Gospel of Jesus - Tallest Tale Never Told (eBook)

FOREWORD

I was never a religious man and now, even less so. But religious personalities, especially prophets (in Abrahamic sense) and avatars (in Indic sense), always fascinated me. Jesus has a special pride of place among the prophets and avatars because his followers of the propagated religion or faith now form about 30 percent of all humanity. He is by far the tallest leader amongst prophets and avatars, if one goes by strength of adherents to the faith. It would not be an exaggeration to say Jesus might easily be the most recognized historical figure in human kind. Yet the historical Jesus seemed to be shrouded in a lot of mystery and gaps in his lifetime that defy belief. It has to be seen in the context of the Christian Church having an asphyxiating grasp on what is considered mainstream and the “allowed” version to be peddled around about Jesus and his life vis-à-vis that is discarded, sometimes unceremoniously, as Gnostic and hence peripheralized on the pages of history. The Nicene Creed of 325 AD literally bestowed the rights, conveniently by the Church onto itself, to decide what crossed the Rubicon and became mainstream Christianity and what fell below never to see the light of historic examination. But no matter how much the Church has tried to stifle the complete story of historical Jesus over the ages and still continues doing it successfully, gaps in Jesus’ life refuse to wither away. On the contrary, in the twenty first century the gap remains as yawning as ever when put under the microscope of history as all four ordained Gospels – Mark, Luke, John and Mathew are silent about Jesus after he becomes a teen. He literally disappears from the pages of Gospels as an inquisitive teenager whose questions were already riling the Jewish clergy and somehow returns next at the age of twenty-nine back in Judea. When he is back, he is suddenly a sermonizing prophet with vast knowledge. He can heal people’s hearts and bodies and is now trying to establish the Kingdom of his God on Earth. So, what happens to historical Jesus between thirteen and twenty-nine years?

The Church’s silence, with the mute gospels in tow, over the years has only assumed deafening proportions. Sometimes it is brushed off as if it does not even matter. But to someone like me, who likes to piece the pieces of history like a jigsaw puzzle and complete the picture, it was an intriguing mystery that needed to be unraveled. In the non-religious or secular historical domain, the possibilities and legends about Jesus’ lost years are numerous. There are accounts of him being in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Parthia, Greece and even far off isle of Britain. So, the obvious question is which one of it is true? Before I embarked on my adventure of unraveling the mystery, thread by thread, I was fortuitous enough to get some help on this subject from unforeseen quarters. Seven years back I traveled to India for the release of my first novel – on eschatology - and bumped into the head of the biggest Hindu monastic order in Kolkata. He tipped me off about a book written about Jesus in India. It was written by no less a person than Swami Abhedananda. Swami Abhedananda was singularly responsible for establishing twenty plus centers of Vedanta society in USA in the early 1900s. He followed in the footsteps of the great Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda who is credited to have introduced Hinduism in the West starting with his sterling speech in the Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago. Swami Abhedananda during his stay in USA learnt about a person named Nicholas Notovitch – a Russian Jew residing in Chicago and his discovery of Jesus’ folklore in India. Nicholas Notovitch was the first to publish a book in the western world in 1894 about Jesus being in India during his formative years. He based it on his experience in Hemis monastery in Ladakh, India where he was recovering from a broken leg and was shown the manuscript of Jesus’ India stories in Pali language. After translating and publishing, Nicholas Notovitch got duly lambasted by the western world with Max Mueller, the foremost Indologist of the times, dissing it to the garbage bin before one bats an eyelid. Next another person named Nicholas Roerich claimed about Jesus’ time in India after due research in the monasteries to similar outright dismissal and disdain in the West. But Swami Abhedananda was not to be trifled with. He was intrigued and completed his research by going to Hemis himself and also retrieving all material on this subject. His book was written in Bengali language – which happens to be my mother tongue as well – in a travelogue format but it does cover translated parts of the manuscript on Jesus’ India stories. It confirmed that Jesus was indeed in India in Rajputana region, Puri and Banaras – where he studied at the feet of masters and then visited Nepal, Lhasa and went back to Judea through Parthia and Assyria. I subsequently found further evidence with the Shankaracharya of Puri mutt (monastery) and the folklore in all these places – Puri, Banaras, Rajputana etc. The independent Indian government even made official documentaries on this subject – not one but multiple! Yet neither Vatican or anybody in the Christian world even raised eyebrows about it. Suddenly the contradicting claims of Egypt, Parthia, Greece, Mesopotamia did not look likewise. What if Jesus did spend time in all of these places with local folklores attesting to it? If one reads local accounts of Parthia, Greece, Egypt, Assyria during those times, the pieces do indeed start falling in place. The Aquarian Gospel of Lev Dowling was another work that put it all together – albeit with some historical inaccuracies which can easily be weeded out. The claims of Britain only though still look outlandish and try as I might, I could never reconcile it within the timeframe of Jesus’ travels and development as a preacher. I was painstakingly taking incident after incident and arranging them in chronological order as some of the dates are confusing and repetitive and some patently wrong. History writing of that period is hardly the forte in these parts. Hence it at times took some imagination or cross verification across multiple sources or even smart speculation to nail it down. But by now as I threaded the needle on Jesus’ unknown years and could now construct all that happened between ages thirteen and twenty-nine including his prodigious travels across different lands and gathering knowledge, something else that I had not bargained for tumbled out of the historical Jesus’ cupboard. Did Jesus really get crucified and then ascended to heaven as the Christian Church would have us believe? Or did he survive to lead a long life post crucifixion?

