Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, and the Buddha a saint in the Roman calendar (Part 2).  That borrowing ran from Buddhism into Christianity, centuries after the Gospels, through Manichaean, Arabic and Georgian hands, and it left exactly the kind of evidence the Gospel parallels lack:  names that change letter by letter from one language to the next, and dated texts in between.  Derrett, who searched longer than anyone for contacts, thought the evidence showed Buddhist texts drawing on the West:  "Buddhist texts, classed as hīnayāna or mahāyāna, make use of Greek, Jewish, and Christian material."37  When the Gospels and the Buddhist texts share a story, the Buddhist version is usually the later one.

Part 4: What the Gospels imply about the missing years

The Gospels say almost nothing about Jesus between the ages of 12 and 30.  Luke tells one story from his twelfth year, a Passover visit to Jerusalem, and closes it:  "And he went down with them and came to Nazareth.  He was subject to them".6  The next time Luke gives an age, Jesus "was about thirty years old" when he began to teach.6  That leaves about eighteen years with no narrative.  Every "Jesus in India" story is written into this gap, and the gap is real.

The silence is not total, though.  Three Gospel scenes show how the people who knew Jesus before his ministry reacted to it, and each assumes he had been living among them.

  1. Mark 6. When Jesus taught in the synagogue of his home town, the listeners asked, "Where did this man get these things?" and then answered themselves: "Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?"6 The town knew him by his trade and by his family. Matthew's version calls him "the carpenter's son".6
  2. Luke 4. Luke sets the same visit in "Nazareth, where he had been brought up", has Jesus stand up to read the scroll of Isaiah, and has the listeners ask, "Isn't this Joseph's son?"6
  3. John 7. In Jerusalem, people were surprised at his learning: "How does this man know letters, having never been educated?"6 Whatever else this means, it says that people who knew of him knew of no schooling. Fifteen years of study with Brahmins and Buddhists, as Notovitch's text claims, is exactly the kind of education they say he lacked.

None of this is a diary.  A skeptic can fairly say that a man could leave Nazareth at 14, come back at 29, and still be "the carpenter" to his neighbours.  The case is an inference from what the neighbours said, not a record of where he was.  And the phrase "as was his custom" in Luke 4:16 should not be pressed:  it can refer to his habit during the ministry Luke has just described, not to his youth.

John P. Meier, a Catholic priest whose four-volume A Marginal Jew is the most thorough mainstream study of the historical Jesus, draws the same inference without overstating it.  He grants that "nothing certain can be said about the influences that molded the Jesus known to us through the public ministry," and he names what fills the gap:  "The reason why authors of both apocryphal Infancy Gospels (like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) and modern novels have gravitated to the so-called 'hidden years' of Jesus' life in Nazareth is that they can give free rein to their imaginations (pious or impious), with no facts to restrain them."44  His own reading of the evidence is plain:  "all signs point to an uneventful adolescence and adulthood spent at woodworking in Nazareth.  However galling the Gospels' silence about Jesus' 'hidden years' may be, the silence may have a simple explanation:  nothing much happened."44

Meier also answers the one scholarly reading that could support an absence.  William Albright and C. S. Mann argued in their Anchor Bible Matthew that the people of Nazareth did not know Jesus by sight when he came back.  Meier replies that this "is not borne out by the exegesis," that the questions are "mocking rhetorical questions" (the town plainly knew his sisters lived there), that the Nazarenes would hardly have invited "an unknown stranger" to read the lesson, and that John 6:42, often quoted with them, is set in Capernaum, not Nazareth.44

There is a second, independent check.  The teaching the Gospels give Jesus is Jewish through and through:  Moses and the prophets, the Sabbath, the Temple, the resurrection of the dead, one personal God who made the world.  Rebirth, karma and the escape from the cycle of lives, the core of what a Buddhist teacher in India would have taught him (see Non-Self, Rebirth, and Nirvana), are absent.  A man who spent fifteen years learning Buddhist doctrine and then taught bodily resurrection and a creator God would have learned remarkably little.

Part 5: The same standard, applied both ways

Notovitch's text did not fail because it was unwelcome to Christians.  It failed four tests that can be put to any document, including the Gospels:

  1. Can the document be inspected? A manuscript in a named library, a shelf mark, or at least a photograph that a second reader can check.
  2. Did anyone independent of the claimant know of it before he published?
  3. Does the text know things it could not have known at its claimed date, or copy from later texts?
  4. Do the people who hold the document confirm it?

Goodspeed, writing in 1931, put the first test in one sentence:  "the scholar's desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it—its place and number in the Himis library—is not in this case to be satisfied."2

The table runs the same four tests on four texts:  Notovitch's Issa, a nineteenth-century Christian forgery called the Archko Volume, the Acts of Thomas (the one ancient Christian story that does send an apostle to India), and the four Gospels.

Test Life of Saint Issa (1894) Archko Volume (1879–1887) Acts of Thomas (early 3rd century) The four Gospels (1st century)
1. Can it be inspected? No. No manuscript, photograph or shelf mark; by 1895 Notovitch said the verses were "scattered through more than one book without any title"2 No. The Vatican and Constantinople manuscripts were never produced2 Yes. Syriac and Greek manuscripts survive Yes. About 5,100–5,300 Greek manuscripts; the oldest fragment, P52, is dated to the second century, possibly the early third4546
2. Independent early witness? None before 1894 None None for the events; the king's name is on coins and an inscription Josephus names Jesus about 93; Tacitus records his execution under Pilate about 116.4748 They confirm the man, not the Gospel texts
3. Anachronism or dependence on later texts? Yes. Draws its ages from Luke and its three-year ministry from John; uses the Arabic form of Jesus's name; sends Issa to Jagannath Yes. Copies whole pages of Ben-Hur (1880)2 Legendary throughout; the king may have reigned before Jesus was born49 Disputed. Mainstream scholars date Mark about 70, partly from its prophecy of the Temple's fall; Matthew and Luke copy Mark
4. Do the custodians confirm it? No. The head lama of Hemis signed a denial in 18951 No. The librarian of St. Sophia denied it n/a n/a: the texts were public and copied in many places
Verdict Modern fiction Modern fiction; its author was suspended by his own church Unproven legend Ancient, real texts; their truth is a separate question

Three things follow, and the first two cut against Christian habits.

Christian forgeries fail the same test.  The Archko Volume claimed to print Pilate's official report to Tiberius and other first-century documents found in Rome and Constantinople.  It was written by W. D. Mahan, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in Missouri, who published the first part in 1879.2  Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur and then American minister to Turkey, went to the library where Mahan said he had read one manuscript.  The librarian "assured General Wallace that he had been in charge of the library for thirty years, and it contained no such manuscripts as Mr. Mahan professed to have seen."2  Mahan's own presbytery tried him in 1885, and he "was found guilty of falsehood and of plagiarism, and suspended from the ministry for one year."2  The test that sank Notovitch was applied by Christians to a document that flattered Christianity, and it sank that one too.

Christianity's own India story is weak.  The Acts of Thomas says that Jesus sold the apostle Thomas as a slave to "a certain merchant come from India whose name was Abbanes, sent from the King Gundaphorus," who wanted a carpenter, and that Thomas preached in that king's realm.50  The king was real:  coins and the Takht-i-Bahi inscription name him, and Sten Konow, the editor of the inscriptions, wrote in 1929 that "the existence of this king, as ruling shortly after the death of Christ, had become known to the Christian world at an early date."51  But the Acts are a romance.  A. F. J. Klijn, their modern editor, dates them to "the beginning of the third century," about 170 years after the events, and he doubts even the king's date:  "It is not certain at which time Gudnaphar reigned, but it may be about 30–15 B.C.  It seems that the author of these Acts introduced a legendary king who once lived in this area".4949  By the standard of this article, an apostle's mission to India is possible and unproven.  It is still better attested than Notovitch's Issa, because the text exists, is ancient, and names a real king.

The Gospels pass tests 1, 2 and 4 and are contested on test 3.  They exist in thousands of copies, their oldest fragment is within about a century or two of Jesus,4546 and outsiders independently confirm that Jesus lived and was executed under Pilate (Did Jesus Exist?).  Their weaknesses are real and are argued elsewhere on this site:  they are formally anonymous (Who Wrote the Gospels?), the standard dates put them 40 to 80 years after the crucifixion (When Were the Gospels Written?), and the oldest substantial copies are about 150 years later than that (New Testament Manuscripts & Variants).  Raymond Brown, the standard mainstream guide, dates Mark "most likely between 68 and 73,"52 and one anchor for that date is Mark 13's prophecy that the Temple would fall, read as written after the fact.  That is itself a test-3 argument.  Christians reject it because it assumes predictive prophecy is impossible, and Brown himself admits that the New Testament's failure to describe the Temple's destruction "is very hard to explain."52  A reader can weigh that dispute;  it is a dispute about forty years, not about whether the texts exist.

The fair conclusion is narrow.  The tests do not prove the Gospels true.  They show that the Gospels are ancient documents that can be examined, while the Life of Issa is a modern text that cannot, and that the same tests sink Christian-flavoured fictions just as quickly.

