Jesus in Tibet (The Tibetan Gospel)
Dr. H. Koya“Missing years of Jesus” by Russian Spy Nicolas Notovitch Resonates with JESUS
IN INDIA and JESUS IN KASHMIR
In that founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Sect, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad takes lead role.
Of these "missing years" stories, the only one worth dealing with here is that underlying Nicholas Notovitch's Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, since this one claims an ancient documentary basis, and has its partisans even today.
In 1887, Notovitch, a Russian Jew converted to Greek Orthodoxy and a war correspondent (possibly a spy), visited the city of Leh, capital of the district of Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet. He had a toothache and sought treatment at a Moravian mission station there. But his imagination got the better of him, and in 1894 , he wrote a book which told a new and much improved version of the story. Now it seemed he had visited the Tibetan lamasery (monastery) of Hemis (also spelled Himis). Here he mentioned folk legends he had picked up about a prophet named Issa, who sounded strikingly like Jesus (in fact, it's the Arabic for Jesus). He was informed, he said, that the Hemis monastery itself housed a two-volume manuscript called The Life of Saint Issa! He hesitated to ask for access to the sacred book, but announced he would return. This happened sooner than expected, however, when he fell from his horse and broke his leg. Carried back to the monastery, he arranged to have Saint Issa read aloud and translated for him as he recuperated. As the story unfolded, his initial suspicions were confirmed: this could be nothing less than a hitherto-unknown chapter in the career of Jesus. He listened carefully and made copious notes. He reorganized much of the material to make it suitable for Western readers and he finally produced The Unknown Life of Jesus 94). The book created an international furor. ld attest there was no such document as Notovitch claimed to have used . Notovitch was exposed as a fraud and that was the end of it for a while.
Other Witnesses
Swami Abhedananda (a disciple of the great Vedanta sage and mystic Ramakrishna) had read Notovitch's book and determined to find the truth of the matter. He was an admirer of Jesus but skeptical of Notovitch's account. So in 1922 he, too, traveled to Hemis. In the late 1970s in an interview with Dick and Janet Bock, his disciple Swami Prajnananda declared that his master "found the scrolls and he translated all the writings, all the life incidents of the Christ. He narrated those incidents in his book 'Kashmiri O Tibetti.'" [Bock, p. 21]. "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." [Bock, p. 22].
But this is not exactly what Swami Abhedananda said in his book (Journey into Kashmir and Tibet). There we read that "he requested to be allowed to see the book. . . . The lama who was acting as our
-2guide took a manuscript from the shelf and showed it to the Swami. He said that it was an exact translation of the original manuscript which was lying in the monastery of Marbour near Lhasa. The original manuscript [as per Notovitch] is in Pali, while the manuscript preserved in Himis is in Tibetan. It consists of fourteen chapters and two hundred twenty-four couplets (slokas). The Swami got some portion of the manuscript translated with the help of the lama attending on him." [p. 119 why is the narrative third person i n a supposed autobiography?].
The excerpt that follows closely parallels, though not exactly, the corresponding section of Notovitch's book, also included in full as an appendix. It reads as if it might be a summary or abridgment of Notovitch. Note that in Journey into Kashmir and Tibet, we read not that Swami Abhedananda himself translated the text but that he managed to get someone to translate for him from a Tibetan text he could not read. And note that the Saint Issa gospel is once again a scroll, a single document, a version of the story which Notovitch himself had since abandoned! Also, note the curious fact that the material occurs in the same order as in Notovitch's version, though Notovitch says he had to rearrange it _extensively!
Müller Refutes Notovitch's Story
The book did not escape the scrutiny of scholars. For one thing, Notovitch could offer no manuscript for examination, only an excuse for lacking one (he could not take it from the monastery). The great Orientalist Max Müller, editor of the epoch-making Sacred Books of the East series of translated Eastern scriptures, took an interest in Notovitch's claims. He pointed out that such an honored work as Notovitch described would inevitably have been included in the great canon lists of Tibetan books, the Kanjur and the Tanjur but it wasn't.
Plus, Notovitch's frame story itself smacked too much of the legendary, the fictive. For the Russian maintained that the Life of Saint Issa was first compiled when Jewish merchants, having journeyed to India, told the recent news of Jesus' fiery preaching and crucifixion in Judea. By a Dickensian stroke of luck, among the crowd of those who heard this tale just happened to be the very Asians who had themselves met Issa in India a few years before! And these people were somehow certain that this Jesus was the same as the Issa whom they had known.
Worse yet, Müller shared a letter (June 29, 1894) from an English woman who had visited Leh in Ladakh, including the Hemis lamasery, where she checked out Notovitch's story. She reported that, according to the abbot, "There is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. 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!" [Goodspeed, p.11].
After Müller's attack, Notovitch began to back-pedal, changing his story in the preface of the 1895 edition. This time it seemed that there had been no single two-volume work as he had first claimed, but that he had assembled his Unknown Life from fragmentary notices scattered among many Tibetan scrolls.
The same year, Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra visited the Hemis monastery and interviewed the abbot, reading him Notovitch's Unknown Life. The abbot was outraged at the hoax and asked why crimes like Notovitch's fraud could not be punished! As abbot for the past fifteen years, he knew no one had been given shelter with a broken leg, and as a lama for forty-two years he cou Nicholas Roerich, a theosophist mystic and painter whose evocative work has its own Museum today in New York City, visited Central Asia in search of the lost city of Shamballah and other mysteries. In the 1920s he, too, visited Ladakh and later (1925) recorded what he claimed were gleanings from popular tales about Saint Issa as well as related material from a 1500-year-old Tibetan manuscript (too young by some 400 years to be Notovitch's manuscript!). But the texts Roerich quotes are simply one abbreviated set of verses from Notovitch and another from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ , a 1908 "channeled" life of Jesus, inspired by Notovitch. (Westar page)