There are now quite a lot of literature on how Jesus could have possibly survived the crucifixion. “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh and their later books wax eloquently on that subject and very persuasively so. But as I dug in, I discovered the accounts of Jesus post survival in the Muslim lands of Punjab in present day Pakistan and a very scholarly account of Jesus post crucifixion meticulously put together by Fida Hassnain in Kashmir, India. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who hailed from Punjab, did not only found the Ahmadiya sect in Islam in the late 19th century, he also wrote about Jesus living the latter half of his life post crucifixion in Kashmir and Punjab region. His book, bluntly titled Jesus in India, takes pain to explain and provide some proof of Jesus’ post crucifixion life. Since he himself hailed from that region, it was quite easy for him to gather the prevalent stories of Jesus – who by now for security reasons had assumed the name of Yuzu Asaph. While the Ahmadiyas remain a persecuted group inside Pakistan mainly because of heretic origins exacerbated by Ghulam Ahmad’s claims of being the Mahdi – the Islamic prophet to come after Mohammad, Ghulam Ahmad still remains respected as scholarly. Taking the cue about Jesus having survived crucifixion and not ascended to heaven, it did not take much detective work to see what roles Joseph of Arimathea, Essenes, Ananias and even the timing of Paul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus to piece the first parts of post crucifixion life of Jesus together. Fida Hassnain, another erudite person from Kashmir, India, next came under my research microscope. He had written several academic books on this subject! Not only has he captured all details of Jesus’ post crucifixion life till his death at ripe old age of eighty years in Kashmir, he has even translated authors in Parthian world (written in Farsi) and Arabic authors to capture other details as Jesus made his way to Kashmir from Judea post crucifixion. There has been no scholarly refutation to such works that I know of. They have been either summarily dismissed or plainly ignored by mainstream Christianity. Especially since such details emanated from the economic backwaters of India, Iran and Pakistan. A rich aggrandized Vatican cannot care less! Last but not the least, the burial place of Jesus in Rozabal, Kashmir with all clues to his Jewish origins and remains of post -crucifixion life still stand there as a mute testimony to historical Jesus- making the case of post crucifixion life even stronger. All I had to do now is continue piecing it all together chronologically and string the entire life of Jesus together as it transpired historically as opposed to a sanitized religious version ending with Ascension.

As if that was not enough, another facet of historical Jesus was how Thomas, his doubting disciple, and his own life gets intertwined especially in India. Thomas received Jesus in India...