Objections and responses

  1. "The Gospels are silent about ages 12 to 30, so India is as likely as Nazareth." The silence is real, and Part 4 says so. But silence is not evidence for any particular place, and the Gospels are not wholly silent: Jesus's town knew him by his trade and family, and people wondered at his learning "having never been educated." A claim that he spent those years in India needs evidence of its own. Every document offered for it fails the tests in Part 5.
  2. "Douglas was a British official, the lama could have lied, and Asian monks evade Europeans' questions." Notovitch made the last argument himself in 1900. The limits of Douglas's evidence are stated in Part 1: one abbot, one interpreter, an unpublished Tibetan original. But the case does not rest on Douglas. The text's dependence on Luke and John, its Arabic name for Jesus, its misreading of Luke 1:80, its Jagannath, and Notovitch's own dates are all independent of him. And Notovitch, who had the best reason to settle the matter, never produced a page, a photograph or a shelf mark.
  3. "Later visitors confirmed it: Abhedananda, Roerich and Caspari." Each came after the book and depended on it. Abhedananda went to Hemis to check what he had read, could not read what he was shown, and printed verses that his own champion says "almost exactly" follow Notovitch's. Roerich claimed no manuscript, and one of his "legends" comes from Levi Dowling's 1907 Aquarian Gospel. Caspari's books were never read.111010
  4. "The manuscripts were lost when China destroyed the monasteries of Tibet." Elizabeth Clare Prophet makes this argument for the Lhasa original.10 But the copy Notovitch says he heard was at Hemis, in Ladakh, which is in India. Prophet herself writes that Hemis "avoided destruction by various invading armies and became a repository for the books" of other monasteries.10 On her own account, the Hemis copy should still be there.
  5. "Critics of Notovitch were Christians defending their turf." Max Müller was no defender of miracles. He hoped that if a new life of Jesus were ever found, the historical Christ, "though different from the Christ of the Gospels, would be welcomed by all who can believe in his teaching, even without the help of miracles."4 Douglas was a college professor, Francke a missionary, and Lang, Thomas and Rocher scholars of Asian texts with no stake in the Gospels. And Christian scholars applied the same tests to the Archko Volume, a forgery that flattered Christianity, and its author's own church suspended him (Part 5).
  6. "The Roza Bal grave lies east to west, like a Jewish grave, and has carved footprints with crucifixion wounds." The orientation is asserted by Nazir Ahmad without a measurement or an excavation,21 and nobody has dated anything in the tomb. The Ahmadiyya's own key text, Ibn Babawayh's death scene, is the death of the Buddha in the Arabic legend (Part 2). The footprint carvings are known only from modern photographs and interpretation; this article found no study of their date.
  7. "So many Buddhist parallels cannot all be coincidence." The number shrinks as expertise grows: Thomas noted that Seydel's fifty became van den Bergh's nine, Garbe's four and Charpentier's one.36 The closest parallels survive only in commentaries four centuries younger than the Gospels, and several Gospel stories have Old Testament models (Part 3).
  8. "The Buddhist stories are older than the commentaries that preserve them." Perhaps; Garbe argued exactly this.33 But it has to be shown, not assumed. Skeptics rightly refuse to date a Gospel story earlier than the text that contains it without evidence. The same rule applies to a fifth-century Buddhist commentary. Winternitz admitted "we have no clue for a definite determination of the date of the Jataka commentary."39
  9. "Jesus's ethic of love and non-retaliation is Buddhist, not Jewish." It is in the Hebrew Bible: "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18), and "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat" (Proverbs 25:21). Jesus's own command to love enemies is framed as a reading of the Law: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'"6 What is missing from his teaching is everything distinctively Buddhist: rebirth, karma, no-self, nirvana.
  10. "Christians believe Thomas went to India on weak evidence, so why not Jesus?" By this article's standard the Thomas mission is also unproven: its source is a third-century romance whose one historical name may belong to a king who reigned before Jesus was born (Part 5). The difference is that the Acts of Thomas exists, is ancient, and names a real king; the Life of Issa does none of these.
  11. "Notovitch had no motive to lie." Motive is not needed to reject a document nobody can inspect. For what it is worth, Notovitch's preface says he hoped for the glory of publication rather than leave it to Renan, his book sold through eight French editions and three American translations in its first year, and Klatt documents a career of controversy that ended in Russian exile.352 None of that proves fraud. The evidence in Part 1 does.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Douglas's Tibetan original. The head lama's signed statement went to Max Müller and has never been published in facsimile. A search of Müller's papers at the Bodleian Library might find it.
  2. Favre's report. The French engineer A. Favre's article "Les véritables aventures de Tartarin Notovitch" (Gazette de Lausanne, 24 October 1896) is known here only through Klatt. The Swiss newspaper archive (letempsarchives.ch) should hold it.
  3. Notovitch's 1895 London preface. It is quoted here from Goodspeed. No digital copy of Violet Crispe's translation (Hutchinson, 1895) was found. Per Beskow wrote in 1983 that this preface admitted there was no manuscript and said the story had been gathered from various books in the monastery;53 that fits Goodspeed's quotation, but the preface itself was not read.
  4. Books not obtained. J. Duncan M. Derrett's The Bible and the Buddhists (2000) and Zacharias Thundy's Buddha and Christ (1993) are represented only by Derrett's 2006 article and by publishers' descriptions. Holger Kersten's Jesus Lived in India could be found only in an unlawful scan and is not assessed. H. Louis Fader's The Issa Tale That Will Not Die (2003), Simon J. Joseph's survey in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2012), Günter Grönbold's Jesus in Indien (1985), Philip Almond's "The Buddha of Christendom" (1987) and Daniel Gimaret's edition of the Arabic Bilawhar (1971) were not read.
  5. Ibn Babawayh's own words. The Arabic and Persian text of the Kamal al-Din death scene was not read; the article relies on Lang's account and Nazir Ahmad's translation, which agree that it places the death in Kashmir.
  6. The Bengali first edition. The 1929 first edition of Abhedananda's Kashmir O Tibbate was not found, so whether the Hemis chapter was revised after his death in 1939 is open. The article relies on Prophet's English translation and her editor's comparison.
  7. The date of the Nalaka Sutta. Edmunds, Garbe and Winternitz thought the Asita ballad old; Thomas thought it "clearly late." Gandhari manuscripts of the first centuries AD, published since Thomas wrote, might settle whether this sutta existed before the Gospels. If it did, the Asita–Simeon likeness stands as the best-dated parallel, and the question of contact remains open for that one story.
  8. The tomb itself. Roza Bal has never been excavated or dated. A radiocarbon date on any wooden fitting or organic material in the burial chamber would test the claim of a first-century grave directly, if the custodians allowed it.

Verdict

No evidence places Jesus in India, before the cross or after it.  Notovitch's Life of Issa is a nineteenth-century composition:  no manuscript was ever produced, the head of the monastery denied it in a signed statement, the text borrows its frame from Luke and John and its hero's name from Arabic, and Notovitch's own dates leave no room for the visit he describes.  Every later "witness" depended on his book, and one repeated a passage from a 1907 American "Akashic" gospel.  The Srinagar tomb is a real eighteenth-century shrine to a saint called Yuz Asaf, whose name and death scene come from the Arabic life of the Buddha;  it became the tomb of Jesus in 1898.  The famous Buddhist "sources" of the Gospels are either real likenesses of type with no proven direction, or stories first written down four centuries after the Gospels.  The one proven borrowing between the two religions turned the Buddha into a Christian saint.

The same tests, applied to Christian texts, sink Christian forgeries just as quickly and leave the Thomas-in-India tradition unproven.  They do not prove the Gospels true.  They show that the Gospels are ancient documents that can be examined and argued over, while the Life of Issa is a modern book that cannot.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Douglas, J. Archibald.  “The Chief Lama of Himis on the Alleged 'Unknown Life of Christ'.”  The Nineteenth Century 39(230):667–678.  Apr 1896.  A report by a professor at the Government College, Agra, who followed Notovitch's route in 1895, stayed at Hemis, read Notovitch's book to the head lama through an interpreter, and printed the lama's signed and sealed answers.  Written at Hemis in June 1895, with a postscript by Max Müller dated 15 November 1895.

    1. 1a.

      Page 668:  “I may here mention, en passant, that I did not find it necessary to break even a little finger, much less a leg, in order to gain admittance to Himis Monastery, where I am now staying for a few days, enjoying the kind hospitality of the Chief Lama (or Abbot)”. ↩

    2. 1b.

      Page 667:  “my faith in M. Notovitch was somewhat revived by the bold reply which that gentleman made to his critics”. ↩

    3. 1c.

      Pages 668–669:  “does distinctly remember that several European gentlemen visited the monastery in the years 1887 and 1888.”  Page 669:  “on being shown the photograph of M. Notovitch confesses that he might have mistaken him for an ‘English sahib.’” ↩

    4. 1d.

      Page 669:  “Careful inquiries have elicited the fact that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch was treated by the medical officer of Leh Hospital, Dr. Karl Marks, when suffering not from a broken leg, but from the less romantic but hardly less painful complaint—toothache.” ↩

    5. 1e.

      Page 672:  “Signed in the Tibetan language by the Chief Lama of Himis, and sealed with his official seal.”  “Himis Monastery, Little Tibet: June 3, 1895.”  Witnessed by Douglas and by Shahmwell Joldan, late Postmaster of Ladakh, who acted as interpreter.  Müller's postscript on p. 678 prints the date as "June 3, 1894," a slip:  Douglas's paper was written at Hemis in June 1895. ↩

    6. 1f.

      Page 671:  “Have you or any of your monks ever shown any Life of Issa to any sahib, and allowed him to copy and translate the same?”  “There is no such book in the monastery, and during my term of office no sahib has been allowed to copy or translate any of the manuscripts in the monastery.” ↩ ↩

    7. 1g.

      Page 671:  “Are you aware of the existence of any book in any of the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet bearing on the life of Issa?”  “I have been for forty-two years a Lama, and am well acquainted with all the well-known Buddhist books and manuscripts, and I have never heard of one which mentions the name of Issa, and it is my firm and honest belief that none such exists.” ↩

    8. 1h.

      Page 671:  Answer 3, on the injured European:  “No, not during the last fifteen years.”  Page 672:  Answers 8 and 10:  “I do not know what a thermometer is.”  “They know nothing even of his name; none of the Lamas has ever heard it, save through missionaries and European sources.” ↩

    9. 1i.

      Page 672:  “I was reading M. Notovitch's book to the Lama at the time, and he burst out with, ‘Sun, sun, sun, manna mi dug!’ which is Tibetan for, ‘Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!’” ↩

    10. 1j.

      Page 673:  “The Tibetans of Ladakh competent to interpret such a conversation are leading men, certainly not more than three or four in number. Not one of them has ever seen M. Notovitch”.  Pages 673–674:  “he took a shikari into his service ‘who fulfilled the rôle of interpreter.’”  “relating to the necessities of the road, the camp and sport”. ↩

    11. 1k.

      Page 674:  “the hospitality offered by the monastery to travellers is for one night”.  Page 675:  “the whole story of the broken leg, in so far as it relates to Himis Monastery, is neither more nor less than a fiction.” ↩

    12. 1l.

      Page 677:  “while I have not found one single fact to support his statements, all the weight of evidence goes to disprove them beyond all shadow of doubt.” ↩

    13. 1m.

      Pages 677–678:  Max Müller's postscript.  “He was not hoaxed, but he tried to hoax us.”  “I gladly testify that they entirely agree with the extracts given in the article”. ↩ ↩

    14. 1n.

      Page 678:  Max Müller's postscript.  “One might as well look for the waters of Jordan in the Brahmaputra as for a Life of Christ in Tibet.” ↩

    15. 1o.

      Page 676:  “It practically denies the working of miracles, and it also gives a definite denial to the resurrection of Jesus.”  “Another daring departure from the New Testament account is that the blame of Christ's crucifixion is cast on the Roman governor Pilate”.  “bears a resemblance to the Vie de Jésus by Renan, to whom the Russian author states that he showed his manuscripts.” ↩

  2. 2.

    Goodspeed, Edgar J.  Strange New Gospels.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  1931.  A short book by the University of Chicago New Testament scholar and translator that examines modern "lost gospels," including Notovitch's Life of Issa, the Aquarian Gospel and the Archko Volume, by the same literary and textual tests.  Goodspeed debunks forgeries that flatter Christianity as firmly as those that attack it.

    1. 2a.

      Page 10:  “In 1887 a Russian war-correspondent, Nicolas Notovitch, visited India, and proceeding into Tibet, at the Lamassary or Convent of Himis, learned of the Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men.” ↩

    2. 2b.

