Nicolas Notovitch - Controversy

Controversy

While Edgar Goodspeed does find evidence that Notovitch was in Ladakh at the time he claims, he judges the essential part of his tale to be a hoax.

Some light was thrown upon the matter by a communication sent to The Nineteenth Century in June 1895 by Professor J. Archibald Douglas of Agra, who was at that time a guest in the Himis monastery, enjoying the hospitality of that very chief lama who was supposed to have imparted the Unknown Life to Notovitch. Douglas found the animal life in the Sind Valley much less picturesque than Notovitch had described, and no memory of any foreigner with a broken leg lingered at Leh or Himis. But Douglas' inquiries did at length elicit the report that a Russian gentleman named Notovitch had recently been treated for the toothache by the medical officer of Leh hospital. To that extent Notovitch's narrative seems to have been on firm ground.

But no further. The chief lama indignantly repudiated the statements ascribed to him by Notovitch, and declared that no traveler with a broken leg had ever been nursed at the monastery. He stated with emphasis that no such work as the "Life of Issa" was known in Tibet, and that the statement that he had imparted such a record to a traveler was a pure invention. When Notovitch's book was read to him he exclaimed with indignation, "Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!" The chief lama had not received from Notovitch the presents Notovitch reported having given him--the watch, the alarm clock, and the thermometer. He did not even know what a thermometer was. In short the chief lama made a clean sweep of the representations of Notovitch, and with the aid of Douglas effected what Muller described as his "annihilation.".

The story of his visit to Hemis seems to be taken from H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. In the original, the traveler with the broken leg was taken in at Mount Athos in Greece and found the text of Celsus' True Doctrine in the monastery library. But in fact proof was found that Notovitch was in Leh and Hemis. A German dentist residing there had treated him, extracting one of his teeth. There is the written record in his diary which is shown in the book of Holger Kersten.

The idea that Jesus was in India was also inspired by a statement in Isis that he went to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Bart D. Ehrman says 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."