Dear friends, if you ever wonder if Jesus went to India or Tibet during so called missing yrs (12-29 yr old) as rumors said, here below is a very good article for you to read and I would just paste a few paragraphs for you to sample, for the whole article, please click the link.
http://www.answering-islam.org/Ahmadiyya/notovich.htm
Did Jesus go to India? Was he taught by Hindu and Buddhist sages? There are many who are convinced that between the ages of 12-29, Jesus travelled . These sorts of claims are presented in the film The Lost Years of Jesus. They are also made in Shirley Maclaine's Out on a Limb, Janet Bock's The Jesus Mystery, Elizabeth Clare Prophet's The Lost Years of Jesus and Holger Kirsten's Jesus Lived in India. Edgar Cayce the trance medium, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Sai Baba have also claimed that Jesus went to India.
The Life of St Issa
The claim that Jesus spent his missing years in India originated with Nicholas Notovitch's The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ in 1894. Notovitch, a Russian journalist, claimed he had found documents in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery which described Jesus' life. In these scrolls Jesus was known as St Issa. At the age of 12 he left Jerusalem for India where he studied the Vedas. He was welcomed by the outcasts for his wisdom and miracles but the Brahman priests grew jealous and sent St Issa away. He journeyed to Kashmir and Tibet. In Tibet he mastered the Buddhist Scriptures and then returned to Palestine to preach.
Do these scrolls exist? Janet Bock concedes:
Of course, the truth about the missing years in Jesus' life cannot be historically proven and therefore will always be subjective for each individual who explores it, which is the way it should be. We have no need to prove anything about this story. (p. 5)Since she admits there is no historical evidence to support these claims it seems presumptuous of her and others to attribute to Jesus things he neither said nor did. Surely what Jesus really said and did is more significant than the presentation of what these writers want Jesus to say. The real Jesus is preferable to the fictitious one.
According to Notovitch, Jesus mastered Buddhism whilst living in Tibet. The big problem with this is the fact that Buddhism did not reach Tibet until the 7th century AD. Buddhist author Christmas Humphreys states in his book Buddhism (Penguin 1962):
Before the seventh century the sole religion of Tibet was the Bon... Some time in the fifth century AD a number of Buddhist books were brought into Tibet from India, but they seem to have been ignored, and it was not until the reign of King Srongstsen Gampo in the middle of the seventh century, that Buddhism became a force in Tibet (pp. 190, 191).In The Elements of Buddhism John Snelling himself a committed Buddhist, notes:
We can trace two principal transmissions of Buddhism to Tibet: an initial one begun during the seventh century CE and a second one starting around the year 1000. (pp. 33-34)So the evidence shows that Jesus could hardly have been a student of Buddhism in Tibet in the first century AD. What much also be noted is that what St Isaa teaches bears almost no resemblance to Buddhist teachings.
In 1895 J.A. Douglas, a professor at Government College in Agra, India retraced Notovitch's steps to Tibet. He interviewed the Head Abbot at the Monastery where Notovitch claimed the scrolls were. Douglas obtained an affidavit from the Abbot denouncing Notovitch's story as a lie. Douglas established there were no scrolls about St Issa or Jesus. He published his findings in the popular monthly journalThe Nineteenth Century (The Chief Lama of Himis on the Alleged Unknown Life of Christ April 1896).
...Another important fact is that the Gospels were written either by eyewitnesses to the events (Matthew, John) or by people who interviewed the eyewitnesses (Mark, Luke). J.A.T. Robinson in Redating the New Testament argued that all the New Testament books were in circulation before 70 AD that is within 40 years of the events. The Gospels can also be tested by external evidences, such as the writings of non-Christians (Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger) and from archaeological findings. In all these respects the Gospels pass the critical tests for historical reliability.
Who is Jesus?
So what did Jesus say about himself? He claimed to be God in human flesh and rested the proof of his credentials on the fact that he would be put to death and rise again from the dead. The Gospels painstakingly present the evidence that Jesus was executed and then rose from the dead. Jesus taught that he alone was the Way, the Truth and the Life. He did not say that God could be reached by following any other religious path. Jesus also made it plain that He alone was God and that we are not.
...The claim that Jesus went to India or Tibet and taught Hindu and Buddhist dogmas is a spiritual deception. Why settle for a fabrication when your journey in life can be enriched by meeting the real Jesus?
More information from Wikipedia
Claims of Jesus in India before crucifixion
Louis Jacolliot, 1869
The idea of Indian influences on Jesus (and Christianity) has been suggested in Louis Jacolliot's book La Bible dans l'Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (1869)[28] (The Bible in India, or the Life of Jezeus Christna), although Jacolliot does not claim travels by Jesus to India.[29]
Jacolliot compared the accounts of the life of Bhagavan Krishna with that of Jesus Christ in the gospels and concluded that it could not have been a coincidence that the two stories have so many similarities in many of the finer details. He concluded that the account in the gospels is a myth based on the mythology of ancient India. However, Jacolliot was comparing two different periods of history (or mythology) and did not claim that Jesus was in India. Jacolliot used the spelling "Christna" instead of "Krishna" and claimed that Krishna's disciples gave him the name "Jezeus," a name supposed to mean "pure essence" in Sanskrit.[29] However, according to Max Müller that is not a Sanskrit term at all and "it was simply invented" by Jacoillot.[30]
Nicolas Notovich, 1887
Main article: Nicolas Notovitch
In 1887 a Russian war correspondentm, a Belarusian Jewish adventurer who claimed to be a Russian aristocrat and journalist, Nicolas Notovitch claimed that while at the Hemis Monastery inLadakh, he had learned of the document "Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men" - Isa being the Arabic name of Jesus in Islam.[31][32] Notovitch's story, with a translated text of the "Life of Saint Issa," was published in French in 1894 as La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ (Unknown Life of Jesus Christ).[6][32]
Notovitch's writings were immediately controversial and Max Müller stated that either the monks at the monastery had deceived Notovitch (or played a joke on him), or he had fabricated the evidence.[33][34]Muller then wrote to the monastery at Hemis and the head lama replied that there had been no Western visitor at the monastery in the past fifteen years and there were no documents related to Notovitch's story.[35] J. Archibald Douglas then visited Hemis monastery and interviewed the head lama who stated that Notovitch had never been there.[35] Indologist Leopold von Schroeder called Notovitch's story a "big fat lie".[36] Wilhelm Schneemelcher states that Notovich's accounts were soon exposed as fabrications, and that to date no one has even had a glimpse at the manuscripts Notovitch claims to have had.[6]
Notovich at first responded to claims to defend himself.[37] But once his story had been re-examined by historians, Notovitch confessed to having fabricated the evidence.[36] Bart D. Ehrman states that "Today there is not a single recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter. The entire story was invented by Notovitch, who earned a good deal of money and a substantial amount of notoriety for his hoax".[38]
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