      Page 11:  Footnote.  “at least eight editions of it were printed that year. Three separate translations of it, Mr. Frederick W. Ashley informs me, were entered for copyright at Washington in May of that year”. ↩ ↩

    3. 2c.

      Page 12:  “As published by Notovitch, the work consists of two hundred and forty-four short paragraphs, arranged in fourteen chapters.” ↩

    4. 2d.

      Page 19:  Goodspeed quotes Notovitch's preface to the London edition of 1895.  “the verses of which I give a translation in my book are probably not to be found in any kind of catalogue, either of the Tandjur or of the Kandjur.”  “They are to be found scattered through more than one book without any title”.  “For if its parts exist only thus scattered, the order and structure of the work are evidently the contribution of Notovitch himself, and the Life as a whole is his creation.” ↩ ↩ ↩

    5. 2e.

      Pages 20–21:  “the Vatican Library possesses sixty-three complete or incomplete manuscripts in various Oriental languages referring to this matter”.  “Nor has any independent student of the Vatican manuscripts reported one of the sixty-three manuscripts.” ↩

    6. 2f.

      Page 13:  “It is interesting at the outset to observe that these two ages are taken for granted by the author of this work, who unconsciously bases his scheme upon them. We know them from the Gospel of Luke alone”.  Pages 13–14:  “an idea derived from the Gospel of John, and from no other book of the New Testament.” ↩

    7. 2g.

      Page 14:  “it becomes clear that the range of Christian literature reflected in the book makes a date earlier than the second century impossible.” ↩

    8. 2h.

      Page 15:  “But it is not of Jesus but of John that Luke says this (1:80), so that it will hardly yield the conclusive proof Notovitch seeks. At this point in Luke’s narrative, in fact, Jesus has not yet appeared.” ↩

    9. 2i.

      Page 25:  “Dr. Levi H. Dowling (1844-1911), who after years of service as chaplain, doctor, and Sunday-school worker became a believer in the Akashic Records, the imperishable records of life preserved in the Supreme Intelligence, or Universal Mind.” ↩

    10. 2j.

      Page 28:  “He visits Tibet (Lassa, the Ladakh, Leh), where he meets Meng-ste, the greatest sage of the farther East. This name suggests the Chinese sage Mencius (Meng-tsze), who died in 289 B.c.”  Page 29:  “The visits of Jesus to the Brahmins, Buddhists, and Persians remind us of Notovitch’s “Unknown Life of Jesus Christ,” with which Dr. Dowling was probably acquainted.” ↩ ↩

    11. 2k.

      Page 16:  “It is evident that the scholar’s desire to see the manuscript of the work, or failing that to see a photograph of it, or a part of it, or at least to have precise directions as to how and where to find it—its place and number in the Himis library—is not in this case to be satisfied.” ↩

    12. 2l.

      Page 42:  “published a pamphlet of thirty-two pages, entitled “A Correct Transcript of Pilate’s Court.” It consisted chiefly of an official report of the trial and death of Jesus, made directly to the Emperor Tiberius, by Pilate, as governor of Judea.”  The author was the Rev. W. D. Mahan, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister of Boonville, Missouri, in 1879.  The expanded collection became known as the Archko Volume. ↩

    13. 2m.

      Page 52:  “Mr. Quarles was quick to observe that whole pages of Eli’s “Story” were copied verbatim from “Ben-Hur.”” ↩

    14. 2n.

      Page 55:  “Zia Bey, the librarian, assured General Wallace that he had been in charge of the library for thirty years, and it contained no such manuscripts as Mr. Mahan professed to have seen.”  Goodspeed is quoting Lew Wallace's Autobiography (1906), p. 943. ↩ ↩

    15. 2o.

      Page 56:  “Mr. Mahan was found guilty of falsehood and of plagiarism, and suspended from the ministry for one year.” ↩

  3. 3.

    Notovitch, Nicolas.  La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ.  Paris: Paul Ollendorff.  6th edition.  1894.  The book that launched the claim:  a travel narrative through Kashmir and Ladakh, followed by "The Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men," which Notovitch says a lama at Hemis read to him from Tibetan manuscripts through an interpreter, and a commentary.  The article quotes the French original and gives its own English translations.

    1. 3a.

      Section Preface, page IV:  “Une chute malheureuse à la suite de laquelle je me brisai la jambe me fournit d’une façon absolument inattendue un prétexte pour retourner dans le monastère, où l’on me donna les premiers secours médicaux. Je profitai de mon court séjour parmi les lamas pour obtenir le consentement du lama en chef à ce qu’on me fit apporter de la bibliothèque les manuscrits relatifs à Jésus-Christ, et, aidé de mon interprète qui me traduisait la langue thibétaine, je notai soigneusement sur mon carnet ce que le lama me lisait.” ↩

    2. 3b.

      Page 140:  “Pour se conformer à la coutume établie, chaque élève ou lama qui a visité Lassa, ne manque pas de faire cadeau d’une ou de plusieurs copies au couvent auquel il appartient; notre gonpa, entre autres, en possède déjà un grand nombre, que je lis à mes heures de loisir. Parmi ces copies, se trouvent des descriptions de la vie et des actes du bouddha Issa”.  The head lama of Hemis is speaking. ↩

    3. 3c.

      Pages 143–144:  “Des rouleaux, apportés de l'Inde à Nepal et de Nepal au Thibet, relatifs à l'existence d'Issa, sont écrits dans la langue Pali, et se trouvent actuellement à Lassa, mais une copie en notre langue, je veux dire dans la langue thibétaine, existe chez nous.” ↩

    4. 3d.

      Pages 148–149:  “il finit par m'apporter deux gros livres cartonnés dont les grandes feuilles étaient en papier jauni par le temps; il me lut alors la biographie d'Issa que je notai soigneusement sur mon carnet de voyage d'après la traduction que m'en faisait mon interprète. Ce curieux document est rédigé sous forme de versets isolés, qui, bien souvent, ne se rattachent pas les uns aux autres.” ↩

    5. 3e.

      Page 236:  “Les deux manuscrits, dans lesquels le lama du couvent Himis m'a lu tout ce qui avait trait à Jésus, forment des recueils de copies diverses écrites dans la langue thibétaine, traductions de quelques rouleaux appartenant à la bibliothèque de Lassa et apportés de l'Inde, de Nepal et de Maghada, vers l'an 200 après Jésus-Christ”. ↩

    6. 3f.

      Page 237:  “Ces rouleaux étaient écrits dans la langue Pali”.  “Les manuscrits nous racontent tout d'abord, sans explications ni détails, d'après le récit de quelques marchands venus de Judée dans l'année même de la mort de Jésus, qu'un juste du nom d'Issa, un Israélite, après avoir été deux fois acquitté par les juges comme étant l'homme de Dieu, fut néanmoins mis à mort sur l'ordre du gouverneur païen Pilate”. ↩ ↩ ↩

    7. 3g.

      Section Preface, postscript:  “Au cours de mon voyage, j'ai tiré beaucoup de photographies très curieuses, mais lorsque de retour aux Indes j'ai examiné les négatives, il s'est trouvé qu'elles étaient toutes abîmées.”  He adds that the book's illustrations are photographs lent by a friend, M. d'Auvergne, who had travelled in the Himalaya. ↩

    8. 3h.

      Section Preface, page VIII:  “les sociétés savantes pourront, sans beaucoup de frais, équiper une expédition scientifique qui aurait pour mission d'étudier ces manuscrits sur place et d'en vérifier ainsi la valeur historique.” ↩

    9. 3i.

      Page 166:  “10. Lorsqu'Issa eut atteint l'âge de treize ans, époque où un Israélite doit prendre femme,”.  “12. C'est alors qu'Issa quitta clandestinement la maison paternelle, sortit de Jérusalem et, avec des marchands, se dirigea vers le Sindh,”.  Page 167:  “Au cours de sa quatorzième année, le jeune Issa, béni de Dieu, vint en deçà du Sindh”. ↩

    10. 3j.

      Page 168:  “s'en fut à Djagguernat, dans la contrée d'Orsis, où repose la dépouille mortelle de Viassa-Krichna et où les prêtres blancs de Brahma lui firent un joyeux accueil.”  “Il passa six ans à Djagguernat, à Radjagriha, à Bénarès”. ↩

    11. 3k.

      Page 192:  “avait vingt-neuf ans quand il arriva dans le pays d'Israël.” ↩

    12. 3l.

      Page 198:  “3. Alors Pilate, gouverneur de Jérusalem, ordonna qu'on se saisit de la personne du prédicateur Issa, qu'on l'amenât dans la ville et qu'on le conduisit devant les juges; toutefois, pour ne pas exciter le mécontentement de la population, Pilate chargea les prêtres et les savants, vieillards hébreux, de le juger dans le temple.” ↩

    13. 3m.

      Pages 254–255:  “Luc dit : « Il demeurait dans le désert jusqu'au jour où il devait paraître devant le peuple d'Israël, » ce qui démontre uniquement que personne ne savait où avait disparu le saint jeune homme, qui réapparut subitement seize ans après.”  The verse is Luke 1:80, which is about John the Baptist. ↩

    14. 3n.

      Section Preface, page VII:  “A la fin de notre entretien, M. Renan me proposa de lui confier les mémoires en question afin qu'il en pût faire un rapport à l'Académie.”  Ernest Renan wrote the Vie de Jésus (1863).  Notovitch declined, he says, because Renan would take the credit, and waited until Renan's death in 1892 to publish. ↩ ↩

    15. 3o.

      Pages 146–147:  “mon cheval fit un faux pas et je tombai à terre si malheureusement que je me cassai la jambe droite au-dessous du genou.”  He fell near the monastery of Piatak and had himself carried to Hemis. ↩

    16. 3p.

      Pages 149–150:  “Le troisième jour, ma santé s'améliora au point de me permettre de continuer ma route.”  “Ce furent vingt jours d'un lent voyage, rempli d'intolérables souffrances; mais, grâce à une litière qu'un Français, M. Peicheau, m'envoya obligeamment”. ↩

    17. 3q.

      Page 130:  “Nous avons plusieurs fêtes semblables dans l'année, répondit le Lama”.  The festival itself is described in the chapter "Une fête dans un gonpa," from p. 104. ↩

  4. 4.

    Müller, F. Max.  “The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India.”  The Nineteenth Century 36(212):515–522.  Oct 1894.  An article by the Oxford Sanskritist who edited the Sacred Books of the East, written within months of Notovitch's book.  It tests the story against the printed catalogues of the Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist canons and against letters from Ladakh, and suggests the monks had fooled Notovitch rather than that he had invented it.

    1. 4a.

      Page 516:  “But, taking it for granted that M. Notovitch is a gentleman and not a liar, we cannot help thinking that the Buddhist monks of Ladakh and Tibet must be wags, who enjoy mystifying inquisitive travellers, and that M. Notovitch fell far too easy a victim to their jokes.” ↩

    2. 4b.

