The Messiah Secret - James Becker [134]
• Jesus lived in Nazareth. In fact, it’s almost certain that Nazareth didn’t exist as a settlement when Jesus was alive, and ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is actually a mistranslation of an Old Testament passage by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew. The name ‘Iesous Nazarene’ or ‘Nazareneus’ means that Jesus was a Nazarene, not that he came from a place called Nazareth. If the writer had meant that he did come from Nazareth, the correct word would have been either ‘Nazarethenos’ or ‘Nazarethaios’. A ‘Nazarene’ was an ascetic, a holy person who spent a lot of time praying, and who lived simply with no or few possessions. They were an important sect in northern Palestine, and may also have been known as ‘Mandaeans’.
There’s also a large gap in the story of the life of Jesus Christ that the Christian Church never mentions. His birth is talked about, then His appearance at the Temple at the age of twelve or thirteen, His ministry and of course His death and apparent Resurrection, but where was Jesus between the ages of about thirteen and thirty?
There’s evidence that Christ spent quite a lot of His early life outside Judea, and it appears quite possible that He actually lived in India for at least a part of this time. Such travels were not unknown in the first century AD. What later became known as the Silk Road or Silk Route was already well established, and there was frequent two-way traffic between the countries around the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as China.
In the winter of 1887, a man named Nicolai Notovitch was travelling through India as a correspondent for the Russian journal Novaya Vremiya. In November he was in the Kashmir region, near Ladakh, when he fell from his horse and suffered a broken leg. His bearers carried him to the Hemis Gompa monastery for medical treatment. While he was there, Notovitch was told a story that astonished him.
He was slightly puzzled that he’d been given such excellent treatment by the residents of the monastery, and was told by one of the lamas that, as a European, they considered him to essentially share their faith, to almost be a Buddhist. Notovitch objected that he was a Christian, not a Buddhist, but the lama told him that the greatest of all the Buddhist prophets, a man named Issa, was also the founder of the Christian religion. The head lama produced two bound volumes of loose leaves, from which he read the story of Issa to Notovitch, who took notes and recorded as much as he could.
According to these ancient records, Issa was born in Israel, and arrived in India when he was about fourteen years old in company with a group of merchants. For the next fifteen years or so, he travelled throughout the sub-continent, including a six-year stint in Nepal, learning the tenets of Buddhism and acquiring a reputation as a preacher and a prophet. He then returned home to Israel to try to combat the oppression of the Jewish people. These texts, Notovitch was told, were part of a collection of ancient Tibetan writings compiled in Pali, an old Indian language, during the first two centuries AD.
The parallels between the lives of Issa and Jesus were obvious, and on his return to Europe Notovitch attempted to publicize his discovery, but every Church official, including one at the Vatican, warned him in the strongest possible terms not to try to publish anything about this strange story. And the power of the Church at the end of the nineteenth century was sufficient to ensure that when Notovitch did finally manage to publish La Vie Inconnue de