The Messiah Secret

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 Jesus Christ in 1895, not only was the work essentially ignored, but Notovitch himself was arrested in St Petersburg and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and accused of ‘literary activity dangerous to the state and to society’. He was exiled without trial to Siberia, but was allowed to return in 1897. His ultimate fate remains unknown, though he probably lived until about 1916.

Various attempts have been made to debunk Notovitch’s claims since then, but without success. An impartial look at the evidence suggests that he really did visit Ladakh and the Hemis Gompa monastery – the basis of at least one of the debunking attempts was that he was simply never there – and other, later, travellers to the area have been told similar stories of books held at Hemis Gompa that contained accounts of the life of Jesus in India.

It’s an interesting story, but without sight of the original documents held at the monastery it’s unproven. But there is other evidence that suggests Jesus and Issa might have been one and the same person.

First, when Jesus reappears in Judea as an adult, He’s clearly already an accomplished prophet, which suggests He had to have learned His trade somewhere.

Second, there are a lot of similarities between what Jesus is supposed to have preached and the Buddhist religion, so if India is where He went for His formative years, it’s at least possible that when He returned to Judea He was essentially a Buddhist. For example, both religions cite exactly the same story of the poor widow giving two coins – all she has – at a religious gathering, and this tiny gift being feted by the presiding priest as being more valuable than all the other contributions. As Buddhism was founded about 460 BC, it’s almost possible to argue that Christianity is essentially simply a Buddhist sect, the religious message being carried to Judea by Jesus, which then became enshrined in the Christian religion.

The third piece of circumstantial evidence is that when the first Christian missionaries arrived in Ladakh, they discovered that the local people were already very familiar with the story of Jesus/Issa, and they were carrying and using rosaries.

And what happened after Jesus’s crucifixion? The accepted story of the death of Jesus is perhaps the most contentious part of His life, because it simply doesn’t make sense for a whole list of reasons, far too many to fully discuss here. But one of the most obvious anomalies was that Jesus apparently died within about three or four hours of being crucified, and his body was then taken down from the cross.

The whole point about crucifixion was that it was intended to be a slow, lingering and very public form of execution. That was why the Romans used it – to frighten and intimidate their subject peoples. Victims could survive for as long as four or five days on the cross if their legs weren’t broken to hasten their deaths. And the bodies of victims were never removed from the cross after death. Again, for the purposes of intimidation, they were left there to rot, and guards were routinely posted at sites of crucifixions to ensure that relatives didn’t manage to steal the bodies for secret burial after death.

If the whole episode wasn’t purely apocryphal – a crucifiction, in fact – and the execution did take place as described in the Bible, there had to have been collusion between the Roman authorities and the Jewish people, because nothing else makes sense. The strong implication is that Jesus was alive when he was taken down from the cross, and that, of course, provides the easiest and most logical explanation for the Resurrection – there simply wasn’t one.

Taking that as a given, it would also be obvious that Jesus couldn’t stay in Israel – having a condemned and crucified man walking around would have been unacceptable to the Romans – so He would have had to leave the country. And if He had spent almost half of his life in India, that would have been the obvious place for Him to return to. Which brings us to the ‘Rozabal’.

As Angela states in this novel, in Srinigar there’s a building known as the ‘Rozabal’ – it’s an abbreviation of Rauza Bal, and the word rauza means ‘the tomb of the prophet’ – which contains two tombs. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, and points north- south, in accordance with Muslim custom. The other tomb is aligned east-west, a Jewish custom, and bears the name ‘Yuz Asaf’.

This tomb is also unique in that it bears a carving of a pair of footprints – actually a common custom at the graves of saints – but this carving shows what appear to be the marks of crucifixion, a punishment unknown in India, on the feet. Records show that this tomb dates from at least as early as 112 AD.

According to the Farhang-i-Asafia, an ancient text that describes the history of Persia, the prophet Jesus – who was then known as ‘Hazrat Issa’ – healed a group of lepers, who thereafter were referred to as Asaf, meaning ‘the purified’, because they’d been cured of their disease. Jesus or Issa then acquired the additional name ‘Yus Asaf’, meaning the ‘leader of the healed’.

It’s reasonably certain that this tomb contains the body of Yus Asaf, a man who was also known as Issa, and also probably known as Jesus, and I based this novel upon that supposition. I should emphasize that there’s no evidence the body was removed from this tomb and carried into the high valleys of Ladakh – that is purely a fiction I devised for this book. As far as I know, the body of Yus Asaf – whoever he was – still lies in the grave in Srinigar.

Readers interested in learning more about this aspect of Jesus’s life should refer to Jesus lived in India by Holger Kersten (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-302829-1).

What did Jesus look like? Again as stated in the novel, the current depictions of Him as a tall man of noble bearing with long hair and a beard have no historical basis whatsoever. In the first century AD, the average height of an adult male in Judea was about five feet.

The full description of ‘the King of the Jews’ from the Slavonic copy of Josephus’s Capture of Jerusalem states that He was ‘a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows . . . with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard’. That description is very similar to one found in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which stated he was ‘a man small in size, bald-headed . . . with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed’.

And Jesus was, according to several different accounts, physically quite unattractive. In the Acts of Peter a prophet described Jesus as having ‘no beauty nor comeliness’, and in the Acts of John as ‘a small man and uncomely’. Celsus described Jesus as ‘small and ugly and undistinguished’. Tertullian said that ‘he would not have been spat upon by the Roman soldiers if his face had not been so ugly as to inspire spitting’.

The first depictions of Jesus showed Him as a small man, clean shaven and with short hair. In the sixth century, He was first depicted with long hair and a beard, and He’d grown slightly. By about the eighth century, what’s now the present picture of Jesus had fully emerged. It’s probable that the image on the Turin Shroud, now positively established to be an extremely accomplished medieval forgery, simply served as a reinforcement of the physical appearance of this ‘new’ Jesus.

Finally, I mentioned the ‘Baigdandu anomaly’ in the novel. This is real. Every few generations, a child is born in the village of Baigdandu with red hair and blue eyes. A local legend states that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived in the area looking, oddly enough, for the tomb of Jesus Christ, and eventually settled there, and it’s their