      Page 518:  “It contains no less than 1,662 entries.”  “The Kandjur consists of 108 large volumes”.  Page 519:  “The Tandjur consists of 225 volumes”.  “In the Tandjur, therefore, if not in the Kandjur, the story of Issa ought to have its place”.  The 1,662 entries are those of Bunyiu Nanjio's 1883 catalogue of the Chinese canon. ↩

    3. 4c.

      Page 518:  “how these Jewish merchants met the very people who had known Issa as a casual student of Sanskrit and Pali in India—for India is a large term—and still more, how those who had known Issa as a simple student in India, saw at once that he was the same person who had been put to death under Pontius Pilate.” ↩

    4. 4d.

      Page 518:  “His name in India is said to have been Issa, very like the Arabic name Isa'l Masih, Jesus, the Messiah, while, strange to say, the name of Pontius Pilate seems to have remained unchanged in its passage from Hebrew to Pali, and from Pali to Tibetan. We must remember that part of Tibet was converted to Mohammedanism.” ↩ ↩

    5. 4e.

      Page 519:  “Two things in their account are impossible, or next to impossible. The first, that the Jews from Palestine who came to India in about 35 A.D. should have met the very people who had known Issa when he was a student at Benares; the second, that this Sûtra of Issa, composed in the first century of our era, should not have found a place either in the Kandjur or in the Tandjur.” ↩

    6. 4f.

      Page 521:  Postscript, quoting a letter from an English lady dated Leh, Ladakh, June 29.  “There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian there. No one has been taken into the Seminary for the past fifty years with a broken leg! There is no Life of Christ there at all!”  “The Lamas are the dirtiest of a very dirty race.” ↩

    7. 4g.

      Page 521:  “Only let us hope that if such a Life were ever to be discovered, the attitude of Christian theologians would not be like that which M. Notovitch suspects on the part of an Italian Cardinal or of the Moravian missionaries at Himis, but that the historical Christ, though different from the Christ of the Gospels, would be welcomed by all who can believe in his teaching, even without the help of miracles.” ↩

  5. 5.

    Notovitch, Nicolas.  La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ.  Paris: Société d'éditions littéraires et artistiques (Ollendorff).  Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée edition.  1900.  Notovitch's revised edition, whose new preface is his fullest reply to his critics.  It answers Max Müller and the English lady of Leh, explains why he never went back to Tibet, and does not mention J. Archibald Douglas.

    1. 5a.

      Page VII:  “Une dame voyageant dans ces parages a écrit en Europe qu'elle ne m'y a jamais vu”.  “Un missionnaire morave, l'honorable M. Shaw, répète, un peu plus tard, cette plaisanterie”.  “M. Shaw s'est ensuite loyalement rétracté, mais la calomnie avait fait son chemin, après avoir paru pour la première fois dans le Daily News.” ↩

    2. 5b.

      Page XXIII:  “Si je suis parvenu à prendre copie du texte de la « Vie de saint Issa », c'est que j'ai usé de la diplomatie spéciale que m'ont enseignée mes fréquents voyages dans l'Orient asiatique.” ↩

    3. 5c.

      Page XXIII:  “mon projet d'un nouveau voyage au Thibet a été presque achevé”.  Page XXIV:  “pour m'enfermer dans la forteresse Pierre et Paul, d'où je fus envoyé en exil sur la simple décision du Conseil des Ministres, sans jugement”.  “je n'ai plus songé ni à Max Muller, ni à la fameuse Anglaise, qui lui a écrit de l'Inde.” ↩ ↩ ↩

    4. 5d.

      Page VIII:  “Le même Sourajbal m'a écrit, le 4 novembre 1887, pour me recommander les bons soins du docteur Karl Marx”.  Notovitch's footnote prints the letter in English:  “I am sorry to find that you are feverish and suffering from toothache.”  “Of course you know we have a medical man here, Dr. Marx of the Ladane Charitable Dispensary”.  Page IX:  “J'ai été soigné, à Leh, par ce docteur Karl Marx, médecin européen au service du gouvernement anglais.” ↩

  6. 6.

    World English Bible.  eBible.org.  2020.  A modern public-domain English translation of the Bible, used here for every Gospel verse quoted.

    1. 6a.

      Book Luke, chapter 1, verse 80:  “The child was growing and becoming strong in spirit, and was in the desert until the day of his public appearance to Israel.”  The child is John the Baptist, whose birth Luke has just narrated (1:57–79). ↩

    2. 6b.

      Book Luke, chapter 2, verse 26–29:  “It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ.”  “Now you are releasing your servant, Master, according to your word, in peace;”. ↩

    3. 6c.

      Book Matthew, chapter 4, verse 2–4:  “When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward.”  “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth.’”  Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 8:3;  his other two answers (4:7, 4:10) quote Deuteronomy 6:16 and 6:13.  Moses fasted "forty days and forty nights" (Exodus 34:28), and Elijah went "forty days and forty nights" to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8). ↩

    4. 6d.

      Book Matthew, chapter 14, verse 29–31:  “Peter stepped down from the boat and walked on the waters to come to Jesus. But when he saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, “Lord, save me!””  Peter's walk is in Matthew only;  Mark 6:48–51 and John 6:19–21 have Jesus alone walk on the sea. ↩

    5. 6e.

      Book Job, chapter 9, verse 8:  “He alone stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea.”  Book Psalms, chapter 77, verse 19:  “Your way was through the sea, your paths through the great waters.” ↩

    6. 6f.

      Book 2 Kings, chapter 4, verse 42–44:  “twenty loaves of barley”.  “What, should I set this before a hundred men?”  “So he set it before them and they ate and had some left over, according to Yahweh’s word.” ↩

    7. 6g.

      Book Luke, chapter 15, verse 20:  “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was moved with compassion, and ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him.” ↩

    8. 6h.

      Book Luke, chapter 2, verses 42, 51:  “When he was twelve years old”.  “And he went down with them and came to Nazareth. He was subject to them”. ↩

    9. 6i.

      Book Luke, chapter 3, verse 23:  “Jesus himself, when he began to teach, was about thirty years old”. ↩

    10. 6j.

      Book Mark, chapter 6, verse 2–3:  “Where did this man get these things?”  “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?”  Some witnesses read "the son of the carpenter" here;  either way the town knows him as a local family's son. ↩

    11. 6k.

      Book Matthew, chapter 13, verse 55:  “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” ↩

    12. 6l.

      Book Luke, chapter 4, verses 16, 22:  “He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up.”  “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” ↩

    13. 6m.

      Book John, chapter 7, verse 15:  “How does this man know letters, having never been educated?” ↩

    14. 6n.

      Book Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18:  “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Book Proverbs, chapter 25, verse 21:  “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat.”  Book Matthew, chapter 5, verse 43–44:  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies”. ↩

  7. 7.

    Stietencron, Heinrich von.  “The Advent of Visnuism in Orissa;  Early Temples of Jagannatha in Orissa.”  The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa.  New Delhi: Manohar.  Edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke and Gaya Charan Tripathi.  1978 (edition of 1986).  Chapters in the standard collaborative study of the Jagannath cult at Puri by the Heidelberg South Asia programme.  Stietencron dates the temples of Puri from inscriptions and archaeology.

    1. 7a.

      Page 1:  “Religious life in Orissa has been dominated by the cult of Purusottama-Jagannatha ever since the famous and majestic present temple of this god in Puri was built in the 12th century A.D. Its construction began after the year 1135, probably in the last decade of the long reign of Anantavarman Codagangadeva (1078-1147 A.D.).” ↩

    2. 7b.

      Page 68:  “I have shown in chapter 1 that there existed no Purusottama or Nilamadhava temple in Puri prior to the 10th century.”  “Next to the date of the first Purusottama temple, which we have fixed at 949-959 A.D.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Francke, A. H.  “Antiquities of Indian Tibet, Part I: Personal Narrative.”  Archaeological Survey of India, New Imperial Series 38.  Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing.  1914.  The narrative of a 1909 archaeological survey of Ladakh by the Moravian missionary who lived there from 1896 and became the leading Western historian of the region.  It records local sites, inscriptions and monasteries, including Hemis.

    1. 8a.

      Page 66:  “This monastery which was built by king Seng-ge-rnam-rgyal only about 300 years ago, has acquired quite unusual fame among European visitors to Ladakh on account of its devil-dances.”  “The monastery was also frequently referred to fifteen or eighteen years ago, when the Russian traveller Notovitch surprised the world by stating that he had found in it a copy of a new Christian gospel written in Pali. A great deal of learned correspondence then took place which proved that Notovitch’s extraordinary find was a forgery.” ↩

    2. 8b.

      Page 78:  “Munshi dPal-rgyas emphatically denied the existence of Indian manuscripts at the Hemis monastery, in spite of a rumour to that effect which had been brought to us.” ↩

    3. 8c.

      Page 66:  “These are performed here in June (originally probably on the occasion of the summer solstice), a convenient time for Europeans to attend them, whilst most of the other monasteries have the same performance in winter.” ↩

  9. 9.

    Klatt, Norbert.  “Notovitch: Jesus war nie in Indien!”  EZW-Texte.  Stuttgart: Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen.  1986.  A pamphlet by a German historian of religion that reconstructs Notovitch's life and his 1887 journey from Russian, French and British sources, including letters Notovitch himself published and the testimony of a French engineer who met him in Srinagar.  It concludes that Notovitch was never at Hemis in the way he describes and that the Life of Issa is his own composition.

    1. 9a.

      Section text at notes 95–97 and 134–135:  “verließ NOTOVITCH am 27. Oktober - nach FAVRE am”.  “25. Oktober”.  “Srinagar, um nach Ladakh weiterzureisen.”  “wenn nicht FAVRE berichtete, daß NOTOVITCH am 15. November”.  “nach Srinagar zurückgekehrt sei.”  The OCR of the 15 November sentence is damaged;  Klatt writes that Notovitch returned unharmed (wohlbehalten), and that three days earlier he had told Favre he had broken his leg and his jaw in a fall into a ravine.  Klatt's source is A. Favre, "Les véritables aventures de Tartarin Notovitch," Gazette de Lausanne, 24 October 1896. ↩

    2. 9b.

      Section text at notes 115–116:  “Fest findet am 10. und 11. Tag des fünften tibetischen Monats zu Ehren des Geburtstages von Padmasambhava statt”.  “ist es ausgeschlossen, daß NOTOVITCH im November des Jahres 1887 bei dem farbenprächtigen Maskenspiel im Kloster Hemis zugegen war.”  Klatt gives the usual European dates as the second half of June or the beginning of July. ↩

  10. 10.

    Prophet, Elizabeth Clare.  The Lost Years of Jesus: On the Discoveries of Notovitch, Abhedananda, Roerich, and Caspari.  Malibu, California: Summit University Press.  1984.  The fullest defence of the Issa text, by the leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant.  It reprints Notovitch's text, the first English translation of Abhedananda's Hemis chapter, Roerich's Ladakh passages and an account of Elisabeth Caspari's 1939 visit, with the editor's comparisons.

