The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ

One of the mysteries of the Bible has always been where Jesus was during his twenties. There is a huge gap in the biography from puberty until about three years before the crucifixion. The simplest inference is that he was working as a carpenter with his father and that nothing remarkable happened to him during this period. This prosaic scenario, Jesus as a salt-of-the-earth working man, is in character with the rest of what we know about him, and there is no good reason to invalidate it. One rumor that has circulated for years has been that Jesus went to India during this time. There were well-established trade routes, so it would not be impossible. If Alexander the Great got there several centuries earlier, why not Jesus? This book is the source of that rumor. In the late nineteenth century a Russian, Nicolas Notovitch, published a travelogue of a trip through India, into Kashmir, eventually reaching Ladakh in Tibet. At this point, the book takes a sensational turn. A lama informs him that Jesus is revered as a Boddhisattva, under the name Issa, by a splinter sect of the Tibetan Buddhists. While Notovitch is convalescing from a broken leg, an ancient manuscript read to him about Issa. This tells of Jesus trekking to India to study the Vedas and Buddhism. Jesus stirs up a caste war against the Brahmins and has to leave India. Then Jesus returns home, stopping off briefly in Persia, where he preaches against Zoroastrianism. This account was supposed to have been written shortly after Jesus' death.