The Lost Years of Christ

The Lost Years of Christ

We know that Jesus has many years of his life accounted for in the Bible. Ancient manuscripts discovered in India may help us fill in the blanks. In the early 1900s, a Russian man traveled to India. While traveling, he broke his leg and was taken to the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh to heal. His name was Nicolos Notovich. He learned from the lamas that Jesus Christ had been to India, according to records in a manuscript preserved in the monastery's library. He had the manuscript brought to him and got it translated into Russian. He eventually wrote a book entitled The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, discussing Christ's journey in India; sadly, when the manuscript came to the attention of the Catholic Church, they did everything in their power to bury the story. The Church used its political power to discredit and censor the book.

Swami Abhedananda, a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna and Founder of Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, heard of this legend and his curiosity drove him to visit the Hemis Monastery so he could verify for himself this hidden legend of Jesus. In 1987 he published his book Journey into Kashmir and Tibet. The head lama of the monastery informed him there are two copies of the manuscript on Issa (as he is known in the east) or Jesus Christ. The original manuscript is in the language of Pali. The manuscript in Himis has been translated from Pali to Tibetan. It consists of fourteen chapters and two hundred twenty-four couplets (slogans). The Swami got some portion of the manuscript translated with the help of the lama attending to him.

The Issa Manuscript

Noted from Chapter 12 of The Journey into Kashmir and Tibet are the given activities of Jesus Christ in India according to the Issa manuscript:

10 Issa stepped into his thirteenth year by and by. According to the national custom of the Israelis, this is the right age for matrimony. His parents lived the life of humble folks

11 Their humble cottage came to be crowded with people proud of wealth and pedigree. Each of them was eager to accept Issa as his son-in-law

12 Issa was unwilling to marry. He had already earned fame through his expounding the true nature of God. At the proposal of marriage, he resolved to leave the house of his father in secret.

13 At this time, his great desire was to achieve full realization of god-head and learn religion at the feet of those who have attained perfection through meditation

1 At the age of fourteen, he (Jesus) crossed Sind and entered the holy land of the Aryans

2 As he was passing all along through the land of the five rivers, his benign appearance, face radiating peace, and comely forehead attracted Jain devotees who knew him to be one who had received blessings from God Himself

3 And they requested him to stay with them in their monastery. But he turned down their request; at this time, he did not like to accept anyone’s service

4 in the course of time, he arrived at Jagannath Dham (puri), the abode of Vyasa Krishna, and became the disciple of the Brahmins. He endeared himself to all and learned how to read, understand and expound the Vedas.

After this, he went on a pilgrimage to Rajagriha, Benares, etc. This took six years, and then he started for Kapilavastu, where Buddha had been born. Then he spent six years in the company of Buddhist mendicants, where he mastered Pali to perfection and studied all the Buddhist Scriptures. From here, he went to Nepal and traveled to the Himalayan region. Then he went westwards. He came to Persia, the abode of Zoroastrians, from where his fame soon spread in all directions. Then he returned to his native land once again at the age of 29. After this, he started preaching his message of peace among his brethren suffering under oppression.

The Gospel of Luke (Luke 3:23) states that Jesus was "about 30 years of age" at the start of his ministry. A chronology of Jesus typically has the date of the start of his ministry, 11 September 26 AD; others have estimated at around AD 27–29 and the end in the range AD 30–36. This timeline matches up almost perfectly with the testimony from the Hemis Manuscript.

The Tomb of Christ

Swami Abhedananda reports the Lama said that Jesus Christ came secretly to Kashmir after his resurrection and lived in a monastery surrounded by many disciples. He was considered a saint of a high order, and devotees from many lands came to see him and joined him as disciples. The original manuscript in Pali was prepared three or four years after Christ’s demise based on reports from Tibetans who saw him at this time of his life and the accounts received from wandering merchants who had witnessed his crucifixion. If someone collates in a single book all the observations made by scholars on the subject of Christ’s sojourn in India, it will undoubtedly be a valuable addition to the historical record.

Many wonder about Christ’s ascension to heaven. It’s interesting to note that Kashmir, the northernmost part of India, is more popularly known as 'Heaven on Earth'. In a city called Srinagar located in the Kashmir region of India there is a place known as Roza Bal. Roza in Persian means holy, and Bal in Kashmiri language means shrine. In the year 1899, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement claimed that this tomb belongs to Jesus Christ, about which he wrote extensively in his book, Masih Hindustan-mein (Jesus in India). The tomb is the burial place of Yuz Asaf. The name Yuz Asaf relates to Jesus, or Hazrat Isa or Issa. Interestingly, ‘Issa’ is the Tibetan name of Jesus and it is Hazrat Isa or Isa as stated in the Quran. This has been carried down through the Farhang-Asafia, Volume one, which explains how Jesus healed some leper who then became asaf or purified, meaning healed. The word yuz means leader. Thus, Yuz Asaf became a common reference to Jesus as "leader of the healed". According to him, Jesus survived the crucifixion, traveled to the Indian subcontinent where he lived until his death at the age of 120 and was buried in the beautiful valley of Kashmir. They claim that he must have chosen Kashmir because Kashmiris are considered as one among the ten ‘missing tribes’ of Israel, out of 12 Jewish tribes, who later settled in the new countries, especially along the Silk route in Afghanistan and Kashmir, after they were drove out of Israel by the Assyrians in around 700 BC. Hence, even today, many Kashmiri tribes call themselves Bnei Israel/ Bene or Bnai Israel or children of Israel1. This site of this tomb in Kashmir was recorded as a ‘sacred’ site in many Buddhist and Hindu sources before the Islamic period; hence, it attracts followers of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.