    1. 10a.

      Pages 230–231:  Prophet's English translation of Abhedananda's Bengali.  “He recovered about a month and a half later.”  “Swamiji read the book when he was in America and felt very enthusiastic about it. In order to verify the descriptions, he took the trouble to come up and see the Himis retreat for himself.”  “He said that it was a copy and the original was in a monastery at Marbour near Lhasa. The original was written in Pali, but this was a translation into Tibetan. It consisted of 14 chapters and 224 verses. With his help, Swamiji got a part of it translated.” ↩ ↩

    2. 10b.

      Page 231:  The editor's note.  “Abhedananda’s version of the Himis manuscript almost exactly parallels Notovitch’s Life of Saint Issa through chapter 5, verse 4. Following that, Abhedananda excerpted parts of the Himis manuscript corresponding to scattered verses of The Life of Saint Issa through chapter 9, verse 1.” ↩ ↩

    3. 10c.

      Page 43:  “It would appear that the book was not entirely revised by Abhedananda, inasmuch as in the section describing his verification of the document, Abhedananda is referred to in the third person as “Swamiji.”” ↩

    4. 10d.

      Page 58:  “I heard from his own lips that he [Abhedananda] saw the scrolls [at Himis] and he translated from them. Years afterwards he inquired but they said the scrolls were no longer there. I also requested to see the scrolls, but there is nothing. There are no scrolls. They have been removed, by whom we do not know.”  Swami Prajnananda speaking, as reported by Richard and Janet Bock. ↩

    5. 10e.

      Page 51:  “The story that follows is in many places nearly the same as Notovitch’s Life of Saint Issa.”  Prophet is introducing Roerich's Ladakh passages. ↩

    6. 10f.

      Page 60:  “He then presented Mrs. Gasque the parchment leaves and with great reverence said, “These books say your Jesus was here.””  “unfortunately we do not know what the books said. They were written in Tibetan and neither of the two women asked for a translation.” ↩ ↩

    7. 10g.

      Pages 60–61:  “Since the Chinese suppression of an uprising in 1959, virtually all the monasteries have been destroyed or converted to secular uses”.  “If the Pali original of the text was still in Lhasa in 1959, it was probably confiscated or destroyed.”  “the Himis monastery avoided destruction by various invading armies and became a repository for the books, paintings, statuary, costumes, and valued property of the other convents.” ↩ ↩

  11. 11.

    Roerich, Nicholas.  Altai-Himalaya: A Travel Diary.  New York: Frederick A. Stokes.  1929.  The travel diary of the Russian painter's 1925–1928 expedition through Kashmir, Ladakh, Central Asia and the Altai.  Its Ladakh chapter records legends of Issa that Roerich says were told by local people.

    1. 11a.

      Page 89:  “Many remember the lines from the book of Notovitch, but it is still more wonderful to discover, on this site, in several variants, the same version of the legend of Issa. The local people know nothing of any published book but they know the legend and with deep reverence they speak of Issa.” ↩

    2. 11b.

      Pages 93–94:  “Near Lhasa was a temple of teaching with a wealth of manuscripts. Jesus was to acquaint himself with them. Meng-ste, a great sage of all the East, was in this temple.”  “Finally Jesus reached a mountain pass and in the chief city of Ladak, Leh, he was joyously accepted by monks and people of the lower class.” ↩ ↩

  12. 12.

    Dowling, Levi H.  The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ.  Marina del Rey, California: DeVorss.  1907 (edition of 1972).  A life of Jesus that its author said he had transcribed from the "Akashic Records," sending Jesus to India, Tibet, Persia, Greece and Egypt.  Cited here for the chapter that reappears as a Ladakh "legend" in Roerich.

    1. 12a.

      Chapter 36, verse 1:  “In Lassa of Tibet there was a master’s temple, rich in manuscripts of ancient lore.”  Verse 3:  “Now, Meng-ste, greatest sage of all the farther East, was in this temple of Tibet.”  Verse 11:  “At last he reached the pass, and in the Ladak city, Leh, he was received with favour by the monks”. ↩

  13. 13.

    Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam.  Jesus in India (Masih Hindustan Mein).  Farnham, Surrey: Islam International Publications.  3rd revised English edition.  Translated by Qazi Abdul Hamid.  1899 (edition of 2019).  The founder of the Ahmadiyya movement argues from the Gospels, the Quran and hadith, medieval medical books and Persian histories that Jesus survived the cross, travelled east to the lost tribes of Israel, and died in Kashmir.  Ahmad planned ten chapters and a conclusion and decided that four would suffice;  the book was written in April 1899 and published in Qadian in November 1908.  It is the movement's own primary statement of the claim.

    1. 13a.

      Pages 15–16:  “I shall prove in this book that Jesus, the Messiah, may peace be on him, did not die on the cross, nor did he go up to the heavens; nor should the hope be entertained that he would ever again come down to the earth from the heavens. On the contrary, the fact of the matter is that he died at the age of 120 years at Srinagar, Kashmir, where his tomb is still to be found in the Khanyar quarter.” ↩

    2. 13b.

      Page 17:  “the divine object underlying his mission was indeed to meet the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in different parts of India.” ↩

    3. 13c.

      Page 75:  “It is a medical preparation known as the ‘Ointment of Jesus’ [Marham-i-Isa] and is found recorded in hundreds of medical books.”  “First, in the days of Jesus, the Messiah, shortly after the crucifixion, a pharmacopoeia was compiled in Latin, which contained this prescription and in which it was stated that it had been prepared for the treatment of the wounds of Jesus, the Messiah, may peace be on him.” ↩

    4. 13d.

      Page 77:  “Roman Qarabadin a book concerning Skin Diseases, compiled about the time of Jesus, the Messiah, and translated in the reign of Mamun ar-Rashid into Arabic.”  The list also names the Qanun of Avicenna and the Kamil al-Sina'a of al-Majusi. ↩

  14. 14.

    Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam.  A Hidden Truth (Raaz-e-Haqiqat).  Farnham, Surrey: Islam International Publications.  1898 (edition of 2016).  An earlier short book by the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, in which he first identifies the tomb of Yuz Asaf in the Khanyar quarter of Srinagar as the tomb of Jesus.  It prints a report from a follower sent to investigate the shrine and Ahmad's site plan of it.

    1. 14a.

      Page 26:  Caption to Ahmad's site plan of the shrine.  “This is the tomb of Isa, peace be upon him, who is also known by the names Yasu, Jesus and Yuz Asaf. According to the testimony of the elders of Kashmir, the tomb has existed in Mohalla Khanyar, Srinagar for nearly 1900 years.” ↩

    2. 14b.

      Page 51:  “Thereafter, he stayed in Kashmir for a considerable period of time where he imparted guidance to the Children of Israel who had, at the time of the Diaspora, left Babylonia and settled in Kashmir. Finally, at the age of 120, he passed away in Srinagar and was buried in Mohalla Khanyar, but due to general mispronunciation, became known by the name Yuz Asaf Nabi.” ↩

    3. 14c.

      Page 29:  The opening of the Epilogue.  “it has been proven without a shadow of doubt that the grave of Yuz Asaf, situated in Mohalla Khanyar, Srinagar, is in actuality the grave of Jesus, peace be upon him.” ↩ ↩

  15. 15.

    Reynolds, Gabriel Said.  “The Muslim Jesus: Dead or Alive?”  Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72(2):237–258.  2009.  A journal article by a historian of the Quran at the University of Notre Dame on how the Quran and its commentators treat the death of Jesus.  Cited here for its remark on why mainstream Muslims reject the Ahmadiyya.

    1. 15a.

      Page 237:  The teaching that Jesus escaped death.  “has become a sort of shibboleth of orthodoxy, as the rejection of this teaching is one of the accusations made against the Ahmadiyya movement.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Browne, Edward G.  Arabian Medicine.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  1921.  The FitzPatrick Lectures of 1919–1920 on the history of medicine in Islam, by the Cambridge Orientalist.  Used here for the dates of the oldest identifiable books on Ahmad's list.

    1. 16a.

      Page 45:  “The chronology of his life is very uncertain, for not only do the dates assigned to his death vary between a.d. 903 and 923”.  Browne is writing of Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (Rhazes), author of the Hawi (Latin Continens). ↩

    2. 16b.

      Page 53:  “He composed for the King 'Adudu'd-Dawla Fanakhusraw the Buwayhid his System of Medicine entitled al-Maliki”.  Browne's footnote gives 'Adud al-Dawla's reign as 949–982.  The book is the Kamil al-Sina'a, known in Latin as the Liber Regius. ↩

    3. 16c.

      Page 59:  “Avicenna, worn out by hard work and hard living, died in 428/1036-7 at the comparatively early age of 58.” ↩

  17. 17.

    Younghusband, Francis.  Kashmir.  London: Adam and Charles Black.  1909 (edition of 1911).  A descriptive book on Kashmir by the British explorer and official, written in 1908–1909.  Its chapter on the people records the local saint Yus Asaf and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's identification of him with Jesus, a few months after Ahmad's death.

    1. 17a.

      Pages 129–130:  “It is a curious theory, and was worked out by this founder of the Quadiani sect in much detail. There resided in Kashmir some 1900 years ago a saint of the name of Yus Asaf, who preached in parables and used many of the same parables as Christ used, as, for instance, the parable of the sower. His tomb is in Srinagar, and the theory of this founder of the Quadiani sect is that Yus Asaf and Jesus are one and the same person.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  18. 18.

    Lang, David Marshall.  The Wisdom of Balahvar: A Christian Legend of the Buddha.  London: George Allen and Unwin.  1957.  A translation of the Georgian version of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend, with a history of how the life of the Buddha passed through Manichaean, Arabic and Georgian hands into Christian literature, by a lecturer in Georgian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.  A postscript applies the findings to the Srinagar tomb.

    1. 18a.

      Page 25:  “It was rather when Manichaeism later spread through Central Asia and became the dominant religion in areas formerly permeated by Buddhism that the Manichaeans were led to make a thorough study of the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha.” ↩

    2. 18b.

      Page 129:  “We have already tried to show (pp. 29, 39, above) how confusion of diacritical markings in Arabic turned Budhasaf (Bodhisattva) into Yudasaf and even Yuzasaf.” ↩

    3. 18c.

      Pages 129–130:  “Furthermore, the ‘Book of Balauhar and Budhasaf’ makes the Buddha die in Kashmir, doubtless through confusion with Kusinara where he is in fact reputed to have passed away.”  “And he (Budhasaf) reached Kashmir (i.e., Kusinara), and this was the most remote place in which he ministered, and there the end of his life overtook him. And he left the world, bequeathing his heritage to a certain disciple, Ababid (i.e., Ananda) by name”.  Lang quotes the Bombay Arabic edition, pp. 285–286. ↩

    4. 18d.

      Page 130:  “The Kashmir story gives Yus Asaf a disciple called Ba’bid; this is the Ababid of ‘Balauhar and Budhasaf’, the Ananda of Buddhist tradition.”  “An almost identical account of the Buddha’s death is given by Ibn Babuya (see Oldenburg’s summary, pp. 250-51), where the Buddha's name occurs as Yudhasaf; this same passage turns up practically verbatim among the lore on the Kashmir Yus Asaf”.  “As for the parable of the Sower, this occurs in the earliest Arabic non-Christian versions of the Budhasaf or Bodhisattva story”. ↩

    5. 18e.

      Page 129:  “Even a superficial reading of the sources quoted by Mr. Graves and Mr. Podro, however, suffices to show that they have no possible bearing on the life of Christ, but are simply a reflection of the Muslim story of Gautama Buddha as transmitted in the Arabic ‘Book of Balauhar and Budhasaf’, the prototype of the Christian Barlaam and Josaphat legend.”  Robert Graves and Joshua Podro had argued for the tomb in Jesus in Rome (1957). ↩

    6. 18f.

      Page 34:  “The earliest surviving version of the Arabic Balauhar and Budhasaf (Barlaam and Ioasaph) story to which a more or less precise date can be assigned is an adaptation incorporated in a tenth century work on the Shi'a doctrine of the Hidden Imam.”  Lang adds that its author, Ibn Babuya (Ibn Babawayh) of Qum, died at Rayy in AD 991. ↩

  19. 19.

    Müller, F. Max.  “On the Migration of Fables.”  Chips from a German Workshop 4.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.  1870 (edition of 1895).  A lecture given at the Royal Institution in June 1870, tracing how Indian stories travelled west.  Its best-known section shows that the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat is a Christian retelling of the life of the Buddha.

    1. 19a.

      Page 170:  “His father, therefore, tries by all means in his power to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian hermit, however, gains access to the prince”. ↩

    2. 19b.

      Page 175:  “No one, I believe, can read these two stories without feeling convinced that one was borrowed from the other ; and as Fa Hian, three hundred years before John of Damascus, saw the towers which commemorated the three drives of Buddha still standing among the ruins of the royal city of Kapilavastu, it follows that the Greek father borrowed his subject from the Buddhist scriptures.” ↩

  20. 20.

    Woodward, G. R., and H. Mattingly.  St. John Damascene:  Barlaam and Ioasaph.  London: Heinemann (Loeb Classical Library 34).  1914.  The Loeb Greek text and English translation of the Byzantine romance of Barlaam and Ioasaph, traditionally credited to John of Damascus.  The editors' preface states the Buddhist origin of the plot.

    1. 20a.

      Page v:  “A comparison of the story with the well-known legend of Buddha must convince every open-minded reader, that the outline of the plot is derived from the same Eastern source”.  “the holy saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India, whose wonderful acts Saint John of Damascus has described.”  “Thus Buddha takes his place as a Christian saint, for Joasaph is a corruption of the title Bodhisatta.” ↩

  21. 21.

    Ahmad, Khwaja Nazir.  Jesus in Heaven on Earth.  Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam Lahore.  1952 (edition of 1998).  The fullest Ahmadiyya presentation of the evidence for the Srinagar tomb, by a Lahore Ahmadiyya lawyer, gathering Persian and Arabic texts, Kashmiri chronicles, inscriptions and a 1770 court decree.  Its translations are its own.

    1. 21a.

      Pages 398–399:  Nazir Ahmad's translation of Ibn Babawayh's Kamal al-Din, pp. 357–358.  “But before his death he sent for a disciple of his, Ba’bad (Thomas) by name, who used to serve him and was well-versed in all matters.”  “directed Ba’bad (Thomas) to prepare a tomb over him (at the very place he died).” ↩

    2. 21b.

      Page 400:  “He completed his Waqiat-i-Kashmir (also known as Tarikh-i-Azami) in 1148 A. H. (1729 C.E.)”  “It is well known amongst the people of the locality that there lies a prophet who had come to Kashmir in ancient times.”  Nazir Ahmad's translation of Didamari.  On the date, see the note on Hijri dates. ↩ ↩

    3. 21c.

      Page 414:  “and is dated 11th Jumada-al-Thania of year 1184 A.H. (1766 C.E.)”  “at the holy shrine of Yuz Asaf Prophet (Paighambar)”.  “He was a prince by descent and had given up all worldly affairs and was a law-giver. He used to devote himself to the prayer of God, day and night; and used to spend most of his time alone in meditation.”  Nazir Ahmad's own translation of a decree he photographed in the possession of the shrine's hereditary custodian.  The decree settles a claim to the offerings made at the shrine. ↩ ↩

    4. 21d.

      Page 401:  “The book, when I saw it, was moth-eaten and the first and last few pages were unfortunately missing. I had the relevant folio photographed, but before I could complete my negotiations for the purchase of the MSS. I had to leave Srinagar on account of the Partition of India.”  “Hazrat Yuz Asaf having come (marfu: elevated) from (Bait-ul-Muqaddas) the Holy Land to this holy valley (Wadi-e-Aqdas) proclaimed his prophethood.”  On p. 303 Nazir Ahmad dates Nadiri's work to the reigns of Sultan Sikandar and Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. ↩

    5. 21e.

      Page 409:  “Dar een waqt Yuz Asaf da’wa-i-paighambari mikunad, Sal punjah wa chahar. (At this time Yuz Asaf proclaimed his prophethood. Year fifty and four.).”  “Aishan Yusu paighambar-i-Bani Israil ast. (He is Jesus, Prophet of the Children of Israel).”  “After the conquest of Kashmir by the Sikhs, these last two inscriptions were mutilated. They are still visible but cannot be read intelligibly.”  “Mulla Nadiri the earliest Muslim historian of Kashmir, whom I have already quoted, gives the text of the last two only.” ↩

    6. 21f.

      Page 402:  “It is in Sanskrit and is said to have been written in 3191 Laukika era (115 C.E.). This book was printed, for the first time, in Bombay in 1967 Bikrami era (1910 C.E.)”  “His reply was that he was Yusashaphat (Yuz Asaf), and had been born of a woman”.  Page 409:  “It is (to establish) love, truth and purity of heart and for this I am called Isa Masih.”  Nazir Ahmad's translation;  he gives the source as the Bhavishya Purana, Parva 3, Adhyaya 2, verses 9–31. ↩

    7. 21g.

      Page 395:  “Although the layout of the slab of the Tomb is North-South, having been built by the Muslims in later days according to their custom, but the actual grave in the basement is East-West like the Jewish graves.”  The statement is a caption to the author's plan of the burial chamber. ↩

  22. 22.

    Converting Hijri years.  The Islamic year has 354.367 days against 365.2425 for the solar year, and AH 1 began in July AD 622.  So AD ≈ 622.54 + (AH − 1) × 0.97022.  AH 1148 gives AD 1735.4, so the year ran from May 1735 to May 1736;  AH 1184 gives AD 1770.3;  AH 871, the burial of Syed Nasiruddin beside the shrine, gives AD 1466.6;  AH 381, the death of Ibn Babawayh, gives AD 991.2, as Lang has it.  Nazir Ahmad's own figures (1729, 1766, 1451, and 962 for Ibn Babawayh on his p. 397) are each about AH + 581, the result of treating lunar years as solar ones. ↩

  23. 23.

    Hassnain, F. M.  A Search for the Historical Jesus.  1994.  A book by a Kashmiri archivist and the best-known local promoter of the Srinagar tomb, arguing that Jesus survived the cross, lived in Kashmir and is buried at Roza Bal.  It reports the Persian and Kashmiri sources from its author's own research.

    1. 23a.

      Page 198:  “The manuscript was in the possession of the son of the chief caretaker of Rozabal, a friend of mine, Sahibzada Basharat Salim. He avoided the issue for years”.  “For this reason he would not show me the manuscript of the history written by Mulla Nadiri, nor documents relating to his family background.” ↩

    2. 23b.

      Page 199:  “The work by Mulla Nadiri, written in 1420, deals with the ministry of Jesus in Kashmir. He says that Yuzu Asaph came to Kashmir from Palestine.” ↩

    3. 23c.

      Page 16:  “At this time, I held the post of Director of State Archives, which maintained repositories at Jammu, Srinagar and Leh.”  Elsewhere in the book he describes himself as having been head of Oriental Research in Kashmir for twenty years and later Director of Archives, Archaeology and Museums in Jammu and Kashmir. ↩

  24. 24.

    Rocher, Ludo.  “The Purāṇas.”  A History of Indian Literature II, fasc. 3.  Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.  Edited by Jan Gonda.  1986.  The standard scholarly survey of the Purana literature, describing each text, its editions and the scholarship on its date.  Its entry on the Bhavishya Purana summarises what Sanskritists have found about each of its four parts.

    1. 24a.

      Page 153:  “The Pratisargaparvan has been principally responsible for Aufrecht’s often quoted disappointment with the Bhavisya°: the fact that the text (3.1.4.16—5.20) contains a description of the Biblical Genesis made Aufrecht speak of the Bhavisya° as a “literarischen Betrug.””  “It narrates stories about Adam, Noah, Yakuta and others, and speaks about Taimurlang, Nadir Shah and Akbar with their decendants.”  “It even knows the British rule in India and names Calcutta and the Parliament (asta-kausalya).”  “Hazra concludes that, even though the parvan is mentioned at Bhavisya° 1.2.2—3, it “is practically a new work.””  Rocher is quoting R. C. Hazra, Studies in the Puranic Records on Hindu Rites and Customs (1940), p. 172.  His footnote 93 quotes Theodor Aufrecht's 1903 review, which blamed the passage on an unscrupulous worker at the Sri Venkatesvara press in Bombay, so a printed edition existed before the 1910 printing Nazir Ahmad calls the first.  “Es bereitet kein Vergnügen, einen Betrüger zu entlarven.” ↩

  25. 25.

    Hultzsch, E.  “Inscriptions of Asoka.”  Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum 1.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  New edition.  1925.  The standard critical edition of Ashoka's inscriptions, giving each text, its variants and an English translation, with an introduction that dates the edicts by the king's regnal years.  Used here for the edict in which Ashoka names five Greek kings his teaching had reached.

    1. 25a.

      Page 70:  Rock Edict XIII, Shahbazgarhi version.  “where the Yona king named Antiyoka (is ruling), and beyond this Antiyoka, (where) four kings (are ruling), (viz. the king) named Turamaya, (the king) named Antikini, (the king) named Maka, (and the king) named Alikasudara”. ↩

  26. 26.

    Strabo.  Geography, Book 2.  Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1.  Translated by H. L. Jones.  c. 23 (edition of 1917).  The Greek geographer's survey of the known world, written under Augustus and Tiberius.  He reports what he learned in Egypt about the Indian trade when he travelled up the Nile with the prefect Aelius Gallus in the 20s BC.

    1. 26a.

      Book 2, chapter 5, section 12, page 455:  “I learned that as many as one hundred and twenty vessels were sailing from Myos Hormos to India, whereas formerly, under the Ptolemies, only a very few ventured to undertake the voyage and to carry on traffic in Indian merchandise.” ↩

  27. 27.

    Pliny the Elder.  The Natural History, Book 6.  London: Taylor and Francis.  Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley.  c. 77 (edition of 1855).  The Roman encyclopedist's account of the sea route from Egypt to India, with sailing times, written about forty years after the crucifixion.

    1. 27a.

      Book 6, chapter 26:  “If the wind, called Hippalus, happens to be blowing, it is possible to arrive in forty days at the nearest mart of India, Muziris by name.” ↩

  28. 28.

    Strabo.  Geography, Book 15.  Loeb Classical Library, vol. 7.  Translated by H. L. Jones.  c. 23 (edition of 1930).  Strabo's book on India, drawing on earlier Greek writers.  Its last section quotes Nicolaus of Damascus, who met an Indian embassy to Augustus at Antioch.

    1. 28a.

      Book 15, chapter 1, section 73, pages 127–129:  “they were accompanied also, according to him, by the man who burned himself up at Athens”.  “Here lies Zarmanochegas, an Indian from Bargosa, who immortalised himself in accordance with the ancestral customs of Indians.”  Bargosa is Barygaza, the port of Bharuch in Gujarat. ↩

  29. 29.

    Cassius Dio.  Roman History, Book 54.  Loeb Classical Library, vol. 6.  Translated by Earnest Cary.  c. 229 (edition of 1917).  A Greek history of Rome by a senator of the early third century, arranged year by year.  It places the Indian embassy in the year of the consuls of 20 BC, while Augustus wintered at Samos.

    1. 29a.

      Book 54, chapter 9, section 8–10, pages 305–307:  “the people of India, who had already made overtures, now made a treaty of friendship”.  “One of the Indians, Zarmarus, for some reason wished to die, — either because, being of the caste of sages, he was on this account moved by ambition, or, in accordance with the traditional custom of the Indians, because of old age”. ↩

  30. 30.

    The great-circle distance from Nazareth (32.70° N, 35.30° E) to Srinagar (34.08° N, 74.80° E), by the haversine formula with an earth radius of 6,371 km, is 3,648 km.  Roads through Mesopotamia, Iran and Bactria add perhaps 10–30%, so about 4,000 km.  At 25–30 km a day that is 135–160 travelling days, about five months each way.  By sea, Pliny's forty days from the mouth of the Red Sea, plus a month to reach it from Alexandria, brings a traveller to Muziris in Kerala, which is 2,665 km in a straight line from Srinagar. ↩

  31. 31.

    Seydel, Rudolf.  Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zu Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre.  Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.  1882.  The first full attempt to derive Gospel stories from Buddhist ones.  It sets about fifty Gospel passages against Buddhist parallels in a "harmony" and proposes a lost poetic gospel as the channel.

    1. 31a.

      Page 303:  “Keineswegs aber ist Lukas selbst der christliche Dichter, der die Vorbilder Indiens benutzte”. ↩

    2. 31b.

      Page 304:  “Diese dritte Quelle vermuthen wir in einem poe tisch apokalyptischen Evangelium frühester Zeit, welches seinen christlichen Stoff, in edelster Heiligung und Reinigung das Vorgefundene der fremden verwandten Literatur gleichsam durch eine Wiedergeburt aus dem christlichen Geiste umschaffend, in die Umrahmungen des buddhistischen Evangelientypus spannte.”  The scan reads "poe tisch" across a line break, for "poetisch". ↩

  32. 32.

    Edmunds, Albert J.  Buddhist and Christian Gospels, Now First Compared from the Originals.  Philadelphia: Innes and Sons.  4th edition.  Edited by Masaharu Anesaki.  1908.  A two-volume comparison of more than a hundred passages from the Pali canon with the Gospels, by an American who worked from the Pali texts and the Chinese versions.  Edmunds thought a few small loans by Luke were possible but set a strict rule for proving any of them.

    1. 32a.

      Page 111:  “our principle should be to regard nothing as borrowed unless proven by express reference, by identity of text or sequence of narrative, accompanied with demonstrable intercourse.” ↩

    2. 32b.

      Page 156:  “I still think, with Seydel, that one of the πολλοί of his Prolog (Luke I. 1) may have been an Aramaic poetical Gospel, now lost, which had drawn materials from the Buddha-legend”. ↩

    3. 32c.

      Page 158:  “If the reader wishes to see what can be said in favor of Christian loans from Buddhism (loans by no means of fundamental importance), let him read my two essays”. ↩

    4. 32d.

      Page 77:  “Fausboll, in his introduction to the first European text of the Sutta-Nipato, considers some parts of it later than the Christian era, and that the story of Asito has been borrowed from the Gospel of Luke.”  “We are now in a position to show that the Sutta-Nipato, in all its parts, was already old at the time of Christ.” ↩

  33. 33.

    Garbe, Richard.  India and Christendom: The Historical Connections between Their Religions.  La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.  1914 (edition of 1959).  A survey of contacts between Indian religions and Christianity by a Tübingen Indologist, translated into English in 1959.  Garbe rejects most proposed Buddhist parallels to the Gospels and argues for four.

    1. 33a.

      Page 58:  “In the Introduction to Jataka 78 it is related that Buddha fed first his five hundred disciples and then all the inmates of a cloister with one loaf that was put in his begging bowl, and that a great deal of bread besides was left over and thrown into a hole by the gateway.”  Garbe counts this parallel among the striking ones because food is left over in both stories. ↩

    2. 33b.

      Page 47:  “I turn now to those cases—four in number—in which after long consideration I have become convinced that Buddhist influence in the Gospel stories cannot be denied.”  The four are the Asita-Simeon story, the temptation, Peter's walking on the water and the feeding of the multitude. ↩

    3. 33c.

      Page 56:  “In comparing this Buddhist story with the Christian one the corresponding feature that Peter began to sink as a consequence of his little faith, just as Buddha’s disciple did because of his wavering contemplation, is much more important than the theme of walking on the water. It seems impossible to account for this most remarkable coincidence in any other way than by a loan.” ↩

    4. 33d.

      Page 57:  “the Buddhist story is not in the Jataka itself but in the introduction to it and hence belongs to the so-called “Stories of the Present,” whose composition brings us down to the fifth century A. D.”  “The idea that men can walk on water by the power of their asceticism or on account of their virtue or piety is very old and widespread in India but it is entirely foreign to Judaism.”  Garbe argues that the story's substance is older than the commentary, as Oldenberg, Charpentier and Winternitz held for the Jataka prose in general. ↩ ↩ ↩

  34. 34.

    Gruber, Elmar R., and Holger Kersten.  The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity.  Shaftesbury: Element.  1995.  A popular book arguing that Jesus's teaching came from Buddhism through missionaries sent west by Ashoka, and that Jesus survived the cross and died in Kashmir.

    1. 34a.

      Page 75:  “There is much evidence to show that Jesus himself, after surviving the crucifixion, took the land route to India.” ↩

  35. 35.

    Lindtner, Christian.  Jesus is Buddha.  n.d.  The website on which Christian Lindtner set out his claim that the Gospels are translations of Buddhist Sanskrit texts.  It names no manuscript or edition for the "discoveries" it announces.

    1. 35a.

      Section Home page:  “A careful comparison, word by word, sentence by sentence, shows that the Christian Gospels are Pirate-copies of the Buddhist Gospels”.  “Names are slightly changed for the source has to be kept secret.” ↩

  36. 36.

    Thomas, Edward J.  The Life of Buddha as Legend and History.  London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.  1927.  A standard English account of the Buddha's life that separates the oldest Pali sources from later legend.  Its chapter "Buddhism and Christianity" weighs the proposed Gospel parallels one by one against the dates of the Buddhist texts.

    1. 36a.

      Pages 247–248:  “Seydel's fifty instances are reduced by van den Bergh to nine. In proportion to the investigator’s direct knowledge of the Buddhist sources the number seems to decrease.”  “Garbe assumes direct borrowing in four cases, Simeon, the Temptation, Peter walking on the sea, and the Miracle of the loaves and fishes. Charpentier considers Simeon the only unobjectionable example. Other scholars reject all connexion.”  “breaks down in every one of its supposed proofs.” ↩ ↩

    2. 36b.

      Page 39:  “It is clearly late, as is shown by the reference to the thirty-two marks; and as it is in general agreement with the Sanskrit accounts, there is nothing to prove that it is as early as the pre-Christian era.” ↩

    3. 36c.

      Page 241:  “The story cannot be proved to be pre-Christian, but the idea certainly is, as the power of going over water as if on dry land is one of the magic powers attained by concentration.”  “There is no likelihood of its being old, as these introductions appear to be often the invention of the commentator.” ↩

    4. 36d.

      Page 246:  “Another late Buddhist story that has been brought into comparison (Introduction to Jataka No. 78)”.  “This belongs to the same part of the Jataka as the tale of the disciple walking on the water, and the same remarks apply.” ↩

    5. 36e.

      Page 245:  “As this parable belongs to a work that in its earliest form is not earlier than the second century a.D., there is no question of borrowing by the Evangelist”. ↩

    6. 36f.

      Page 36:  “The oldest accounts of Buddha’s ancestry appear to presuppose nothing abnormal about his birth”.  “This is not properly a virgin birth, but it may be called parthogenetic, that is, Suddhodana was not his progenitor.” ↩

  37. 37.

    Derrett, J. Duncan M.  “The Epistle of James and the Dhammapada Commentary.”  Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 82:36–39.  2006.  A short article by a scholar of Hindu law who in retirement studied parallels between Buddhist texts and Greek, Jewish and Christian ones.  It states his general view of borrowing in both directions, comments on Lindtner, and argues that a Buddhist commentary story may draw on James 4:13–17 or a source shared with it.

    1. 37a.

      Page 36:  “Buddhist texts, classed as hīnayāna or mahāyāna, make use of Greek, Jewish, and Christian material.”  The opening sentence of the article. ↩

    2. 37b.

      Page 36:  “Dr Christian Lindtner propounds an unexpected explanation for parallels, viz. that Matthew and others copied Buddhist texts almost verbatim. Indian readers take kindly to the idea that Christian texts owed something to Indian originals, but few Western Buddhologists have been convinced.” ↩

  38. 38.

    Fausbøll, V.  “The Sutta-Nipâta.”  Sacred Books of the East 10, part 2.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  1881.  The first English translation of the Sutta Nipata, a Pali collection that contains some of the oldest Buddhist verse, including the ballads of the sage Asita and of the temptation by Mara.

    1. 38a.

      Pages 125–127, verse 691:  “Then remembering his own migration he was displeased and shed tears”.  Verse 694:  “I shall not hear the Dhamma of the incomparable one”. ↩

    2. 38b.

      Pages 69–71, verse 426:  “A thousandth part of thee (is the property) of death, (only) one part (belongs to) life; living life, O thou venerable one, is better”.  The words in parentheses are the translator's. ↩

  39. 39.

    Winternitz, M.  A History of Indian Literature, vol. 2:  Buddhist Literature and Jaina Literature.  Calcutta: University of Calcutta.  1933.  The standard early twentieth-century history of Indian literature, translated from German.  Volume 2 dates each Buddhist text from its manuscripts, translations and internal evidence.

    1. 39a.

      Page 97:  Footnote on the Nalaka Sutta.  “it is indeed one of the most striking Buddhist parallels to the Gospels.”  “Windisch regards it as “not absolutely proved that the Simeon of St. Luke owes his existence to the Asita of the Buddhist legend.””  Page 96:  “precious remnants of that ancient sacred ballad-poetry from which the later epic version of the life of Buddha grew”. ↩

    2. 39b.

      Page 189:  “Unfortunately we have no clue for a definite determination of the date of the Jataka commentary, and consequently, not of the Nidāna-Kathā either.” ↩ ↩

    3. 39c.

      Page 304:  “we shall most probably be right in placing the nucleus of the work as far back as the first century A.D., as it is quoted by Nāgārjuna, who probably lived towards the end of the 2nd century A. D.”  “The work was first translated into Chinese in 223 A.D. This translation has not come down to us, but we have those of Dharmaraksa (286 A. D.)” ↩

  40. 40.

    The Jataka, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Edited by E. B. Cowell.  1895.  The standard English translation of the Pali Jataka collection with its prose commentary.  The stories quoted here come from the commentary's introductions, which tell how each birth-story came to be told.

    1. 40a.

      Section vol. 2, Jataka 190, introduction, page 111:  “he walked into the river. His feet did not sink below the water. He got as far as mid-river walking as though he were on dry land; but there he noticed the waves. Then his ecstasy subsided, and his feet began to sink.” ↩

    2. 40b.

      Section vol. 1, Jataka 78, introduction, pages 346–349:  “Lastly the Treasurer and his wife ate their fill, but still there seemed no end to the cakes.”  “So they threw them away in a cave not far from the gateway”. ↩ ↩

  41. 41.

    Kern, H.  “Saddharma-Puṇḍarîka, or The Lotus of the True Law.”  Sacred Books of the East 21.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  1884.  The first English translation of the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana scripture.  Its fourth chapter contains the parable of the rich father and his lost son.

    1. 41a.

      Page 100:  “had always and ever been thinking of the son he had lost fifty years ago”. ↩

    2. 41b.

      Page 105:  “In this manner, Lord, the householder affected with longing for his son employs him for the clearing of the heap of dirt during twenty years”. ↩

    3. 41c.

      Pages 106–107:  “Even so, O Lord, do we represent the sons of the Tathagata, and the Tathagata says to us : Ye are my sons, as the householder did.”  “Then have we been prompted by the Lord to ponder on the numerous inferior laws (or conditions, things) that are similar to a heap of dirt.” ↩

  42. 42.

    Lüders, Heinrich.  Bruchstücke der Kalpanāmaṇḍitikā des Kumāralāta.  Leipzig: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft.  1926.  An edition of the manuscript fragments from Turfan of Kumaralata's collection of Buddhist tales.  Its introduction dates Kumaralata and compares his stories with other versions.

    1. 42a.

      Page 124:  In the 22nd tale of the Kalpanamanditika the girl gives the monks, at a festival in Tamasavana,  “zwei Kupferstücke, die sie auf dem Kehrichthaufen gefunden hat”.  Lüders goes on to say that her wish for a reward is granted:  a king who has lost his wife sees her, falls in love and makes her his queen. ↩

    2. 42b.

      Page 25:  Aśvaghoṣa would belong more to the first half and Kumāralāta more to.  “der zweiten Hälfte des zweiten Jahrhunderts n. Chr. angehören.” ↩

  43. 43.

    Rhys Davids, T. W.  Buddhist Birth Stories (Jataka Tales):  The Commentarial Introduction Entitled Nidāna-Kathā.  London: Trübner.  1880.  The first English translation of the Nidanakatha, the introduction to the Jataka commentary, which tells the life of the Buddha from his previous births to his awakening.

    1. 43a.

      Page 63:  “Then the future Buddha, who had become a superb white elephant, and was wandering on the Golden Hill, not far from there, descended thence, and ascending the Silver Hill, approached her from the North.”  “he gently struck her right side, and seemed to enter her womb.” ↩

  44. 44.

    Meier, John P.  A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1:  The Roots of the Problem and the Person.  New York: Doubleday.  1991.  The first volume of the most detailed modern historical study of Jesus, by a Catholic priest and New Testament scholar who restricts himself to what historians of any belief could accept.  Its chapters on Jesus's upbringing weigh what can be known of his life before the ministry.

    1. 44a.

      Page 253:  “nothing certain can be said about the influences that molded the Jesus known to us through the public ministry.”  “The reason why authors of both apocryphal Infancy Gospels (like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) and modern novels have gravitated to the so-called “hidden years” of Jesus’ life in Nazareth is that they can give free rein to their imaginations (pious or impious), with no facts to restrain them.” ↩

    2. 44b.

      Pages 351–352:  “all signs point to an uneventful adolescence and adulthood spent at woodworking in Nazareth. However galling the Gospels’ silence about Jesus’ “hidden years” may be, the silence may have a simple explanation: nothing much happened.” ↩

    3. 44c.

      Page 313, chapter 9, note 169:  “is not borne out by the exegesis of the various verses in the context of their respective pericopes. In particular, the mocking rhetorical questions introduced by ouch (e.g., Matt 13:55; Mark 6:3) should not be taken in a literalistic fashion.”  “it seems unlikely that Jesus would have been invited to read the lesson from the prophets on the Sabbath if the Nazarenes considered him an unknown stranger.”  “As for John 6:42, it simply does not belong in this discussion at all, since the rhetorical ouch question is posed by the Jews in the synagogue of Capernaum, not Nazareth.”  Meier is answering W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann, Matthew (Anchor Bible), pp. 21–22. ↩

  45. 45.

    Nongbri, Brent.  “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel.”  Harvard Theological Review 98(1):23–48.  2005.  A study of how the oldest fragment of John has been dated, by a historian of early Christian manuscripts.  It compares P52's handwriting with securely dated documents and concludes that its possible dates run later than the popular AD 125.

    1. 45a.

      Page 46:  “What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries.” ↩ ↩

  46. 46.

    Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism.  IVP Academic.  Edited by Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry.  2019.  An edited book of essays by evangelical textual critics, written to correct their own side's inflated apologetic claims.  It is the closest thing this field has to a self-audit.  The article draws on its chapters on the manuscript count, the classical comparison, the early translations and the church fathers.

    1. 46a.

      Page 69:  The chapter's stated takeaway:  “Most manuscripts of the New Testament are only manuscripts of part of the New Testament, and providing an exact count of them is a fool's errand.  It is best to say that there are about fifty-three hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts in existence, although fifty-one hundred might be the safer estimate.”  Page 52:  The chapter's starting figure: summing the catalog.  “results in a count of 5,885 manuscripts…  The 5,885 total just cited, for instance, is surely incorrect, as will be shown.” ↩ ↩

  47. 47.

    Josephus.  Antiquities of the Jews.  Translated by William Whiston.  c. 93.  The Jewish historian's history of his people, finished in the thirteenth year of Domitian.  It mentions Jesus at 18.63–64, in a passage later altered by Christian copyists, and again at 20.200 as the brother of James.  It is cited here for its date. ↩

  48. 48.

    Tacitus.  Annals.  Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb.  c. 116 (edition of 1876).  The Roman historian's account of the empire under the Julio-Claudians.  Its report of Nero's persecution after the fire of AD 64 names Christus as executed by Pontius Pilate under Tiberius.  It is cited here for its date. ↩

  49. 49.

    Klijn, A. F. J.  The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary.  Leiden: Brill (Supplements to Novum Testamentum 108).  2nd revised edition.  2003.  The standard English edition of the Acts of Thomas, translated from the Syriac with an introduction and commentary.  It dates the work and discusses its one historical name, King Gudnaphar.

    1. 49a.

      Page 15:  “It is generally assumed that the Acts of Thomas have to be dated to the beginning of the third century. The place of origin is more difficult to establish. The city of Edessa is possible, but it is not more than a guess.” ↩

    2. 49b.

      Page 21:  “From coins a king is known with this name who was reigning in North India”.  “It is not certain at which time Gudnaphar reigned, but it may be about 30–15 B.C. It seems that the author of these Acts introduced a legendary king who once lived in this area”. ↩ ↩

  50. 50.

    The Apocryphal New Testament.  Oxford: Clarendon Press.  Translated by M. R. James.  1924.  The standard English collection of the early Christian apocrypha, with short introductions, by M. R. James.  Used here for the Acts of Thomas, the romance that sends the apostle Thomas to India.

    1. 50a.

      Page 365:  “there was there a certain merchant come from India whose name was Abbanes, sent from the King Gundaphorus, and having commandment from him to buy a carpenter and bring him unto him.”  “I have a slave that is a carpenter and I desire to sell him.”  James's footnote:  “Gundaphorus is an historical personage who reigned over a part of India in the first century after Christ. His coins bear his name in Greek, as ‘Hyndopherés’.” ↩

  51. 51.

    Konow, Sten.  “Kharoshthi Inscriptions with the Exception of Those of Asoka.”  Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum 2, part 1.  Calcutta: Government of India.  1929.  The standard edition of the inscriptions of north-western India in the Kharoshthi script.  Its historical introduction dates the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares from the Takht-i-Bahi inscription and his coins.

    1. 51a.

      Page xlv:  “There can hardly be any doubt about the identity of the king Gudnaphar and the successor of Azes in north-western India, and we can infer that the existence of this king, as ruling shortly after the death of Christ, had become known to the Christian world at an early date.” ↩

  52. 52.

    Brown, Raymond E.  An Introduction to the New Testament.  New York: Doubleday.  1997.  The standard mainstream introduction to the New Testament by a Catholic scholar of Union Theological Seminary.  Each chapter opens with a summary giving Brown's date for the book;  the article uses these as the mainstream dates.

    1. 52a.

      Page 127:  “Date: 60-75, most likely between 68 and 73.” ↩

    2. 52b.

      Page 163:  “The failure of NT works to make specific and detailed mention of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple is very hard to explain.”  “but we should not pretend that we have a satisfactory answer.” ↩

  53. 53.

    Beskow, Per.  Strange Tales about Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press.  1983.  A survey of modern apocryphal gospels, translated from the Swedish.  Its chapter on Notovitch summarises Müller's and Douglas's findings and traces the later Issa literature, including Roerich's borrowings. ↩